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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"I've Got a REALLY Big Gun"

Sometimes my life is a lot like that of Michelle Pfeifer in DANGEROUS MINDS, or like Steve Urkle in the episode of FAMILY MATTERS in which Laura’s friend gets shot for not giving her shoes to some girls who wanted them pretty bad.

One of my classes has a tendency to get out of hand. Actually, most of them share that tendency; but this class is so reliable that I would be concerned if at least one of the three little boys didn’t blitzkrieg my smart board at least a few times in the 30 minutes I have them.

We were doing an exercize in which I said an emotion and they made a facial expression to go along with that emotion. Now, this was done as a ploy. I was teaching a lesson that would last, if unaltered, a maximum of 5 minutes. This was a means to drag the time on and maybe get a few chuckles: these kids are pretty hilarious.

For a while, it was pretty tame stuff. They went into hysterics when I said “sad” and turned into maniacs when I said “happy.” I know that “crazy” is not really an emotion, but seing as these kids seem to have one foot in that state of mind anyway I wanted to see what they would do.

Mistake? Maybe.

The kid in the photo is the Skinny Boy. He, I believe, is responsible for the departure of Angry Girl. She simply couldn’t put up with his antics. He can be difficult to mange at times (in fact, right before this “episode” I had had to throw him over my shoulder and carry him to the back of the class to keep him from smashing his head into the smart board) but he is a good kid. He makes me laugh a lot. I tend to favor the kids who make me laugh.

I them them to be “crazy.”

He immediately goes into convulsions. He hit’s the ground and screams like a hyena. He stands up and yelps to the back of the room. The other two boys are put to shame. He comes back all cross-eyed and squacking like a bird and says “I haaavvvvvveee aa reallybiggun!!”

I laugh immediately. Kid really nailed the “crazy.”

Was not prepared for him to reach into his bag and pull out the most photo-realistic, gigantic handgun I have seen in person.

For a moment, my heart got all fast and my belly felt hot.

This is how it ends folks, I thought, blown away by a 45 lb 10 year old in an effort to demonstrate what a crazy face looks like.

It was a toy. Obviously. They sell these things everywhere. Guns are not an issue in Korea as they are generally outlawed. Therefore, apparently, police are less apt to blow somebody away with a toy gun: despite that said gun is bigger than the kids head and looks like something out of PULP FICTION.

I laughed a bit more after he packed up to go and I realized that the only things in his bag were an introduction to English book and a giant gun.

That kid totally earned the 4 stickers I gave him.



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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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One Travel

Not a huge fan of promoting stuff, even my own, but here is a link to a non-orbitz website.  Its got a whole slew of features including air travel deals, hotels and whatnot.  They also have a blog which is pretty unique I think.  The guy, George, is pretty cool and features a whole bunch of guest bloggers on a range of different topics from advice to narratives.

Cheap Flights - One Travel

Also, I'm lying about the anti-promotion stuff because they are kind enough to run some stuff of mine at some future date.  I'll keep everything posted, but if you are heading out anywhere you might as well support the place that supports us, right?

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Seoul, Part II

Sometimes travel is about all sorts of righteous ideals: self growth, lessons in understanding, adventures, etc. Sometimes, though, travel is about not losing your shit. By no fault of the Tomgi Hotel I did not sleep. It has been happening all too frequently that I go to bed and do not find sleep. I stare at the ceiling in misery as the room grows bright. I then have to face my day through the eyes of a guy who isn’t really there at all.


I was told upon my checkout from the Tomgi Hotel that I could extend my stay by another night, but it would cost me. One thing about Korea is that it is still common for a hotel to charge for four hour blocks of time during the day. Checkout was at noon, to leave my things in the room while I searched for an Xbox repair man would cost me 30,000W for the hours of 12 - 4 and another 30,000W for 4 - 8. Not willing to pay an extra 60,000W for what basically amounted to a very fancy storage locker I packed my bags and told the desk clerk that I would return at 8pm. I then set out with one heavy backpack and a camera bag. I was sweating profusely before I got to the first metro station.

