Welcome Back Ambition

I thought long and hard about quitting this blog.  I put way more thought into that decision than it warranted; after all, it’s just a stupid blog.  On the one hand I haven’t updated this thing in months.  What is worse, I never even finished a story that was really important for me to finish.  The last post was about my return to Cheongju.  Cheongju is a place I hold dear to my heart, partially because in a stroke of spontaneous stupidity or love I had it tattooed onto my chest.  My return to that place was monumental in my mind.  It is the place that I associated with my entire experience in Korea.  In Cheongju were my friends, my students, and coworkers who I consider to be my family over here.  I never mustered it up to finish the story.

I saw Oo-Rin, but also Jun-Ho.  I didn’t recognize Jun-Ho because he grew up so much.  I was scared he wouldn’t remember me.  He did.  In a quiet moment at the front desk while everyone was teaching he came up to me and sat on my lap, hugged me, and rested his head on my shoulder. 

I saw other kids.  All of them had grown up so much.  So much had changed in their appearance and my own.  Some didn’t know me at first.  Those that did told me I was slim.  My hair was good, they said.  Whatever problems I had in Seoul and at my Gangnam job faded. 

One older student, who had an obsession with Bon Jovi, was confused when I asked if he still played Mine Craft.  I told him my friends built a giant boat, that I became obsessed with it at home.  He clearly had no idea who I was but he was polite.  Before he left I told him that I was his teacher once.

“What! Tom Teacher?!” He said.  He bowed and hugged me and patted my belly.  “So good!”

I saw the elementary school student who gave me a gift.  As he walked out on that last day his eyes were watering and his voice was cracking.  He was trying not to cry and I recognized it because on that day I did the same several times.  The last thing I said to him was a lie.  I told him I would see him again.  I am proud that I saw him again.

Most of the kids were gone, but some of the key players of my time at that school were still around.  Older, pimply faced and awkward with puberty but still there.  They asked if I would be their teacher again and while I wished I could be, that things were different, I could not. 

Billy, who somehow looked exactly the same, walked in and didn’t even say hi.

“Game?” he asked.  Barryfun English.  The wheel game that I wasted so much time playing with him.

At a certain point the Crazy Boy with long hair walked in as bat-shit crazy as ever.  He looked at me behind the desk in shock.  I smiled and said hello.  Another teacher asked if he remembered.  He looked at me again in a comedic portrayal of fake confusion.  He walked around the desk.  At first I thought he would give me a hug.  I thought this boy who sang “Puff the Magic Dragon” with me and who pulled a very realistic toy pistol on me why trying to demonstrate “crazy” would hug me.  No.  He ripped back my left sleeve, saw my tattoo and said “ok.”

There were drinks that night with almost everyone.  Han was gone, Hye-Jin was sick, Shaina was gone, and Ara was in Australia.  Everyone else I ever worked with at that school was there.  We drank for a long time.  I was happy.  I felt as though I had come home.  I saw Albert and we hugged.  The money issues fell into the past and I can barely remember ever being mad at him.  We drank together until 4am, Albert, Boram, and I.  It made me happy to come back to this country when in all honesty I had been questioning it. 

So much has changed since then.  I lived in Gangnam.  I taught at a rich school.  My kids were better dressed but just as crazy.  I worked with Alix.  I ate dinner every day with Alix and Phil.  I then went home and slept next door to Alix and Phil.  Life had a routine.  It was comfortable but I never left Seoul.  My experience felt stagnated. 

Three months ago I lived in a nice apartment in a place made internationally recognized by Psy.  I was comfortable with Gangnam Style.

It all changed so fast, for both good and bad.

I met a girl called Che-Eun.  I quit smoking quite a while ago.  I lost my job.  We all lost our jobs.  They told us that the school was moving.  If the school is actually moving, I don’t know.  What I do know is that none of us are going with it. 

For 2 months Alix and I reached for motivation to teach kids, grade tests, and write report cards we knew were pointless.  Rapidly, we went from a full schedule with few breaks to nothing but breaks.  Kids quit so quickly that by the end we were teaching classes of individuals.  Then, finally, it was over. 

We bonded with our coworkers.  Bankruptcy is like death, I guess.  It sucks but if there is one plus to it is that it brought us together to some degree in the end.  I left Jung Chul feeling as though we were finally all friends.  Too late, but friends just the same.

So now I am here.

I signed on to a kindie north of the Han River in an area called Wangsimni.  I feel sad that the last 6 months counted for little, professionally, but I also feel fortunate.  The first few months of being here I confirmed my nightmare that I was trying to recreate Cheongju.  I now get a second chance.

I’ve done so much since that last entry.  I went to Taiwan, we’ve had three typhoons, I moved, an entire business collapsed.  I regret not writing about them, if even for my own memory.

So, I have decided to start this blog again. 

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Going Home Part 1

Its some time in the early afternoon.  The bus pulls out of the Express Bus Terminal in Seoul.  It all feels so familiar even if I have not been to this place in so long.  I am lost for a long time in the cluster-fuck shopping center of the subway station.  I somehow over shoot my intended exit and end up in a satellite branch of the terminal. I am hot, sweating, hungover from too much soju, and late.

It all seems about right. 

This whole bus ride seems strange but also warm.  It is all reversed.  Instead of the weekend trip being Cheongju to Seoul, it is Seoul to Cheongju.  Its strange that I am escaping some place to relax in Cheongju when for so long the opposite was true and necessary.  Almost always this trip ends in me at the Tomgi Motel.  The world is all topsy turvy.  Never do I end up in the Gallery Motel near the express bus terminal in Cheongju, fighting to wake before a noon check-out.  That's where it ends this time.

Still the journey warms me.  A sense of anxiety builds as we pull onto the highway and leave the megatropolis of Seoul behind.  I catch glances of the buildings and mountains that make up that panorama of Seoul as they fade.  They are replaced with the mountains and rivers of Central Korea, a place that, even still, I am more familiar with, more at home with. 

I am nervous to return to Cheongju for a million reasons.  I am scared that my old coworkers, people I have this last year referred to more often as family than friends, will be cold to me.  I am worried at the pit of my heart that they have somehow either forgotten me or forgotten the warmness they accepted me with once.

I did leave.  I did cause a bit of a stink over money.  I did regularly show up to work hungover or half bombed. 

I am scared that the school won't be the same.  This is what worries me the most because I know that, whatever the case, it will be true.  I left.  Another foreigner took over and left.  He had to cut away the weeds and shadows that I left behind and surely his ghost remains.  I am fresh in nobodys mind.  Maybe they mourn for him.  I thought about them all a lot while I was gone living the wasted time that I did. 

Most all of the teachers are gone.  Hanbyul is in New York.  Boram is working at a restaurant in Cheongju.  Eunhyang is in Cheongju still I guess.  She is hard to keep track of but I know she doesn't teach and I don't know if I will see her.  Shaina isn't there anymore.  So Young is teaching.  Ara is in Australia.  As for the Receptionist and the Bus Driver I know nothing. 

Mostly I am nervous that I won't want to leave.  I am horrified that I will see everyone and it will awaken this whole demon of regret.  Regret of leaving Korea.  Regret of leaving that job.  Regret of going to Seoul.  Regret of ever returning at all.  I am scared the fear that I am trying to recreate a time past will be realized fully.  It is a devastating thought that scares me enough to make my heart beat a bit too fast to maintain focus on my book.

