The New Year

I didn't even realize it was New Year's Eve until Jen came on MSN this morning with an early (very early being from Ontario) "Happy New Year!" Holidays are just whizzing by unnoticed. Well, happy New Year to you all - I hope it's a good one.

The winter is, sadly, becoming harsher rather than milder, as Seoul's average daily temperature dips into the negatives. This unfortunately means my room becomes terrifically chillier, because of a leak in my window I only noticed on the weekend, when it started to snow and I felt water droplets splashing onto my face. Obviously this has to be rectified, and so provides an excellent example of how the simplest things - ie. complaining to your landlord - become a hurdle to overcome when you've got a language gap.

Having spoken to the woman in the real estate office before with poor results about changing my door passcode (I ended up having her call my director to translate, which was kind of awkward), I was determined to break the barrier myself this time. My solution: a picture. Happily, I was blessed long ago with at least a modest amount of skill with a pencil, so it came out reasonably clear: a storm battering the building outside, and below, a shot from inside with wind and water coming in through the closed windows. I managed a caption in Hangul (thanks be to my phrasebook), which read, "bad window".

She understood. Of course, I've no idea when she'll have it fixed, but she got it. Meanwhile, I find it interesting to watch the thermometer in my apartment fluctuate... when the winter was milder, it would generally alternate between 20 and 19 degrees - but just yesterday it started to drop, first to 18, then 17... and last night it was 16. Now it's 15.

I could turn my heat on, since I think it's taken care of by my school, but I'm kind of curious about what kind of temperatures I can feel comfortable in.

One final thought: report cards suck, especially when you're required to lie and pretend that all your kids are excellent students, even the one who doesn't do any of his homework and simply stares ahead with his mouth half-open, a barely-noticeable bit of drool escaping his parted lips, or cutting up bits of paper and scattering them around the desk, all while I'm asking him questions. Ah, to be allowed the honesty of a public school teacher...

Happy Christmas, such as it is

To all my friends and family back in Canada or in other parts of the world, I wish you a happy Christmas. Much joy and suchlike.

Sadly, Christmas is something I don't get to take part in this year. Not only have I no family on this side of the planet, but I didn't even have the day off. My kids were all moaning about having to come in on Christmas day as if it were my fault... hell, if they hadn't come, I'd have been off. it would've been great. Alas.

I didn't really feel much negativity about missing Christmas until this afternoon at work. Normally in December I spend a large pile of my time running around between friends' houses and various events with my extended family, and I love it - ours is one of few extended families I know of wherein the members actually see one another regularly and get along. But today being just another work day... well, it feels wrong. When I got out of work, I felt angry. I can't really explain that, but that really is the right word. Sigh.

Happily, I've had some contact with folk back home, which is nice. I've done a couple of Christmas drawings as gifts (since I haven't been able to buy any yet or send them home in time, obviously), and am fairly distracted all the time. So it's okay. But I think next week I'm going to have to get on the Tae Kwon Do thing to keep my energy up. Sometimes there's nothing like a classroom full of difficult children to drain you.

So there's my first bout with homesickness, I guess. I hope all are having a superior sort of holiday. Mine should be looking up on the weekend.

Sanity/Poverty

I rushed in to school today for a meeting about the upcoming Intensive Program - for some amount of time, there will be extra courses wherein students do extra work and teachers come in at 9:30 and teach for three extra hours and make arseloads of pay while sacrificing their sanity. I was all set to join in on that, but it turns out our head instructor had to choose between myself and another of the newbies, and I lost the coin toss. So instead, I think I'll do tae kwon do. I've had Amy, one of our Korean secretaries, looking for hap ki do classes around the area, but she says there aren't any... so I've got to bite the bullet (gods, I hate using cliches like that, but I'm not feeling creative enough at the moment to come up with something better) and pay the 100,000 won per month for an interesting but somewhat less useful sport. Ah, well.