Yongsan is miserable if you don’t have a plan. There was no giant neon sign that read: “Are you a moron!? Did you lug your Xbox power supply directly into the wall hoping to kill some zombies only to see death as the sparks flew by and your nose filled with ozone? I got your back-ee.” No, there was no sign. Instead there were about 5 floors with random groupings of computer parts dealers, speaker salesmen, and video game stores.

No problem, I thought. I would walk this building of the market first, then double back holding my broken equipment and saying “fix-ee?” until somebody helped me or I struck out. I would then begin walking the streets of Yongsan and hope for the best.

The first thing that went wrong (sans-insomnia) almost led to my unraveling: The escalators of the building were not working. I would be lying if I said I was appreciating the exercise of walking up and down 5 steep flights of dirty stairs with my bags hanging from my back. Whatever trouble I was having just to keep my eyes open was doubled by the sweat that was POURING into my eyes and all over my body. Others were eating ramen in the little convenience stores, some were buying parts to make a computer that could take down an entire nation's network if they weren’t so busy playing Starcraft II; I looked like I was about to keel over on Mt. Everest.

I walked around all five small but packed floors with no luck. I stepped off of the stairs hoping to find the advertised food court. I found only closed or long abandoned stores and a dirty floor with a few men who looked like they had taken in too much soju the night before. The basement, it seems, is where those defeated by Yongsan come to die. Promised the indulgence of a lunch and some coffee I found only despair and shoulder pain as I sat with the rest of the downtrodden trying to muster a collective will to go on.

A week later I would return to this very spot to meet Larry. I would walk down one dark hallway to find, of all things, one of two Hooters in Korea. Really Korea?

Somewhere inside I realized that I couldn’t eat or find somewhere to sleep or otherwise get on out of Yongsan until I found somebody to fix my power supply.

I walked up the first set of stairs and was let down by the first floor. Again, up the stairs and disappointed on the second floor. I was starting to wonder, on the third floor after being shooed away by a video game store, if I just looked like a lost cause. There I was, a derelict fool carrying a busted power supply with a full pack while sweating profusely like an addict who can no longer think straight without his stuff.

Floor number 4 was almost the end of me. There were 4 identical video game stores, each of which with a small line of 20-somethings asking questions or sampling games as the clerk fumbled beneath the counters for parts of hardware. I sat and sweated through three lines to be told “anio (no)” by three grumpy men. I was starting to think blowing $100 to have a new part shipped to me wasn’t so bad when the fourth clerk told me that he could fix the thing for 25,000W cash.

I could have cried. My interest in fighting fake wars or killing zombies was non existent; it had been replaced by the urge to stop carrying the damned power supply around. I asked him how long it would take, if I had time to eat. He told me I could pick it up in 4 days. Son of a bitch.

The heat and fatigue can make you do strange things. It was around 2pm; I left my hotel at 10am and I couldn’t return until 8pm. My pack was all the lighter without the power supply / bane of my existence but it was still there along with my camera.

I was completely soaked. I had spent a long time walking around Yongsan (there was classy mall next to the market) and I was starting to let my misery get the best of me. I couldn’t think straight and found myself just sitting on the curb listening to the cicadas and sweating.

The cicadas in the Korean heat are absurd. I leaned against a pole next to a street overloaded in traffic, pedestrians, and fog and listened as the buzz grew from distant to jackhammer loud in a wild crescendo. I looked for them in the trees like everybody else but found nothing- largely due to the fact that my glasses were sitting somewhere in Cheongju. At it’s peak I could not hear the traffic right in front of me because it was overpowered by the heat bugs.

I saw the building right where Larry said it would be. It looked something like Boston’s South Station with cfogged windows, neon writing, and a covered entrance. I stumbled half dead and delirious and sat under the trees next to a bubbling fountain and a vine covered wooden fence. I sat there for 15 minutes and watched as Koreans came and left before I mustered the courage to go through the doors and into the lobby. I heard splashing water and smelled chlorine. I stood in line for one minute before deciding that this was entirely too big of a leap along the path of “going native” for me to handle.