Still.  The ride is nice.  I have missed these green fields and paddies that we pass.  Rice paddies form rounded steps up a hill.  The hill leads to a green forest and the forest to a green mountain that ends in a blue sky.  It's the blue sky of the Korean countryside, not the gray one of polluted Seoul. 

We pass greenhouses that stretch forever.  I see the tiny and dirty cattle farms, the majority source of the primo-expensive beef in this place. 

I feel far from Seoul already and, truth be told, I feel more at peace, somehow.  The stress of my job and the stress of the city melts off as I sweat on the bus. People snore.  I am not free of my life as a Seoulite but at the moment it doesn't feel so important.  Gangnam is far away.  Report cards don't matter.  My head teacher doesn't exist in the minds of these people. 

The bus pulls off the highway just past a sign that reads "Cheongju" in English and in Hangul.  I am excited and nervous but also comforted.  There is a sense of relief.  A certain part of me accepts that these next moments are why I came back.  When I left I thought that I would never return to this place; that all of the "I'll visit"s and all of the "I will see you soon"s were happy lies.  As the bus pulls into the famed tunnel of trees leading to the hopping transport hub of Cheongju I feel a bit as though I have beaten some sort of odds. 

We drive around and I am in memory lane.  Amanda C and Andrew lived near here.  I see farms and restaurants around me.  They always traveled so far to Chundae for drinks.  I can still see Andrew's face imposed on the plastic ID cover on my wallet.  His wallet.  I don't really know. 

Soon we pass from rural to urban.  This swatch of Cheongju that looks lake every hub in every Korean city.  Seoul is only a Cheongju on steroids. 

Soon I see the bus station.  A place I've seen a million times before.  A place I walked to once searching out a foot long from Subway.  To my right is a bus stop that lead Larry and I to the bus garage instead of a beautiful fortress- the least drunken of our misadventures.  Larry fucking Boire.  It's been a long time since we were in this place together.  He always hated Cheongju.  Once his motorcycle broke down on our highway and he left it for days. 

Larry is to be married in two weeks and I will miss it because I am here. 

To my right, just before we pull in and I set feet on Cheongju terra-firma I see a sign advertising American Burger.  American Burger sells the worst middle school cafeteria style burgers in all of Korea.  I will not be fooled.  I am no naive passer-through.  Not in this place. 

I step out and feel the heat.  I smell diesel and while diesel smells like diesel anywhere, I feel this warmth of remembrance wash over.  I decide to take it all in as much as I can.  The past year of my life has been building up to this. 

I walk out and hang a left.  There is a group of love motels near the station.  I went there often.  Rick and Lauren from Daejeon stayed there whenever they came.  Gallery Motel.  I find it without trouble and am horrified to pay 60,000W for the night. 

It's worth it though.  I head up to a dark hallway a few flights above.  Neon lights give off a blue hue.  As always I feel like some kind of pervert in this place but I am a foreigner and alone.  It is my first love motel in a year and I remember immediately why these places are the best. 

I pop my key into the slot and am greeted by a giant room with a fake mahogany floor, a giant TV, king bed, mood lighting, a huge whirlpool, et al.  I turn on the TV and as I light a cigarette from a crumpled old pack I find in my sack I realize that the last patron never switched from the porn. 

I take a look in the mirror and fix my hair, brush my teeth, and spray a bit of cologne.  This is something that I would have never done before.  Cheongju Tom is, if not entirely dead, dormant inside me.  I had a girl then.  I didn't care how I looked, what people thought of me.  It is entirely fucking obvious in every photo from those days. 

I walk out, hail a cab and somehow manage to recite my old address.  No problems.  It is a rarity. 
We double back and I am in Gavin's old neighborhood.  I remember watching Elf with him and Robyn.  The streets are all the same but everyone is gone.  Melodramatic, I know. 

The new neighborhood is up.  We pass Home Plus and Chunbuk University and are in Gaeshin-dong.  My old home.  We drive down the main drag, turn left near Pizza Maru, another right at the Sundae joint and before I know it I am looking at the window to my old apartment.

If much of the Cheongju that I knew has changed, Han-ga-ram apartment complex is still a huge piece of shit that looks like it belongs in Chernobyl.  I stand for a while and then leave, scared that the old landlord will come out and invite me to another lunch. 

I take the long way to Kim Hak Su, now called Kim's Human English.  Cafe Pasucci took over.  I don't remember what used to be there but it makes me sad.  As I round the last corner I see that my old kimbap joint is gone.  I ate there every day.  I had hoped to have a quick meal there and see the nice woman who always gave me watermelon (as opposed to the lady who hated my guts).  It is the only thing that makes me genuinely sad. 

My heart pounds as I open the door.  I walk up the stairs and take one last deep breath before I walk in to my old school.  It is a place that remained and will remain a significant place in my heart.  I don't know quite what to do. 

I hear a squawk from the boss' office.  Mrs. Kim.  I can see her face contorted.  She always had this adorable bunny rabbit face.  I see it clearly as she bursts out of the dark room.  I smile.  It's like a roller coaster.  From this point on, I have no control and it is like the "good ol' days."

She almost knocks me down.  She hugs me and says something in Korean and squeezes my belly. 
"Ahhh, slim!"  She says. 

I hug her and tell her she looks great.  She doesn't understand me but it never mattered so much.  She shouts and a Koean guy pokes his head from the teacher's office.  A classroom door opens and closes.  It is So Young.  She looks beautiful.  She smiles.

"Tooommmm!"

We hug.  I don't remember much of what we say.  I make it a point to tell them both how much I missed them.

So-Young takes me to a classroom.  I am shaking.  It isn't quite visible but I feel it.  Too much caffeine, I think, but I know it is just a kind of happy shock.  I forget about Seoul, about Shannon, about Gangnam. 
Inside the class I am stared at like some sort of monster.  They look at me with curiosity.  Nobody knew I was coming.  I glance over the faces and for a moment I don't see her in the corner behind the teacher's podium.

"Thoma?"

I would have known her voice anywhere.  I missed her the most, I think.  She was my first class at this school.  She was there for my first teaching day and dealt with my inability to communicate better than most, despite being 8. 

Alice.  I never called her by her English name.  Oo-Rin.  I see her smiling and I rush over and hug her.  She looks the same.  She was so young then but so damned mature.  She comforted Junho when he was upset and calmed him down when he got excited, even though he was just a little younger. 

It is the second happiest moment I have in that school that day. 

The memory of my last day rushes forward.  I shook her hand goodbye and she said:

"Thoma, please, hug."

It almost broke me.  I never thought I would see her again. 

I am visibly shaking.  I can't stop it.  I feel light headed and anxious.  The class goes on even if they all stare at me and Oo-Rin explains me to her friends.  I keep looking at her and smiling.  She basically changed my mind on kids. 

I sip my coffee to try to hide my shakes, but it only makes it obvious.  I step out for a moment and try to collect myself.  I am worried that I might cry.

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A Korean in New York

It is somewhere near midnight.  I am in SoHo with Han, my coworker from Kim Hak Soo.
I need to stop calling her my coworker; we haven't worked together in over a year.  Now she is just my friend.  A really good friend.  She has done her time and is no longer responsible for my wellbeing and happiness in a country that is strange to me.
 
She goes to school in New York now.  Everytime I see Han in the States it jars my reality.  It is like a kind of ghost of a dream that invades the day.  It is wonderful. 

Last time she was up we got drunk in Ralph's Diner with Mike, Patty, and Larry.  As we laughed, glossey-eyed, at the 3-6-9 game and pounded beers I became aware at how odd it can sometimes be when two totally seperate social groups that span the globe come together in a union you never thought would ever happen. 