It occurs to me that I haven't written anything about my classes or my students yet, but as they'll be turning off the Internet soon, I will have to put that off for later.

Yesterday I got a Christmas card from Hanna's mother, containing some photos, which was lovely to have... a happy reminder of Canada. I'm starting to make use of the scrap paper I've been liberating from the school's recycling piles, as well, and appear to have gotten into my old habit of drawing strange monsters... perhaps a result of Hanna's desire some time for a moat monster, so thanks to her once again.

It's a tough gig sometimes being a foreigner and not speaking the language. I went to three different SK Telecom stores, trying to get my pay-as-you-go phone (donated by Jen) registered and activated. All said that they couldn't help me and I had to go to a bigger store. One of the clerks, who spoke even less English than the rest, was good enough to call an interpretation service, and after more than a few hiccoughs we established what I wanted and that he couldn't help me, BUT (after a lot of Internet searching and attempts to figure out how he could write the info - I didn't know how to tell him that I could at the very least read Hangul) he gave me the address of the nearest store where I could get this done. Now I just need to figure out how to get there...

Final update: I now have a rice cooker, Cuckoo brand (the biggest brand of rice cookers in the country and probably quite reliable) used for 25,000 won, one hopes it's a bargain. Bought from some Polish woman who is lugging two very-young children along after her travelling-businessman husband while struggling to find them decent schools in all the places they have to temporarily live. She's here for nine more months, then possibly off somewhere else, possibly not, and not long ago they were in Malaysia. ...There's one reason I couldn't see myself having kids.

Sorry for the boring update. Soon enough I'll be off to a mountain village and eating dog meat with a far-off friend from training. Should be lots to talk about then. I'll save classroom anecdotes and discussion of the staff introduction party (three weeks into actually starting here) for next time.

Korean lessons

I had my first Korean class today. Mostly it was on the Hanglu alphabet, and the korean numbering system. It's a bit confusing - there are different ways of countain for almost any sort of thing you care to name, and if you use the wrong one you look like an idiot. I'm learning slowly, but I think if I want to have any level of fluency and be able to hold a simply conversation by the time my year is up, I'll have to find something a bit more intensive than a once-a-week free class.

Learning Hangul offers many opportunities for quiet amusement. For example, I've just looked at an empty carton for a mushroom-shaped cookie/chocolate snack, and read the Korean characters spelling out "cho-ko-suh-nak". The GS 25 convenience store's Hangul lettering reads "chee-eh-suh". And my Easy-Off ("ee-chi-oh-puh") cleaning spray has a Hangul character on the label which, read aloud, sounds like "bang!"

Once again, out in public, I've experienced a little bit of the uniqueness of being a waygook in Korea. A bunch of teenage girls were talking and giggling as they walked past me, and then one of them broke away from the flock, extended her hand, and looked at me expectantly. So I shook her hand - something I've not done for a while in this bowing culture - and she ran off and rejoined her friends as they screamed with delight at this strange foreign novelty. I felt almost like some kind of celebrity - it's either that or a sideshow attraction, and I prefer to consider the more positive image.

Mountain-climbing

Achasan, about halfway up the mountain

I set out today, on my third weekend in Korea, to actually DO something, and so searched online for a mountain that wouldn't be too difficult to find given my limited knowledge of Seoul's geography, language, and subway system, and settled on Achasan, a small and less-famous mountain and an easy climb, but supposedly offering an unparalleled view of the Han river.

It took an arseload of time to get here, but on the way (once I finally left the subway) I passed through an area which seemed decidedly more Korean than modern, suburban Gangseo. Small shops offering silly things, fish, little cheap restaurants... THAT'S why I'm here.

