Unnecessary, in Two Acts

An interesting feature of having disposable income in a relatively guilty-free foreign setting: the ability, perhaps even the desire, to spend money in ways befitting nothing but the internet. Korea's a great place for it. There are a multitude of diversions strewn about the country, and as long as one has a few bucks and a well-developed sense of irony, there's plenty of blog material to be discovered.

Example one: Korean New Year was in late January. It's one of the few vacation days that teachers at hogwans (private English academies) actually receive, so Max and I decided to do something with our friend Kara. Someone stabbed a finger at a map and it landed on Yeosu, a small city on the south coast. So the next day, bright and early, we all hopped a bus out there.

This photo sums up our first impressions of Yeosu.
It was cold, gray, and except for Max's impish enthusiasm, lifeless. All the shops and restaurants was closed - we had forgotten that national holidays apply to other people, too - and while our map put Yeosu on the south coast of the country, the ocean was nowhere to be seen. The Port Authority building was landlocked and empty. The fun we found at a nearby church (see below) was fleeting at best.
We were rescued by a taxi driver who partially understood our desire for a bata yaepawwa (pretty beach) and proceeded to drive us to a cliff 45 minutes and $26 dollars away. We spent most of the cab ride alternatively fearing for our lives and admiring the miniature porno calendar the man had dangling from the inside of the windshield. Fortunately, the island he took us was actually pretty cool.

There were trucks,














rocks,

and a great big beautiful Buddhist temple. On a mountain.













It was a nice place to sit and ponder.
Here's my fave shot of the temple. Last one, I promise.

So we hiked to the summit, chatted with a precocious 6-year-old, and made it back to the 'Ju with little further incident. Altogether, the experience was fun, not too expensive, and wholly superfluous. At least we get points for whimsy - but nowhere near as many as this next place.

Example two: Puppy Palace

Imagine a typical Saturday night with friends in downtown Gwangju. If you've never been to Gwangju (and of course you haven't) imagine that you're in the social hub of some other city of 1.5 million residents. After a dinner and a few drinks, someone says, "Hey what do you guys want to do next?" You don't feel like barhopping, or catching a late movie, or dancing, so you say, "Hey, I know! Let's go to a room upstairs where we can drink bad coffee out of travel mugs while fully dressed, perfumed dogs climb all over our bodies!"

Now, see, if you weren't in Gwangju, your friends would assume you've had too much to drink and would send you home. But if you are in Gwangju, they'll assume that you've had too much to drink and so it's time to go to Puppy Palace!

It's a coffee shop, it's a pet shop; it's so much more. It's got a sweet mirrored front hallway:
And a number of very special friends that you may snuggle with/purchase. Here's one that I named "Nana."














And here's Meatball. He has a skin condition so he's not allowed to play with the others.



















Other special friends include Pebbles, Grim, Pinkerton, Ed, 360, and the ringleader, the "Wizard" called Icepop (credit: Toni Martello).
After visiting twice, I can safely say that it's really not as cool as it should be. Don't get me wrong, I like being mobbed by pets as much as the next guy, but I guess I just prefer them naked. Shirts on dogs are just so redundant. Besides, I want to play with them, not look at them - I want action figures, not dolls.

And the whole place smells like dog pee.

So, moral of the story: when you're teaching English in Korea and you don't speak Korean, your options for fun quickly devolve to the goofy. Whether that's good or bad I leave to you - but it's definitely not necessary.

Visiting

The best part about working at KFS is the amount of time I'm not required to be there. I got a good three weeks off for Christmas; the typical hagwon teacher gets one solitary day. So, to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, my girlfriend Toni and I took a shlep through the only nearby countries virtually guaranteed to be Christian-free: Malaysia and Thailand. Let me tell you: it was a good call.

Malaysia is a strange place. It's a cultural melting pot but also fiercely Islamic; it's got a fantastic influx of oil wealth and foreign investment, and yet it's still in relatively early stages of economic development; and while nearly everyone speaks English, the taxi drivers still pretend not to understand when you ask them to just use the meter.

Kuala Lumpur is cool. It's famous for these,
The Petronas Towers. Toni and I went up to the Skybridge, but before they let us on the elevator we had to sit through a 12-minute video telling us about how great the Petronas Corporation is for us. Pictures of smiling children, new houses, etc. Look what having an offshore oilfield can do for you! Though to be fair, the Towers were really cool.








Here's a shot from the Skybridge. It's a little fuzzy because we were in a cloud.














Nearby KL are the Batu Caves, a series of big 'ol limestone caverns that have been converted into a Hindu holy site/capitalist tourism bonanza. This statue is Lord Murugan, to whom the temple is dedicated. He is tall.












The caves are the perfect place for a spiritual experience: dimly-lit, stalactite-filled, and ethereal. So naturally I went straight to hanging out with the monkeys, who populate the caves in great abundance, due almost certainly to the huge amount of people-food that gets thrown to them daily.

I guess I should include a photo of the caves, too.
From KL we headed to a little island called Pulau Pangkor off the west coast, where we stayed at a nice little place run by some nice little people. Lowlights were confined to the both of us sick and confined to the bed/bathroom on Christmas. On the other hand, highlights ranged from renting a scooter and circumnavigating the island to drinking fresh fruit juice all the time, floating in the ocean, and making friends with the Jungle Puppies, a litter of pups we found living in a pile of trash in the jungle.