If this were at a party that I had thrown, then the two groups would have not mingled at all and I would have gotten drunk alone off the keg in the middle of the room. 

But, we are getting drunk in SoHo now.  Outside New York revelers scatter this way and that.  It is February but the weather is freakishly beautiful, even at night.  Little Tokyo is abuzz.  We are in a Mexican joint.  Through the window I see Kanji script, English, and Hangeul.  We might as well be in Itaewon. 
We talk about students and the other teachers and the rumors of that fledgling school. 
My mojito is destructive.  After that and another beer I am speaking in mumbled slurs.  It is liquid courage that is necessary maybe because I am staying at Han's apartment with what sounds like the United Nations of alcoholics. 

We talk about money.  I am drunk enough to start going on about some nonsense about not caring if and when I die broke and alone so long as I can see the world.  Han agrees with me.  Over the past year and change Han became a really great friend.  It is funny that one of the people that I can relate to the most is a 22 year old Korean girl. 

"I wonder if it is all a huge mistake," I tell her.  My head sinks a little.  It is still drunken conversation over rum and tequilla, but I am talking about something that genuinely worries.
Many of my conversations with Larry from Cheonan entail him telling me not to go back to Korea.  I spent god knows how many nights and days dreaming about going back to Korea and almost always caught myself using my Cheongju friends' faces as stand-ins for the friends I will make in Seoul. 

I have this fear that I will land in Seoul and then get hit in the gut with that "what the fuck have I done?" feeling. 



 

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Waiting

It is just past midnight on a Sunday.  Tomorrow I will pick up my E2 Visa from the Korean Consulate in Newton, MA.  My recruiter, a man who calls himself Steven, has told me that any day now he will send me the itinerary for my flight from Boston to Incheon.  It seems real now.

It has been a long and unproductive road to this point.  It seems as though it was so recently that I touched down at Logan International Airport in Boston after over a year away from home.  It seems such a short time ago but it has now been nearly 9 months. 

I have done next to nothing noteworthy over the past 9 months.

The weather was turning from pleasant to oppressive when I landed.  I had a girlfriend and my family was so happy to see me.  I saw my friends and I told my stories.

Kelly lives in China now.  My family is probably fed up with the horrible mood swings and general crankiness that accompanies an utterly idle and comfortable life. 

I have this memory of sitting in MJ's, an expat bar in my old city of Cheongju.  I don't really remember who was there but Gavin, the only Kiwi in my main circle of friends, was talking about the difficulties of doing stand-up comedy in Korea.

"It won't translate," he said.  "Nobody will know that the hell an ajumma is."

The problem with comming home after a year of living and teaching in Korea with other people from a bunch of other countries living and teaching in Korea is that you almost forget how to relate to anybody else.  You tell your stories and find youself laughing your ass off by yourself, wondering where your Waygook friends are. 

"I felt like I didn't belong," said my friend Tim the day after I got home.  He had been home for a number of months.  "Sometimes, I still don't."

It is hard to come home after something like that.  Well, it isn't.  When I saw my mother, father, and sister after so long it was hard not to cry.  My dog lost his shit and I spent the next several weeks catching up with friends, family, TV, burritos and alcohol.  I told my stories and they told theirs. 

So many of my friends obtained jobs with decent pay and decent respect.  A few were married, bought houses, and / or had children.  I can barely take care of myself. 

Close friends aside I felt myself falling by the wayside of secondary friends and vice-versa.  It wasn't a bad thing; it was a natural thing.  A short common history was partially eaten by the intense experience that is international friendship abroad.  I couldn't relate to a year of adulthood and they couldn't relate to my year of reckless abandon. 

I knew I wanted to go back to Korea almost as soon as I got back.
I put it out of my mind and occupied my time with distractions.  Within a week or so of landing I was on the road with Brandon, one of my best friends and a guy I missed profoundly, down to Florida to see the one and only Hadley. 

I went to the worst part of Brooklyn and deap sea fishing.

Larry from Cheonan is successful now.  I saw him with Mike and Patty in Brooklyn.  At the train station it was hard to recognize him: clean-shaven and dressed to the nines from work.  It all seemed so different.  Last time I saw him we stunk of booze and I was sleeping on his floor because he had already given away his couch. 

It all came back, though.  A couple months later we all went deep-sea fishing.  I brought peanut-butter and jelly, Mike brought grinders.  Larry from Cheonan brought a package of Oreos and a water bottle full of soju.  This was at 7am. 

I tried to put the feeling of wanting to go back to Korea aside.  It was inconvenient.  My family wanted to know my plan, Kelly wanted to know my plan, I wanted to know my plan.  My plan was to blow through my money as fast as possible.  I immediately went out and bought a new laptop and a giant TV despite the fact that the only TV show that I watch is AFV.

After a few months I decided that I really wanted to go back, but I was wary.  Larry spent a long time telling me that it was probably a mistake.  I knew he might be right.  He told me that he had friends who tried for the "repeat" and it ruined it all for him.  I told him to "shut up" but I knew he was right. 

I sat on the idea of going back to Korea for a while because I was scared that what I actually wanted was to go back in time.  I spent so many hours at Buzz in Cheongju talking to Tim and Andrew, Amanda, Amanda, Katie, Gavin, Robyn, Kim and everyone about how we would pay all the money in the world to go back to University. 

It seemed as though my ideal memories of an idyllic University had been replaced by idyllic Korea.  I knew this was fantasy.

Cheongju was gone.  it was over for me.  The vast majority of the people that made that place special were long gone.  I tried to fight the urge to go back to Korea because I knew my tendency to dwell on the "good ol' days" but it all won out.

I took a job in Gangnam, one of the richest areas of Korea. 

The school covers the same age-range of my old school and, while slightly bigger with 2 foreign teachers, does not have a massive / impersonal number of students. 

So, tomorrow I will find out when I leave for Korea.  I have done this before but still I feel anxiety and nerves saturating my core.  My temper is short and I wake up with the jitters. 

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Wandering Downtown

Cherry Blossoms.

A year minus a day or two I said my extended "so longs" to my girlfriend (at a train station), my sobbing mother (in my predawn livingroom), my less sobby sister (same room), and my dry-eyed father (amid exhaust and noise at the departure drop-off at Logan Airport). In a few days I say goodbyes that are likely to be permanent to all of my Korean friends.

I haven't thought too much about the real end of this Korea thing. Most of the time it seemed to be so far off that giving it too much thought wasn't worth it. Then, before I knew it, I didn't want to think about it because I knew it was right around the corner. Now that I have less than a week left in Cheongju; in this one room apartment with warped floors and no attached plumbing on the sink, I have no other choice.

I now realize that I basically have no departure plan. With preoccupations (the lost passport) and money issues with my school (with a dash of extreme procrastination thrown in) I have failed to book any hotels, looked into any activities or things to do on my trip. Hell, I haven't even booked my final ticket home yet.

The plan:

Leave Seoul on 4/25 and arrive at some point in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.

The next ticket I have booked leaves Bangkok, Thailand a couple of weeks later, give or take.

In the mean time I am spending a few days in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and MAYBE a brief trip in Malaysia.

I then fly to Barcelona, Spain to see my friend Jordi with whom I used to wait tables and be taken apart by customers routinely.

Then, I fly to Logan whenever I get a ticket and complete this around-the-world loop.

The River.