I'm at the halfway point, having reached a closed-down pagoda. i'm sittingo n what looks and feels like the gnarled fingers of an ancient Pratchettean troll - I find myself hoping to reach its head, and half-dreading that it might wake. It is near 2:00 and the Seoul air - which is never clear - casts a blurring fog over the jagged skyscraper-dotted landscape and the taller mountains in the distance. A strange and almost disconcerting effect when seen against the perfectly-clear blue sky above - as if the city, separate from this treed and rocky landscape, is being seen through a fogged hole in reality, or in a Carrolean looking-glass - another world entirely, less real than the solid rock below me... or possibly more real, in the bleak Dickensean vision of the industral world... perhaps a dream...

A flock of birds flies past me, so close I could snatch one from the air without budging, were I so inclined.

It's a shame that the children nearby see fit only to play video games while the wonder of gnarled trees somehow living off the deeply-buried soil under the rock, roots thrust through solid stone, lies all round for their awe and speculation.

...

The Peak

There's something about snow on a mountain.

Normally snow depresses me - it's a sign of winter, of cold and discomfort and darkness and death. But snow has not yet descended upon Seoul as it has back home, and so mountaintop snow is a different beast entirely. It's almost welcoming... like a hug or a smile from Nature, despite the cold; trees and plants survive up here despite the cold, like a challenge to the death and drabness that I normally expect from winter. I'm aware my metaphor machine is failing me right now.

At the peak, the rest of Seoul is a bit clearer, and it's not just tall buildings anymore. You can see the different gus (districts), built in clusters, nestled in between the mountains and forests which divide and shape this enormous city. The view of the other mountains and the trees below is so lovely I just had to sketch it - having no camera yet, it's one of my few ways of preserving memories, and sometimes the written word just can't do the job. Sadly, my drawing talents have atrophied through years of neglect. I had started rather well with one of the twisted old trees clinging to the cold high mountaintop rock, but I tend to put too much detail into the rest of the picture, so the important bit is lost - there's no focus to the drawing. It really should've been the tree and rocks, with the general shape and shade of the land below a mere suggestion in the background.

I guess foreigners (waygooks) are still a novelty to many Koreans... as I was sketching, a few teenagers with a camera approached me. I assumed they wanted me to take their picture, and reached for the camera with a nod, but no - they wanted a shot of me with one of their number, pointing menacingly into the camera's eye. I indulged them.

There's something relaxing and meditative in drawing on a mountain... except when you get obsessed with silly details and are consequently bored and frustrated and want to hurry it on. Ah well, I'll get used to it.

I'm glad I bought that sketchbook. I hope it sees more use.


There's something kind of neat about walking on a mountain in December and having to remove layers of clothing because it's too hot.
Just don't sit down anywhere for too long, or your body will be in for a nasty shock.

Final thought: I am so out of shape. I couldn't properly lift myself on the parallel bars at the midpoint rest area (yes, there is exercise and gymnastic equipment on the mountains here). I hope Amy (a secretary at my school) finds me a hap ki do place soon.

Life in Gangseo-gu, Seoul

Since before I got here, there have been police buses covered in riot shields outside the Homever department store beside my apartment building. The store has been a source of much of my nourishment, kitchen stuff, and furnishing. The employees tend to be affable and polite, and greeters smile and bow deeply to customers.

I'd heard that the reason for the police presence is a recent unpopular change in store management - but the people working there don't seem the sort to engage in violent protest.

Today I went in looking for some cheap sushi, and the police - dozens of them - were crawling all over the store. At the entrance were close to fifteen in a line, some standing and some crouching behind their riot shields. They seemed prepared to hold off against a siege. But people were walking calmly in and out of the building in the midst of all this, taking no notice at all of the armed force ostensibly guarding them (us) from some invisible foe.

How strange.


Perhaps an understanding of Kroean would help - I often hear through my window long monologues and sometimes music on loudspeaker - but given that the music comes from the same source as the words and tends to be a Homever jingle, I'm undecided as to whether it's someone passionately exhorting the masses, or passionately extolling the virtues of Homever's broad selection of merchandise.