I left the sanctuary, walked a half mile or so and bought a metro ticket for Itaewon. Itaewon now has a Taco Bell and I guess my plan was to spend the next 6 or so hours eating tacos. I sat in the station looking utterly depressed and desperate until the sane part of my mind that had yet to be melted to its core told me a 6 hour taco binge was a bad idea. So, I headed back to the Dragon Hill Spa.

Dragon Hill Spa is a Korean bathhouse. While public bathhouses generally stir up stories of ancient Rome or less ancient San Francisco, they do not have the same connotation here. They are socially acceptable places to go to relax. Perhaps for the rarity of baths in Korean apartments, or for the desire for a relaxing social experience these places are a staple of Korean culture. They are a must according to any guidebook you read. Korean bathhouses are a place to distress, relax, and kill time (say 6 or so hours). Korean bathhouses are also butt-ass naked.

I will spare you the grim details and give you only vague ideas of my experience. They are like a giant locker room full of closet nudists. There are enough doors off of the changing area to inspire a legitimate fear in the heart of a westerner that he might accidentally walk out into the coed clothed area. There after showering one walks down a path and hop into a giant tub that is usually just shy of boiling and soak for as long as you can bare it. The water is often infused with herbs and the tubs are usually full beyond the capacity of awkwardness. You then jump into a small pool of cold water and repeat the process which produces a feeling of tingling euphoria.

If you are a westerner you spend most of your time staring at the ceiling and avoiding the kid swimming toward you with swimming goggles.

I spent a couple of hours in the tubs, most of which in the cold pool until I felt restored and headed to the sleeping room. I dried off, put on my uniform and stepped into one of the strangest places I have been to in Korea.

It was a room the size of a large classroom. It’s ceilings were low and everything was bathed in a warm light that passed through narrow, fogged windows. Here and there somebody slept on a mat or sprawled on the floor based on how much they rolled. Everybody wore the same faded shorts and t-shirt uniform. I laid down and drifted off to the soothing sound of the piped in crashing surf soundtrack that was drowned out by the sound of 25 mean with no self-awareness snoring like my father and grandfather had created some anti-sleep demon.

I woke up a few hours later. When I laid down the place truly seemed tranquil and I was at ease. I felt as though I was experiencing some vital part of Korean culture and that by stepping into a place like this I was being accepted in a strange sort of way. When I woke up it reminded me of some sort of hippie-cult commune and got one out of there. Manson probably had a sleeping room.

The rest of the night was uneventful. I ate a couple of tacos in Itaewon and made a little bit of peace with the neighborhood that gave me a bitter taste for Seoul. I accidentally took a metro back to Yongsan and had to backtrack and transfer to get back to Anguk, but soon enough I found myself enjoying a beer on a giant bed in a beautiful hotel room. The next day I would get lost and almost lose my marbles trying to get to a bus terminal and again do battle with the heat. That night though, I sat and watched The Office, Community, and a healthy dose of America’s Funniest Home Videos. All was right with the world.

What did I eat today?  Kimchi Jigae (kimchi soup, sour and spicy deliciousness), and Curry Dongas (pork cutlet with curry, made by me to get rid of the rest of my curry).

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Seoul, Day One

It wasn’t much of a vacation but it was deserved and welcomed. I was starting to get sick of kids. I found myself beginning to dread certain classes as though I were still a student. Before Intensives I saw each student somewhere around every other day; I now see most of them every day. Sorry kids, I need a break. I need some space, ya know? I mean, you are all sweet children but I can only take so many cute and adorable moments before I crack.

Angry Girl, I am looking at you. I really appreciate you taking a kid friendly game of Guess That Picture and turning it into a death threat that could have made the news back home. Thank you for laughing as you drew a bottle of soju to go along with the fat man hanging from the gallows. Why couldn’t you draw a chair or a pencil like everyone else?

So, after the weekend of my first ever shabu-shabu and screen golf experiences I headed to Seoul, all alone and on a mission.

Two months earlier, for some truly stupid reason I thought I had some sort of new Xbox power supply that didn’t need a step-down transformer. I plugged the thing into an adaptor and into the wall. Turns out, I do need a transformer after all. I also need a new power supply. Enter Yongsan Electronics Market.