As for what I’ve been up to recently: nothing very productive. The cherry blossoms have come and have basically left. The days have been really nice in Cheongju, a couple I would dare say hot, so I have made time enough to walk along the river even though I usually end up in Home Plus just the same.

The Yellow Dust also came. It blows in from the industrial towns in eastern China as an off colored haze full of mercury and lead. Between that, the radioactive rain from the disasters in Japan, the over-reactive minds of Koreans when it comes to health, the news would have you believing Korea was one toxic heap at the moment. But, it isn’t. I don’t think. I will make a note to see if I have super strength before I leave.

I’ve seen some pretty cool things recently while walking around the river. While meandering around with my camera (soon to be upgraded!) I followed what sounded like drumming. The beats led me to the track near Downtown (or Uptown like I used to call it) where everyone skates or ride all sorts of inane, ass-backwards bikes.

Members of the Ajumma Army.

It was here that I saw a dozen or so ajummas marching around in circles, drumming in formation. There were some older guys and college students mixed in, all led by a young guy in some sort of fancy pants. I don’t know what they were doing but I guess they were practicing for some sort of traditional performance. Either that or the guy in fancy pants now has well disciplined army of ajummas.

Last Friday / Saturday and Saturday / Sunday I spent a lot of time at the bars with my friends here. We saw a band that played Oasis covers and they made me prematurely nostalgic for Korea. It is hard to imagine a Friday or Saturday that doesn’t involve the same four bars and my Cheongju friends. Heck, I still expect to see my friends who have left walk in.

On Sunday, after realizing that I was way too hungover to deal with the hell that is Home Plus on a Sunday, I walked a but further down the river than I had before. Where as traditional drumming led me to the Ajumma Army, old-school bob brought me to some festival at a Buddhist temple that I never noticed until that day.

I walked in and tables lined the courtyard. A few were covered with canopies as those sitting under it served simple Korean foods or made crafts. Across the dirt ground was a cluster of covered tables withh a half dozen families eating. Monks walked here and there. I could see shadows of people bowing in the main temple.

A Buddhist temple in Cheongju.

I lingered for a while there until an older guy, having something to do with the party, came over and talked to me for a while, asking if I wanted to eat something or anything else. I bought a bracelet and left as Louis Armstrong came on over the loudspeaker.

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Hello, Goodbye

I spent some time in Greece a few years ago. I wasn’t there for very long, just a few weeks, but the experience was one of the most profound that I have ever experienced. At the time, the only traveling I had done outside of the country was to Montreal to get drunk.

Tim and Andrew during the trip to Daecheon.

Those three weeks were overwhelming. Here I was, this minimally cultured, shy guy who had just spent a year working in a cubical and going to the same bar every Saturday night. Before I knew it I was freezing as the rain flirted with the idea of turning to snow and then did so in the mountains in the north. Albania was a stone’s throw away.

I remember sleeping on one of a few giant, communal bunk beds in the village’s hostel. I remember hooking my arms into links of chain in the back of a flatbed next to a back-hoe so I didn’t fall out as the driver took sharp corners at mad speeds atop cliffs that dropped off at the side of the road. I remember digging holes into the clay all day only to find that rain had washed our saplings out and about the ground over night. I remember eating feta cheese and kalamata olives to the same frequency that I eat rice and kimchi now.

Amanda and Robyn pre World Cup.
Not shown: Tim having appendicitis.

I remember a lot of things about this brief time in my life, but one memory sticks out as the most representative of that time and all good travel experiences.

It was the eight of us who had stayed the duration of the work camp sat in a restaurant. It was dark and cold, save a fire in the fireplace. It was empty save a Bulgarian cook, her assistant son, and her groundskeeper husband. Carafes of wine lay strewn about the table. Outside was lit by lanterns for a ways but we were just a blip on a very large mountain amidst other large mountains. Most of the world didn’t and doesn’t know that Kedros exists.

We sat for a long time, Mexicans, Greeks, a Frenchman, a couple of Korean girls and myself, talking about all manner of sentimental and obscene things. The entire duration of the trip, the restaurant played the one damn CD they owned, and so it does now.

Tim and Amanda on the way to Daecheon Beach.

Late into our last night a strange thing happens. The alcohol mixes with sadness that it is over ,and the happiness that it happened. The Frenchman and Greek girl stand up and dance to the 19438th playing of “Hero,” by Enrique Inglesias. We all laugh but soon we are all swept up and we are dancing about an empty restaurant to a song I would usually skoff at. The cook’s son asks the Greek girl to dance and soon the night is over. Soon after we are all home or at least not there. We are each other’s fuzzy memories now.

The friends you make abroad are like no others. Maybe it has nothing to do with being abroad.  Maybe it is really about the experience that bods you together with your friends.  Either way, the friends I have made in Korea are like no others that I have had, and recently I had to say goodbye to most of them.

It was rough, even if I am basically incapable of showing emotion.

We started off at MJ’s, the 8 of us sitting amongst the smoke and beneath the heat of a horribly powerful heating duct. We drank and played darts. We listened to music and asked each other if we would ever do Korea again and other such things you ask someone who is about to end a significant experience in their life.

Katie, Tim, and I hiking the fortress.

Gin and tonics, Black Russians, wine, water and vodkas, and beers added up for a long time. A few fought for control of the music play list (and failed) as others played pool or just sat around a table in the middle of the Thursday night bar scene. Titanic played on the giant televisions for god knows why.

There was a dread amongst us. That much was obvious. There was also an honesty that I really appreciated; that of people who have traveled or experienced enough to know the realities of travel.

There were no “oh, please! I say we all meet up this time next year!” There was no “eh, I am not sad man! Nothing is going to change.” 

Christmas, pre Jim Beam.

One of the unique aspects about this Korean experience is that it is all temporary. True, Amanda is staying for another year and Robyn for another 6 months, but regardless we enter into these friendships knowing that the experience they are founded in has an end-date.

And this Korean experience is intense. The most any of us have known each other is a year, and some of us haven’t even known each other that long. But how long you have known each other here becomes irrelevant because we are all having this experience.

All of us left family, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, everything -our whole lives- thousands of miles away. You meet these people her,e so far away from home and the lives we knew, and you become fast and close friends because you are all each other has.

Everyone talks to their family and friends but the fact is they are not a part of our day to day lives here, not really anyway.

So, instead of going to the same college joint in across town every weekend, or going to the same restaurant every week you go to the same foreigner bar where you know almost everyone even if you don’t talk to them. And instead of the same restaurant you go to a place where you can’t even read the damn menu and hope for the best.

This general cluelessness about our lives is a bonding experience.

I don’t know. All I know is that I met these people 10 or so months ago and they all had such a profound effect on me that I dreaded their departure for a while before it happened. Their leaving was the end of an era for me and the beginning of the end of my experience in Korea.

We left MJ’s and headed to one last Noraebang. Most of us probably should have just gone home, some of us had to work, but that didn’t seem important.

The last hookah.

I do not like Noraebang. I didn’t like Noraebang in the beginning and I don’t like it now. I do not imagine this will change. Generally speaking if the night is headed to norae I bail and I bail quick. Part of me wanted to just bail that night and remember my friends in a way that didn’t involve me standing in one place “singing” in a giant, awkward mess. I didn’t though. We all sang something that night. All of us: Tim, Amanda, Amanda, Katie, Andrew, Gavin, and I. We drank more beer. Amanda R. wasn’t wearing shoes. A week before she had returned to Korea from the states and was still out when I left at 4am.

Dedicated mother fuckers.