A FEW MINUTES LATER

I couldn't ignore my curiosity. There were so many officers today and so much noise that I had to check it out. It turns out that today, at least, the police presence is due to a political rally being held outside the store. Koreans hate their president (so I'm told); I'm guessing that the upcoming election resonates with the public. Candidate 3 sure seems to (the candidates are all numbered)... there is a portable stage out there and a crowd of happy cheering people... and a pair of campaign workers, after various speeches and such, got up and did a very jolly dance, jumping side to side, waving arms about, completely in sync, hands always held with two fingers and thumbs extended in a sort of variation on the ubiquitous two-finger sign modified to emphasize that this is for candidate 3. Other campaign workers liined up in front of the crowd, mimicking the dance... and most of the crowd danced along. The only word I could understand in the song was "Hangul!" shouted as part of the chorus - so probably a patriotic campaign song. Very popular. I'm certain a mildly chubby guy in glasses and stereotypical Asian-balding-man hair is a shoe-in, at least in Gangseo. It's nice to see an election campaign like this, where people are actually enthused about particular candidates - this isn't the only dancing I've seen - as opposed to voting against everyone else. You don't see that back home. People CARE. It's almost heartwarming.

Flight to Hong Kong

The following is my first fractured set of journal entries from my visa run to Hong Kong.


Mountains! Islands covered in tremendous green-and-brown mountains. I searched for any islands small enough to be uninhabited (and thus colonized), but it was hard to tell from several thousand feet in the air.

The buildings are so tall, so massive, you'd think the islands would sink under their combined weight. For a moment, it almost felt like there was a danger of the plane's belly being scraped by these gargantuan towers.

The city in the distance resembled a crop of crystals growing in a field, the regular geometric patterns of the quite aptly-named skyscrapers. On the train to the main island, from which I now write, I see them set against mountainous backdrops, and some look like serious competition for Nature in the race toward the heavens.

How odd to see ads for Ben Stiller films on a train into Hong

Ye gods, the heat! Twenty-five degrees in the middle of November. Is there any wonder why I'd want to colonize an uninhabited island hereabouts?

...(later)

Much of Hong Kong posts signs in both Chinese and English - a remnant of British rule for which I am quite thankful - meaning it's a hell of a lot easier to get around than Seoul seems to be. Not too expensive either, depending on what you're trying to do. Granted, I have so little money left in my chequing account after paying for my flight to Korea, I can't really afford to take advantage of this. When I got in, I withdrew $800 HK - about $100 CDN - and decided to spend no more.

Train to the city: $100
Visa: $400
Train back to the airport: $100
Three bottles of water: $4.50 each


I determined then that it was going to be difficult budgeting, especially since I want to eat and sleep at some point in this mission. With only $300 left and $100 needed for my transportation (I HOPE it's the same fare both ways), that leaves me $200 (in Canadian funds, about $25) to cover food and shelter.

I was completely dehydrated - wearing a long-sleeved shirt and carrying a big wool jacket in 25-degree heat will do that to you (give me a break; Seoul is cold) - so I needed cheap food before anything else. I figured I'd look for a hostel on the way, since that was Priority Number Two and there was no way I was going to be able to afford an actual hotel on Hong Kong's main island. ...But how? I couldn't find any unsecured wireless signals (making me feel a bit of a chump for bringing along the extra weight of a useless laptop), and my only guide to the city a cartoon-embroidered tourist map from the Korean consulate with all the text in an alphabet I can't understand. Luckily the street names are all in English - thank you, Colonialism! - so finding my way to the section with the highest density of cartoon images of food was fairly easy, aside fromt he learning curve involved in street-crossing.

Busy streets tend to have rails on the sidewalk and no crosswalks, in addition to being crowded with eight lanes of speeding vehicle at all times. You have to find the occasional set of stairs upward, cross a bridge above the road, go back down, and hope to find the direction you came from on the other side to get to the point you wanted to cross to.

...

