Why students should never know where their teacher lives

I spent last weekend fairly determined to do nothing productive or healthy. One of the consequences of traveling around the country to see the friends I hadn't seen in a while is that I was away from Cheongju and my remaining friends here for a few weeks. I got to miss them.


I went out Friday night. It wasn't anything too ridiculous or out of the norm; it was a normal Friday. Amanda and I went to Pearl Jam.

Pearl Jam is the homeliest of the handful of foreigner bars and it also serves the most decent food. This is something I do not know for sure as I have not indulged in any of the food at Buzz or MJ's, but Pearl Jam burritos trump Road King Burritos. These things become important to a guy.

We played Jenga until my burrito arrived. By the time I had finished my food (maybe 45 seconds after the plate was put before me; I was hungry and I had the shakes) we were joined by Gavin, Robyn, et al.

We drank, talked, and joked our way from Pearl Jam to MJ's.

The only thing I really like about MJ's is decent popcorn, and a 2 hour happy hour with 2,000won gin and tonics.

My opinion of the place rises in warm weather after the roof deck is opened and you can hangout in the fresh air above the city. The weather in Korea is warming up but the roof hasn't been cleaned and it still looks like it has been hit by a series of tornados.

I left in control of my senses at around 2am. Not too late all things considering. I could have gone to bed and woken up to a glorious gray and misty day and done something productive in the morning.

I didn't.

I went back to my apartment and played Xbox with my friends and drank some soju I had in my fridge. I went to sleep at 5am.

Still, not horrible.

What is horrible is being woken up by pounding on the door.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and decided to do nothing. The most serious thing at my door at the early hour of 1pm was a repair man or somebody else on official apartment business. The knocking came again. My apartment was a disaster anyway. I had been trying to get rid of things the past week and with the clothing and general clutter I looked like a hoarder.

Most likely scenario was the ever common Jehovah's Witness; a scenario I didn't really feel like dealing with. The worst case scenario would have been ---

"THOMAS TEACHER!"

Oh shit.

It was Ji-Huan.

Hearing his voice startled me, but there was no reason for me to be bothered. He knocked again and shouted my name, with the addition of "teacher" despite my current state of hiding, hungover, in my own filthy apartment waiting for a 10 year old to go away.

He shouted again.  Everytime the boy says my home, including in school, he says it with this manic crescendo at the end.  Usually I think it is funny.

Eventually I heard Ji-Huan begin to turn my door knob.  It was ever so slowly and subtly but it made a distinct sound. 

"That sneaky ... little... ohdeargod."  At this point I realize two things:

1.  I am butt-ass naked.
2.  I forgot to lock my door.

Several scenarios went through my head and none of them ended without one of us being traumatized or in jail.  I stopped breathing for a few seconds.  I might have prayed.  Anyway, in those few seconds I decided my only plan of action was, if he came in, to spring up with my blanket open and in front of me, wrap him up, and push him right back out the door.  With a bit of luck he would think it was part of a game and even if he didn't I was ok with the idea of Ji-Huan being a little confused for a few minutes.

To ruin the story he turned the handle and walked away. 

On Monday he told me that he came by to my apartment to visit and I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.

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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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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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