Our hour was running out and that sadness that was blocked by laughter and alcohol was creeping back up.

More time added. Nice guy at the front desk.

We sang or slumped into the sofas for what seemed like a long while, fatigue making the end of the night and the inevitable goodbyes necessary. It was ending, soon. It was a bad feeling. I remembered when I had no friends. I remembered when I missed my home and sat on my floor eating pizza by myself. I though about meeting Craig and how he died. I thought about when I saw Amanda and John walking out of my apartment building last spring and meeting the people who would be some of the best friends I’ve ever had. I thought about Frog Rain, Daecheon Beach, Daejeon Rock, and hiking. I thought about the time I ate a lot of cheese and almost crapped my pants on a bus hours after someone shotgun barfed on Amanda. Screen Golf. Barbeque. Jokes. Indian food. Obscenities. Taxi cabs. Lotteria. Lots of alcohol. Hookah. Risk. Tim getting appendicitis. The World Cup. North Korea. Christmas. I thought of all these things and I appreciated this group of people singing like the drunken stars of what my life is now.

Looking back at my friends and the year or whatever amount of time and our experiences, how the night ended was perfect.

The last norae.

Until the day that I die, I will NEVER be able to listen to “Hello, Goodbye” by the Beatles without thinking of these people. Wherever I am, I will drift off for a moment and think of the ending of that night and the end of OUR experience in Korea together: seven drunken fools with their arms around each other dancing and singing in a circular love fest.

The man at the front desk looking at the security camera probably wondered whether that extra time had been wise and whether he had enough sanitizer.

So, outside we said our goodbyes. There were no naïve “I will see you soon”s except for those of us staying. The really, really difficult thing about this whole experience is knowing that the goodbye could likely be the real deal. I hope it isn’t. We hugged. Some of us cried. Some of us fought to hold it back. We got into our taxis and went into the night all better off for knowing each other.

At least “Hello, Goodbye” isn’t as embarrassing to have on my play list as “Hero.”



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Daejeon Rock Festival (aka a lesson in inaccurate advertising)

I spent a while on a crowded and comparatively stuffy (compared to what you might expect in mid-October) bus talking to Amanda R. about our expectations for the Daejeon Rock Festival.  It was about 5pm and the bunch of us were staring out windows or sleeping through the 45 minute trip; waiting for the outlet malls to fade away and the bus to pull into the thick of Daejeon.

A pretty cool ska band.  Thankyou camera phone.

The Facebook flyer advertised an incredible variety of international food and beers.  The music, for a lot of us, was secondary.

"Maybe there will be fried dough," I'd say.

"Or funnel cakes," Amanda said. 
"Or hot dogs and sausages."
"Tacos.  There will definitely be tacos."
"Cheesy stuff"
"Grilled Cheese."
"Burgers."

The list went on, or at least it did in my head.  If you happen to have been on the bus that conversation might have not happened at all like that but you get the gist.  Point is, I was excited about trashy, greasy, non-Korean food.  Like, I was really excited.  When I say that the music was secondary, at various points when I got to thinking about the food I really couldn't care less about what the music was like. 

Then there was the beer.

As the bunch of us (Amanda, Katie, Christina, Tim, and I) wandered around Daejeon looking for a bus terminal some of us got to thinking about beer. 

Blue Moon?  Maybe even Blue Moon with an orange slice.  Sam Adams Winter, I thought.  Maybe they'll have the winter lager!  Maybe there will be cider!  This, I must say, is the prospect for which I was most excited. 
I am a cider kind of guy.  My fondest memories of my old apartment always involved a bunch of hard cider, Thursday night TV, a horror movie, a brisque breeze, and Mike Hadley.  I would be lying if I didn't aknowledge that I was missing all of that at the current point in time.  Summer is over.  The pine outside my window is dying.  Not so subconsciously I was going to eat everything I could, as fast as I could; and then I was going to drink as much cider as I could (also as fast as I could).  I would sit in the crisp air, smell fall and get my fix and maybe stop thinking about what is going on back at home.  Anyway, Proctor Street is gone and Hadley doesn't live in New England anymore and neither do I.

We never found the subway.  Instead we sat in traffic and watched as fireworks cracked above the river.  Beyond the bridge were "300 international food and beer" vendors all set up in a shiny white tent city that reminded me of the Head of the Charles.

Allright!  Maybe I would be getting more than a little taste of New England Fall after all!

Amongst the fireworks was a flapping remote control bird with sparklers attached.  That it was remote control is only an assumption as around the fireworks and amidst the smoke and sulfur flew a line of powergliders, also with sparklers attached.  Above it all few a steady flow of paper lanterns, turned into balloons by the fire at it's base, that followed the wind's current like some haunted orange processional, amongst the buildings and black night. 
That sight alone, looking back on that night and how it turned out, was worth the trip.

Amanda and I beat the others.  We stood for a while at one of the main entrances.  Straight ahead were the booms and concussions of very near fire works.  The grass around us was trampled by the hundreds (probably over a thousand) people in attendance. 

Foreigners.  Everywhere you turned was a foreigner.  All of us drawn in by the prospect of eating something other than kimchi and drinking something of better quality than Cass. 

Then I saw it:  directly to our right as an open stand marked Mexico next to a small image of the Mexican flag.  Heaven was here.  I brought with me 90,000 won.  I was well aware of the potentially disasterous and definitely humiliating results of eating and drinking $90-ish worth of carnival tacos and apple cider but I was pretty much committed.

We met up with everyone and started with a 2,000 won Cass.  Not a bad price when you are used to the trmendously inflated prices of events back home.  Not bad at all.  We then split off to find our own little slices of food and alcohol heaven.

Fault One of the Daejeon Rock Festival: Advertising.

The promise of 300 international food and drink vendors was frankly a lie.  There weren't even 300 tents.  There probably weren't even 300 different meals there total.  Sure, there was an Indian food tent, and a couple kebab tents offering such traditional turkish kebabs as the chicken-drowned-in ketchup-and-russian-dressing-in-a-fajita kebab, and a Spanish food tent that sold stir-fried veggies and tomato sauce but that was really pretty much it.

As for the Mexican food tent; well, I'd rather not talk about it.  Suffice to say there were no tacos and the sold only a tiny little fried thing of dough that was allegedly full of beef.  There was no fried dough, and there were burgers or western hot dogs either for that matter.  The food was a total let down.

The beer was not much different.  The Daejeon Rock Festival Facebook page is currently filled with people complaining about the "international beer selection" amongst other and bigger problems.  Other than the very cheap Cass (if you had the patience to stand in the giant line that sometimes formed) there WERE international beers.  Sure, there was no cider to be had but there were other exotic drinks like Bud Ice.  Bud f*#&@^& Ice.  I shouldn't even tell anybody that Bud Ice is actually available in a lot of bars here but the fact that it cost what you would expect an "imported" beer at a music festival cost probably made a lot of people laugh.
There were other beers:  Hoegarden, San Miguel and such but all of which can be bought at any convenience store by any of our apartments.

Still, the thing was free and it was something to do.  You get what you pay for and in this instance, crappy food and drink aside, we were getting more than we paid for.  This festival was one of the few places I have been, other than the bars at Itaewon, that had such a high ratio of westerners to natives.  It wasn't really necessary to speak Korean.  It is nice to know what is going sometimes.  That is a rare feeling.