After exploring a little in the neighbourhood of the Korean consulate (with some fruitless searching for a place to sleep) and visiting a Japanese/Korean comics exhibit at an art gallery, I headed toward central Hong Kong, which I figured (erroneously, it turns out) to be the most likely area to find food and accommodations without the help of a travel guide or prior research. (By way of explanation for this - I was SUPPOSED to be doing my visa run in Fukuoka, Japan, but my school changed it on me at the last second. I didn't do any research for that, either, but it's an excuse I'm taking.)

Remembering my t ight budget, I peered at signs and in windows to gauge prices, occasionally having to remind myself to divide everything by eight, so $40 for a meal really isn't a bad price.. Still, if I was to find a hostel and keep enough money to cover whatever they might charge, I had to be extra careful.

I started taking turns following what looked interesting rather than what I could recognize on my map, and so wandered down a number of alleys filled with people selling clothing, jewelwry, plants, and random rubbish and into areas where the signage contained less and less English until there wasn't any and I was lost. At this point the dehydration really started to get to me - happily, there was a restaurant nearby with menu prices around $15 and $20 and $6. Assuming the $6 was for drinks and therefore the rest for actual food, I went in.

I was greeted by a confused-looking woman who I would later find out was the cook and couldn't speak a word of English. She said something to me in a questioning tone, and I blanked. She said it again and gestured toward the menu, so I pointed at something marked $15 and hoped while she nodded and turned away. I... stood there gaping like a fish who didn't know where to sit in a restaurant where the staff doesn't speak Fish and also was not underwater, until she noticed me and pointed to the nearest chair. Gratefully, I sat.

She then wrote 15 on a card. I assumed that meant $15, so I nodded, then she nodded and said something... so I took out my wallet, which seemed to confuse everyone.

Finally the guy at the cash came over and said, in passable English, "It's $15." I held out to him the $20 bill I'd been clutching and proferring to the staff for the past few minutes, to which he responded, "Huh? .. Oh, okay," took it, and gave me my change.

What a country.

My meal turned out to be a fairly large and pretty good noodle soup with shrimp dumplings as big as a child's fist. I've never paid under $2 CDN for so much food that was actually GOOD. I can't wait to go to Hong Kong again sometime when I can actually afford it.

Having determined that the cashier spoike English, I asked him about cheap hotels nearby, but he had bad news for me. Central HK is an expensive area, he told me, and I was best off going to another island.

For the $80 it would cost me to take the train there, not likely.

I continued my wanderings, formulating a plan, when I came upon a book shop. Now, anyone who knows me well knows that I have a hard time simply passing by a bookshop, even with no money to spend, so I followed my instincts and found (but did not purchase) a Lonely Planet Hong Kong! Huzzah! ...Apparently there is only one hostel in the city that operates on any kind of regular schedule, and it is both on a mountaintop and too busy to simply walk in and expect a room. That left one next-level hotel at $440/night, and the next one at $1800.

So I'm staying up all night.

What else can I do? Granted, I know nothing about how safe or dangerous Hong Kong is at night or if I'd get rousted for staying in one place too long, but I don't have many other options.
Besides, it's all part of the adventure.

As a bonus, this frees up a little bit of money for luxuries like food and water. And even a little entertainment to while away the time - I found an HMV, which was inexplicably selling new copies of Trainspotting (the book) for $65 - about eight bucks. Huzzah! Now it's just a matter of having a reliable and lit place to read it.

BUT the West has helped me yet again. I have found (potential) succour in a 24-hour McDonalds right in Central Hong Kong with an $8 value menu ($1 CDN). I figure I can weasel maybe a buck an hour to hang around in here and read with a bit of food in front of me without the staff getting to antsy. It's just a matter of getting over that built-in aversion to McDonalds food... but when times are desperate...

...I figure I'll stop in here just once in a while at first, to rest my feet. There's still exploring to do after all, and it's not that late - 10:45 HK time. Though it is late when the six hours you got last night was the only sleep you'd had since two nights before you left Canada. I'm so tired that my sentences aren't even making sense.

