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.