The bands went on.  Rick and Lauren turned up for a while and we walked around looking for food.  Now, before I came to Korea I worked as a photographer for a magazine.  The first event I shot for them was a beerfest in southern Massachusetts.  I had two tickets and invited Ricky along.  I showed up first.  According to the organizers we would be given 5 tickets (everyone who paid the $20 admission and media) for free beer samples and 5 tickets for free food samples.  By the time I got there and finished shooting I realized too late that the free food had run out.  By the time Rick got there the only thing we could redeem our tickets for was a horrible, lukewarm hot dog.  The place was basically on its way to chaos.  There were many awesome beers and ciders there but I had mainly dragged Rick at the promise of awesome BBQ food at the expense of the magazine.

Beer stalls eventually started taking food tickets as well as drink tickets.  It was hot as hell and there was no free water.  People were baking, hungry, and soon enough the vendors were just giving people free drinks.  It was one of those situations where I made my way to my car to get the crap out of there before a couple hundred drunks put Douglas, MA on the map for the worlds biggest DUI case.

Daejeon Rock Festival was pretty much the same thing.  Granted Rick and Lauren live in Daejeon and didn't come as far as most people there and they came on their own free will, but still.  Rick tried to get a hot dog and wound up with some fried seafood jammed onto some chopsticks.

I tried boiled Bundigie (silkworm larvae) and discovered that they are pretty much what you would imagine.  They have this sickly-sweet sort of smell that fills your lungs like it is as thick as steam.  They taste a little bit like sweat and as with most weird foods it's that you are conciously aware that you just paid money to buy and eat bugs that really grosses you out.  That pop when you bite into them and the spray of hot briney bug insides sort of contributes to grossness factor too.

So, the festival was fun.  They never actually said there would be tacos.  It was a nice night.  I was there with my friends from home and from here in this strange little life we had.  Our plan was to stay until the finale at 4am and then hop a bus back to Cheongju at 6am.

Fault Two of the Daejeon Rock Festival: We don't need no stinkin' permit!

This was the first time anything like this has been done in central Korea.  It was the idea of a westerner and it was endorsed by the city council as a good way to get more people to make their way to our neck of the woods.  As it is, there isn't a heck of a lot of tourist business done anywhere but Seoul or Busan.

It seems the what ended up happening is the fault almost entirely on the entertainment company that set up the festival in the first place.  Nobody really knew what to expect as far as crowd turn out but the festival was given the greenlight to go on til 4am according to the entertainment company who also dealt with the logistics.  This, again, isn't really fact.  I am paraphrasing the people on the Daejeon Rock Festival's page who have come to the defense of it's creator.   

Crowd turnout was pretty amazing.  People came from all around Korea.  Basically everyone I have met in Korea was there.  Cheongju was probably a pretty empty place that night. 
It is because of this impressive crowd that it was such a disaster when the cops shut down the entire festival at 12am.

The streets near the festaval grounds suddenly took on the feel of a muted Cloverfield.  Dozens of foreigners left the same way as us and we wandered down the road for a while trying to hail cabs at 12:30am.  The occasional cab that passed as we sat or stood in the road with arms flailing sped right by.  It was probably the same mindset as in Titanic lifeboats that wanted to avoid being swarmed by the desperate, but in this case it was the thought of 10 drunk foreigners turned out to the streets that led to the "screw this crap" attitude of the cabs. 

Our group split off, crossed a bridge and walked through the longest park ever.  At the end we tried for a long time with no success for a taxi.  We eventually put up our thumbs and hailed a random minivan that told us he could only take two people.  Obviously, it seemed like a good idea that the girls all go with him.  Christina and Katie hopped in followed by Amanda who sprinted across the roads and just got in the passengers door.  They were off and eventually those that remained piled into a cab and headed downtown.

The girls survived.  That's probably important.  The night became a blur of people.  Yellow Taxi (or Cab, I don't know) basically had the entire festival inside and was packed.  Some of us ended up at Garten Bier until 3am, at which point we summoned the troops and cabbed it all the way back to Cheongju. 

Dissapointments aside, Daejeon Rock Festival was actually pretty fun.  At the least it will make a good story.  Also, I didn't shit my pants from eating 45 tacos so I have that going for me.

 

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A Birthday in Cheonjgu

Burritos courtesy of Han.

Yesterday was my birthday. To be honest I was not expecting too much and wouldn’t have been disappointed if nobody so much as threw a “happy birthday” my way. In recent years I have not been a huge fan of my birthday. I could go without the presents if I could stop getting older

It would not be Korean for my birthday to pass unnoticed.

Actually, I knew that I would at the very least be getting a book from the Young Receptionist because she made me sit down and pick a book from the Korean equivalent of Amazon. I am very excited for this present as I am having problems finding books written in English. I am almost at the end of Road Fever by Tim Cahill and would have jumped straight into the Lord of the Rings trilogy but now I will be reading The Best American Travel Writing. I am not sure what edition it is but before I came I read a recent installment edited by Anthony Bourdain and I enjoyed it a lot. Some of the stories weren’t my cup of tea but all in all it was like reading a really great travel section in a Sunday paper.

As soon as I sat down in my little office Han gave me her present contained in a Tupperware container.

“Tom, I made you burritos,” she told me. I could have died. I am from the Northeast but have been craving American-perverted Mexican food for the past two months. I probably WILL take a two hour bus and subway ride to Itaewon just to go to Taco Bell whenever the place finally opens. To get a burrito on my birthday was like being given a car or a million dollars.

‘But,” Han went on, “I could not find a recipe so I made it up myself.”

This could be a problem, I thought. Even if they were the worst burritos on earth I still would have been appreciative but Koreans tend to put some pretty funky things in their foods. Still I was determined to down at least one even if a tentacle fell out when I bit into it.

There was no octopus inside, and no fish. They were as genuine as burritos got this far from Mexico. They were made with real beef, fresh tomatoes, onions, red and yellow peppers, and about a dozen tiny slices of fresh chili peppers that I didn’t see until it was too late.

It was that sort of food burn where you feel at first a tingle on your lips and think “this is going to be bad” before the pain kicks in and next thing you know your eyes are watering as your face is under the faucet. Still, they were amazing and I ate two of them.

Boram gave me travelers coffee cup with a picture of Seoul stretched around it. The Older Receptionist gave me a shirt but promptly took it back when she thought it was a little too big. I was pretty proud as I have lost 20 lbs since I have been here. My boss’ wife gave me some K-Swiss sandals.

If the day was like any other day I can say that we sure ate a lot more than usual. A few hours after the burritos the Young Receptionist brought us all Red and White burgers from Lotteria. I should point out that Lotteria calls everything a burger and they are not to be trusted as this was made out of shrimp.

Part of me genuinely thought that I would go home after work, maybe have a drink and get to bed like any other night. I have this thing where I think about what food I will eat when I get home if I was still hungry after dinner. Would I make chicken nuggets? Mandu? Donkkaseu (pork cutlet)? No, I wouldn’t make anything. I would go to the Kimbap joint next door and get the donkkaseu meal (cutlet, radish, salad, rice) or omurice (a sort of omelet with fried rice).

Everyone else knew we were going out but they didn’t tell me. Oh, don’t think that it was meant to be a surprise or anything like that- they just didn’t tell me. Nobody tells me nuthin’.

After work we hailed a cab and soon we were at Seduce in Downtown. In the beginning it was just Han, Boram, the Older Receptionist, the Younger Receptionist, and I. Several things happened at Seduce that likely played a hand in how the night turned out and the quality of teaching experienced by the kids the next day.

Boram and one of my birthday cakes.
Cellphone camera.

- We started with beer.