Yongsan is sort of a dream come true and a living nightmare all at once, but I’ll get to that. It is allegedly the largest market of the kind in Asia (quoting Wikipedia / Lonely Planet on that one so don’t quote ME) Suffice it to say that from somebody I do not know’s blog I heard of a guy there who would repair Xbox power supplies that morons like me had gone and fried. The blog was fairly recent so I assumed it would be a cinch to find the guy; probably had a big sign even.

I figured “hey, man. You are on vacation so why not make a few days out of it?” So I did. I left my apartment early Monday afternoon and didn’t plan on returning until Wednesday with a working power supply.

The plan was to take a bus to whatever bus terminal it was in Seoul that I said “nay” to when the cashier asked me. I would then take the subway to Youngsan and find a cheap little Love Hotel to use as a base. I would then find some amazing western food, have a drink, sleep and then deal with the Market on Tuesday.

I talked with a high school girl on the bus. She asked me: “If I go to America, will my face be ugly?” She spent most of the hour and a half trip reading bits of the Lonely Planet guide to Cheongju back to me. I spent most of the hour and a half trip trying not to sweat on her.

I have to say I did pretty well for a while trying to get around Seoul. I had a minute of panic trying to figure out where to transfer subways but I got it all sorted out and was soon stepping out into Yongsan station and straight into the market.

Sometimes, travel is just about trying to get the hell out of a place. I tried like hell to get out of the market but every exit seemed to take me via covered bridge to another section full of appliances, games, and computer parts. I ended up following a sunken alley through convenience stores and shanty grocers and then finally into the open air.

The market is massive and stretches along the roads outside of the main building. In any other area the stores would be selling Kimbap, soju, and cigarettes: in Yongsan they sell tripods, cell phones, and computers to which they might not have selling rights. It was as sketchy as people hawking high-powered graphics cards can get.

The heat proved to be the theme of my vacation. At times, for example between the hours of 7am and 6:50 am it was unbearable. I walked up and down Yongsan with a bag full of clothes and my laptop and my camera bag. I did so for two hours, until I thought that soon I would have to burn my clothes and figured that apparently not too many people are looking for a cheap hotel in Youngsan.

After downing my third bottle of water I pulled out my Lonely Planet and found a neighborhood more apt to give me results in my hotel search: the sun was fading, my feet hurt and I was out of water.

Anguk. A ride on one subway and then another took me to Anguk. When I came to the surface twilight had ceased and night was on me. I was starting to get worried that maybe my vacation wouldn’t be nearly as relaxing as I was hoping. I started to wonder if I’d be spending the night on a bench with a bag of clothes and over a thousand bucks worth of camera junk.

Enter the Tomgi Hotel. I saw its neon through the trees next to the metro stairs and decided that I would be staying at this place regardless of its cost. I walked through a hopping market street, past a soju tent and a dozen of so street food stalls. I passed into smoke and the sound of the night as bars spilled into the road. Alcohol flows readily in Seoul, even on a Monday night.

Tomgi is a love motel but it has class. I paid 60,000W for the night and took the elevator to the dark 8th floor. Soft pop music piped into the hallway as I stuck the keycard in its slot. Ten minutes later I managed to discover that the lights only worked if the card was put into another slot. Things look different in the light. I had been expecting a motel room with cigarette burns on the floor or things growing in the bathroom. I was ready for all sorts of bad things. What I got was shocked.

To start I had a giant, firm queen that sat next to a window that looked down upon the night and her people going this way and that. In front of the bed was a GIANT flat screen TV, a water dispenser, a PC, and a fridge full of Gatorade. In the bathroom was a 2 or 3 person whirlpool that worked, a full-body shower, and a toilet with a heated rim and a bidet.

I remember thinking that it wasn’t such a bad deal after as I sat in the foaming tub with a can of Cass while watching My Name is Earl on the TV.

 

This photo is the fire escape.  Seriously.

What did I eat today?  Kimchi and egg ramen (not good).  Vegetarian curry and rice made by me (pretty freaking awesome).

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