I think I'll use McDonalds as my refuge until 4 or 5 AM, or whenever the sun rises. It should be a lovely thing, to sit in a park and watch the rising sun in the corner of the globe where it's supposed to begin its journey across the sky. At that point, I may be too tired to write anything, but one must try. I shall attempt to update this jorunal as the status changes.

...

On the basis that there were no VISIBLE people on the route up the mountain and very little light, I decided to abandon my idea of checking out the botanical Gardens and such things at the peak to pass the time. Strange how one feels so much discomfort (and by "one" I mean "I") going off alone in the dark in a foreign country, yet I'd be perfectly at ease wandering through Montreal's gardens in the dark, would the opportunity arise. Perhaps it's that, while there may be rapists and murderers in Canada, they're rapists and murderers I could communicate with, and I'd at least be able to tell people where I was raped.
Geographically, I mean.

On my meanderings I discovered what I gather to be a pastime amoung HK youths - hanging around in large groups outside the 7-Eleven, drinking.

Also, what I judged to be a woman from the skirt and voice, though it was hard to tell, shouted at people while sporting an elaborate headdress and enormous beard composed entirely of plastic bags.

I'm apparently familiarizing myself with McDonalds food. First a McChicken, then McFlurry.
I feel dirty.

...

Well, it's now 2 AM HK time, and already I'm starting to get the waking-dreaming and occasional collapsing that comes with massive fatigue. This hasn't been a very successful experiment. Damn them for changing the location... if this was Fukuoka, it would've at least been my fault for not being prepared.

Hong Kong architecture is really quite spectacular, compared to the standard rectangular shapes with the occasional slant if the architect was feeling daring that you get with the office buildings of Toronto and other Canadian cities. Here, every major building seems to stand out - whether they're one of the ubiquitous Towers which seem to fight for supremacy and suggest that either the people here have some kind of complex about their genitalia or that this might be the site of the legendary Babel - particular if you don't speak Cantonese -
or the curved blue-glassed triangular prism wherein entire offices form pillars within the superstructure, or the vast curving walkways that allow pedestrians to cross the busy eight-lane streets.. you might believe you were in the future.

..You know what's conspicuously absent from every Hong Kong shop and restaurant I've seen, as compared to every Canadian Chinese shop and restaruant I've partronized? Those tacky waving cats. Good on you, Hong Kong.

...

At about 3:30 AM, I got sick of McDonalds food (well, sicker) and decided, screw it, I'll wait it out outside. I found a spot near the water under a bridge with benches, and read Trainspotting, anticipating the rising of the sun.
Sadly, at the street level, HK's beauty is almost entirely manmade - the enormous buildings b lock any view of the sunrise; when day breaks, it merely gets brighter out. I began to feel that HK had sacrificed natural beauty for the inorganic, sterile attractiveness of modernity. With a sigh, I decided to set out for breakfast.

Navigating my way along the huge crosswalkless streets, I eventually had no choice but to use a foot bridge. The one available to me, I found, led not to the street but into an enormous mall. I figured if I continued crossing, I might get out to the other side, but my options seemed to be bringing me only upwards. But I'm exploring. So I kept on.

Imagine my shock when the mall exit led to a plant- and bird-filled Elysium! I had stumbled upon Hong Kong Gardens, a massive botanical garden up a mountain, a "natural" paradise accessible through the inauspicious wossnames of a mall, of all thins.
While much of HK is best appreciated at night, when buildings are lit up wildly and their colours seem somehow richer in the artificial glow of the street lamps and neon, THIS aspect of HK is definitely to be witnessed in the early morning, as the birds are waking up with a song and the old people come up to do their exercises - a combination of Tai Chi and vigorous pelvic thrusts, so far as I could tell.

I might be starting to fall for this island city. I will have to come back.

ho, and the banyan tree is now my favourite. I must get myself a small one... it won't look like much to begin with, but if you come back in 500 years...