- We ended up doing a few tequila shots each. I learned that it is a horrible idea to be polite in Korea when it comes to alcohol. The Younger Receptionist told me that I could have more tequila if I wanted it. I stated that I would only have a shot if everybody else wanted one. Thus we found ourselves licking salt, downing the thing and sucking lemon for a fourth time.

- Albert’s wife showed up and ordered a cocktail that was mostly Bailey’s.

- Albert showed up in his shiny suit a cake from the exotic Baskin Robbins.

- The restaurant gave us free food, which was very nice. The food consisted of peanuts, cooked beef jerky (from a package- I know my jerky and I knew the brand), and heated mayonnaise. It might have been the trashiest thing that I have ever eaten.

- I had to choose between the cake brought by Albert and the cake brought by my coworkers. I don’t even like cake.

- Albert offered to extend my contract and hire my girlfriend when the school reaches 100 students.

- I was served a flaming shot of 151 which was pretty scary.

We walked out of Seduce at 11pm and I was feeling pretty happy. If I had to celebrate another birthday then I was happy with how it had turned out. I became a bit self-conscious as I was walking around with shopping bags and wearing socks with my new sandals. I thanked everyone as Albert and his wife, citing fatigue, went home.

“Ha! Tom,” Han said, “you think the night is over?”

No, of course the night wasn’t over. This is Korea. We went to another bar with a name that made it sound like an all-male strip club and found our way to a wooden table in the corner by the windows overlooking a fairly quiet night in Downtown.

There was more beer and a lot of conversation. I feel so bad sometimes that I can’t communicate with the two receptionists. They are trying to learn English when it should be me trying harder to learn Korean; I am, after all, a guest here.

Still, we all talked for what seemed like a very long time over a fiery hot chicken dish. One of the more poignant things that I have learned through international traveling is that communication is often not held down by language barriers. It is true, that 90% of the time I have no idea what the heck is going on or what anybody is saying but that didn’t seem important.

The night still did not end when we left. We made a trip to the horrible dance club Frog Rain only to find it closed. I thanked god for my luck and we found ourselves at noraebang.

Noraebang.
Cellphone Camera.

Ordinarily, I am not a fan of the karaoke rooms but tonight I did not care. I threw ego to the gutter which, given my song choices, was a very good thing. By the time we left the place at 4:30am I had willfully sang four songs while my coworkers danced on couches, banged tambourines, or smoked cigarettes in the corner as the colored lights pulsated.

What did I sing?  I’ll tell you.

Buddy Holly - Weezer

Semi-charmed Kind of Life - Third Eye Blind

Girlfriend - Avril Lavigne (…I know)

Bitch - Meredith Brooks

To say the least, students did not learn anything new the next day as we hung onto podiums just to stay vertical. Still, it was an awesome birthday in Cheongju.

Things I ate today:

Noodles with black bean sauce

Lettuce wraps with spicy pork and sauce.

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Korea vs Ghana

Well, it is the end of the line for the South Korean soccer team. I will not pretend that watching the World Cup in Cheongju has opened my eyes and converted me to the thralldom of soccer but it has provided me with loads of fun.


A Korean asked me atop the roof deck of MJ’s, an expat bar located in downtown, during the Brazil vs. Portugal game why Americans were so drawn to football while the rest of the world goes glossy eyed over the checkered ball and athletes that pay as much attention to acting as they do the game.

I mustered some terribly lame and fairly pretentious answer about it being a spectacle of controlled violence with enough testosterone to keep us warm against the falling winter.

Later on, as we were leaving MJ’s a girl from Philadelphia summed it up much more accurately.

“It’s the social atmosphere.”

That is what I will miss the most with the elimination of South Korea.

Hours before the game, I met up with a handful of fellow expats at one of the hundreds of barbeque restaurants of Cheongju. If you asked me the name of the place I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It is no exaggeration to say that nearly every street in Cheongju has at least one, if not many barbeque restaurants and they look just about the same: a dozen or so tables with holes cut into the center and a few dozen plastic chairs strewn about. There are times when the Cheongju night is ripe with the smell of burning meat.

It is, thus far, my favorite food here in Korea.

Barbeque in Korea is different than barbeque in the States. For one thing I have not seen a steak since I have been here and while I have seen hamburgers (or very horrible takes on what we would call a burger “I didn‘t know hamburgers were orange?”) they do not appear at Korean barbeque. Instead you are given a plate full of chopped raw meat, a million sides and a fire in the middle of the table.

The meat that you cook (by yourself though the waiter will usually come and replace the grate after you have succeeded in charring the meat and sending up amateur plumes of white smoke) is not limited to traditional cuts that are familiar to westerners. I’ve had thick slabs of lean and fat that resemble a giant’s bacon (pretty good), volcano hot chicken (amazing if you don’t mind sweating profusely), chicken anus (not so good) and pig organs (surprisingly delicious).

On this day we had pork. It is now one of my favorites.

The day had threatened and delivered rain off and on. A couple of times during the meal workers would rush to pull a canopy over the outdoor patios, killing any sort of breeze on a humid night and bringing on the dreaded spicy-food-way-too-humid dinner sweats.

With time to kill we found our way to another common sight in Cheongju: Garten Bier. In an odd sort of way this place reminds me of home. My girlfriend, while a full blooded American, was born and partially raised in Germany before moving to California, Texas, and finally Massachusetts. She has a passion for schnitzel and sausage.

While they do serve Koreanized sausages there does not appear to be any schnitzel at Garten Bier. In any case we got neither, instead we ate the traditional Korean soccer food of fried chicken and beer. The neat thing about this place is that each place at the table has a sunken cup holder that is kept chilled so that the hookah-like shaped glasses of beer are consistently frosty.

The original plan was to watch the game at Chunbuk Stadium. The place has been ground central for Korea’s World Cup fight. Chunbuk Stadium is located a whopping 3 minutes from my apartment and is less a stadium than it is a bunch of concrete bleachers surrounding a multi purpose field, where a screen has been erected on which to watch the games.

Earlier in the day I had scoped the place out to stave off boredom. At 3pm kids were carrying banners across the field, souvenir carts were already stocked and van upon van was unloading its goods (a massive amount of booze) onto the side of the road. It was looking like a good night.

The weather conspired against us, though and we didn’t end up at the stadium. Instead we ended up again on the roof of MJ’s with the place to ourselves with the exception of a few older Koreans who sat on a sofa beneath a canopy.

By the time we sat down Ghana had already scored. Most of the predictions floating around had Ghana taking the victory and Korea being eliminated. Of course, this is what happened but the game was not without its excitement. With each attempt on either net there were screams of hope and despair with at least a few people (and all of the Koreans) jumping from their water-logged seats.

At some point Korea scored but I didn’t see it. I only heard maddened screams as I stepped into a rooftop bathroom that smelled like a port-a-potty in the hottest part of hell.

The tie didn’t last long though, and Ghana’s next goal proved to be the last of the night. While Ghana rejoiced the Koreans atop MJ’s (and likely all about the country) smashed their glasses of beer to pieces on the floor.

There is a sense of heartbreak every time your team loses. This is also true with an adoptive team in a sport you really care very little about. When the players stopped running and moped off of the field they took with them the patriotism that won’t be seen until the next time around.

I remember watching the Red Sox take on the Yankees in the post season of 2003. Framingham State College and all of New England was galvanized one moment and distraught the next as we all saw that ball sail out of the field. It was over. Now the World Cup is over and the vevuzelas are silenced in the Land of the Morning Calm.

The group broke up and I ended the night playing Jenga and eating Nachos in another expat joint called Pearl Jam. Korea might have lost to Ghana, but I owned at Jenga.



Things I ate today: Kimchi mandu (dumpling), omurice (omelette and fried rice), sundae (blood sausage) and ttekbokki (rice cakes in a spicy red sauce with fish cakes).

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Korea vs Argentina

It seems that each night I lay down to sleep and each morning I rise to the same sound: the vuvuzelas of South Africa. Invariably as I walk to the convenience store down the road for a triangle Kimbap I pass the restaurant with the TV hanging in the patio and there is somebody watching some team whose name he might not know play some other team from a country he has never heard of. On my way to the grocery store after school always there is a crowd at the bar next door and always that buzzing theme of the World Cup.


A long time ago I spent a little while in the mountains of northern Greece, a stones throw from the Albanian border. One night we sat in the reception building of our little village tired and dirty. The first part of the day, for me at least, had been spent digging holes into the heavy clay in the rain as it flirted with the idea of turning into slow. After a lunch of bean soup I had spent all afternoon with a lead pipe drawing back and thrusting it into the clay. Again and again I did this as two Greeks watched me sweat in the freezing air of the new winter. My arms jarred with each rock I hit beneath the grass and as the hours wore on my muscles burned just to carry the clay-caked thing onto the next spot. All to put in the flimsiest and worst piece of crap fence made out of sticks and thin nylon rope.

If you ever find yourself in the Forest Village of Kedros enjoy the scenery: I planted the trees and I put the holes in the ground for the fence. If the trees have washed away and the fence is no more, well, just don’t tell me.

On the night after my first tango with the lead pole I watched soccer with Greeks long after most of my fellow volunteers had left for out freezing hostel. Greeks love soccer. I no longer remember who was playing but those who lived at Kedros seemed to have something at stake. My friend Axilleas barely spoke English but he bridged the gap by buying me a beer from the bar at the far end of the room. I returned the favor and we sat on big leather chairs almost unable to move.

The fire next to the TV both lit and warmed the place into the waxing morning. I didn’t know what team was who but I watched the game until the end. Each goal bought on cheers or screams that threatened murder. Men fresh out of the military with heads still shaved and scarred at the hand of some butcher of a barber lit cigarettes straight from the tap of burning logs.

I never really knew who won that game. What I know is that I forced myself into the freezing and black night, the path barely illuminated by the moon’s light that bounced off of the wild mountains of the Tzourmeka range so that I might get a few hours of sleep before the morning came and with it brought utter agony to my body.

The next day was still a nightmare. Again I did battle with the pole and if I was miserable Axilleas looked like he might drop dead any minute. Hangovers tend to be magnified by hard labor with little food in the cold at high altitude. I remember asking him when he had finally returned to the hostel and he said it had been sometime near 4am after another game. I tried asking him why in the name of god he had stayed up so late given we were doomed to 6 more days of these 6am wake up calls.

He looked at me as though he didn’t understand the question. He did understand the question but he couldn’t fathom why I bothered to ask it in the first place.

“Thomas,” he said, “because it is football and because it is Greece.”



Jump two years or more into the future and there I sat in a taxi trying to cut through Cheongju traffic that was as thick as the haze that clung to the city. The weather had taken a turn towards oppressive- the temperature was in the 90’s and the humidity was monstrous enough to bring the haze to the ground. Indeed the air was suffocating.

Everywhere pedestrians, cars and madmen on scooters rushed to where they might watch the game. Friends of mine headed to the stadium which was jammed full enough to suspend disbelief that they were watching a broadcast and not the Korea vs. Argentina game in person. Cheongju’s streets flowed red with the homeland pride.

A 10 minute trip to Albert’s other school took over 30 minutes. We spent much of the ride in stand still traffic watching scooters and bikes risk narrow passages when they didn’t abandon the road all together and take to the sidewalks, pedestrians be damned. The cab was full. I sat in front while Han and Boram sat in the back. Albert, holding three giant boxes of fried chicken and three big bottles of Pepsi sat in the middle. He was as giddy as a very well dressed school girl.

Albert had canceled night classes. I was the last person to find out (about an hour before we left) and had insisted that everyone at his schools watch the game together.

“We are,” Albert always says, “a social family.”

As it was, the guys at the other school had apparently joined the countless red army marching to the stadium and I was the only guy there apart from my school director.

So, we sat at desks in a classroom that had been occupied an hour earlier by students anxious (or forced) to learn the English language. It now contained 5 Korean girls giggling in the back row, Albert hooking the antenna to the computer so that we could watch the game on the giant whiteboard, a clueless foreigner, and an absurd amount of fried chicken.

The moment the game began all classroom-appropriate behavior ceased to exist. Korean girls can scream very loud. Once the ball was in motion there was a constant chatter of shrieks, commentary and blood curdling cheering. Albert had dragged in a great leather armchair in which to sit right in front of the game. Whether we were there or not Albert could have cared less.

Argentina scored first to screams. Had we been quiet I am sure that all of Cheongju could be heard around us. We weren’t quiet though. Albert swore, the girls sounded like they had just been stabbed in the spine and I dropped my chicken.

Soon after the Older Receptionist and Albert’s wife showed up with a few more goodies.

Pepsi wasn’t enough to drink, I guess, because they came in with 30 beers and doled them out as the game played on.

So, there I was: watching Korea take on a powerhouse while eating fried chicken and drinking beer in school. Sometimes I have to laugh at where my life has taken me. Albert would occasionally stand up and without saying a word tap his beer can against my own in some silent toast and step over to the window and smoke a cigarette. If he were a high school kid in a bathroom he would have been suspended; but he isn’t: he is Albert. He does whatever he damn well pleases.

A short time later we watched as Korea danced around the Argentinean goal in the last seconds before the first half ended. There was a kick and-- the ball wasn’t even in the net yet when I saw Albert propel himself into the air, twist around, suck in air and let it out in an eardrum shattering scream/growl before his feet even hit the ground. While all of Korea erupted my attention had been taken from the game. I was wondering if Albert was going to eat me, or if he had chosen this moment to turn into some sort of hip Korean demon. I was wondering if maybe I had wet my pants.

The game went on and Korea lost. Later on, Albert’s wife was driving us back to our neighborhood. I sat in front as his wife laid on the horn while watching another soccer game on the navigational system / TV / really, really bad idea. Han was in back with Boram. Half sitting and half squatting was the Older Receptionist who had taken the unopened beers and was planning to drink her sorrow into a hangover. Albert sat with his face pressed against the window.

“Thomas,” said Albert, “I think that I am going to cry.”



Korea will likely not be a contender in the end, but for the time being Korea is galvanized. Each day I wake up and walk out my door to that omnipresent buzz. Koreans walk around as though they are stretched out a bit too thin, but there is a national pride involved that we in the States see only in the Olympics. In the States LA rioted because they beat the Celtics, Melissa Snelgrove was shot in the eye by a non-lethal projectile and soon died in the riots that broke out after a Red Sox victory.

But here there is nothing but unity and a bond. Amidst threats of war with the North, even my coworkers spoke with brotherly pride when North Korea denied a shut-out game to Brazil.

I don’t expect that I will ever see Axilleas again, but all of this excitement and pride has me imagining him working at whatever it is that he works at with one hell of a month-long hangover.


What I ate today: Kimchi mandu, rice, bean sprouts, plain old mandu, tortila chips, salsa (score!)

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