Awwwww.




Next: Thailand. This part was going to be easy: bus to Butterworth, Malaysia; overnight bus to the Similan Islands, Thailand. Ha!

We arrived at the Butterworth bus station on the 26th to discover that there wasn't a bus station. Butterworth, just so you know, is a city of over 100,000 people. Yet the bus station is a parking lot - an unpaved one, for that matter. After being herded off the bus and wandering around the parking lot for a while, we discovered the ticket booth, which is in fact an unlabeled shack by the road. The lady in said shack said that the overnight buses weren't running since it was the day after Christmas. The next bus left at 5:30 am. Toni and I, undeterred, found the least sketchy hotel we could find (all the places in the area charge by the hour) and hit the hay. The next day, which happened to be my birthday, went as follows:

5:30 am - arrive at bus terminal to discover that our bus is actually a minibus with no room for us or our luggage. We squeeze in anyway.

7:30 am - we arrive at the Thai border where we are instucted to hand our passports to the driver, who promptly disappears.

8:00 am to 11:30 am - wait in line to get through the border.

11:31 am - a family of 30 unnecessarily sweaty folk attempt to cut me. Elbows get involved, but no eye contact. I am larger and I win.

11:35 am - back on the bus. Passport has reappeared.

1:30 pm - Bus driver drops Toni and I off on the side of the road somewhere in Hat Yai. Another minibus picks us up. Onward.

3:00 pm - bus arrives at a parking lot with a small building on it. Toni and I are sent into the building to wait for a different bus. I am still not sure where exactly this place was.

4:00 pm - our other minibus arrives, the impatient driver sends us aboard.

4:01 pm to 4:35 pm - the impatient bus driver idles the bus' engine and stands outside smoking cigarettes. I contemplate hijacking the bus and driving to the Similans my own damn self, but I refrain, in large part because I don't know where I am.

6:00 pm - Impatient bus driver turns left where I know he's supposed to turn right. My free tourist map says so. I say something to him, but he ignores me/doesn't speak English.

6:10 pm - we definitely should have turned right back there. I show him the map, he swears in Thai, and points to his head while making that wide-eyed "Aw shucks, I forgot!" face. He does not, however, turn around.

6:40 pm - impatient driver drops Toni and me off at a convenience store by the side of the road outside Phuket. He explains the situation to the owner, who relays to Toni and I that a bus to the Similans will be coming by soon, and we need to buy a ticket. Impatient bus driver skedaddles off before I can get my money back.

6:45 pm - in a flash of insight, I ask the convenience store owner to call the Similan Islands' bungalow office and double-check on my reservations. After about 20 minutes I get on the phone with an English-speaking employee, and start getting a bad feeling.

7:15 pm - the bus to the Similans arrives. Our "bus tickets" apparently didn't guarantee us seats, or even walls, for that matter; fortunately, it is at this very moment that the Similan employee finally gives up the truth: our reservations have vanished. The bus goes on without us.

9:30 pm - we follow the convenience store owner's hot tip and make it to a bungalow place not too far away from the beach. I am tired, sick, and have not eaten in 36 hours. Still - all in all, not a bad birthday.

Yikes, this post is too long. To be continued.

Waeg'in'

Remember the county fair you went to as a kid? With the petting zoo and the fried dough and the horrible rides that were all just spinning things with different axes of rotation? Well, Gwangju is like that, except there are no llamas or Tilt-a-Whirls: the attraction is you.

By "you" I mean probably you; that is to say, someone who isn't from Korea and looks that way. The Korean word for "foreigner" is waegukin or waeguksaram, or literally translated, "person from not here." And it's a word that gets thrown around a lot, not like in America, where really almost everyone is a foreigner if you go back four or five generations. Children in particular are fond of pointing me out to their friends, parents, or people on the street and proclaiming "waegukin!" as if I need to be viewed immediately before I melt into the ground or vanish in a puff of pink butterflies or something. They might as well, I guess, since it's not considered particularly rude, and everyone knows that waegukin can't speak Korean, so really, what's the harm?
My favorites are probably the children that are still too young to fully articulate a sentence but old enough to know that I look different, perhaps fundamentally so, than they do. They've been the source of the best double-takes I've ever seen. I almost accidentally killed one kid in the food court when I stood up to put away my tray; he was so shocked to see me that he began choking on his kimchi. Another time involved a kid at the bakery who spun around for a second look so fast that the torque from his head pulled his whole body into a spin. He clearly hadn't been walking for too long and hadn't expected this contingency, so he fell on his face and started crying. His mom rushed over to gather him up, glaring at me while doing it, as if the whole thing had been my fault. I need to learn how to say "What, lady??" in Korean.
Of course, the attention is not limited to children. They're just the most obvious about it. Adults are also very interested in waegukin, but they know that they're not really supposed to be, so I find myself playing a bizarre game of Red Light Green Light whenever I'm in a public setting. They look at me, I look at them, they look away, I look away, we repeat. This happens most often at the grocery store, where my choice of food generates a surprising amount of interest. I haven't yet had anyone stick their head into my shopping cart yet, which happened to a co-worker, but I've seen many a neck craning over to catch a glimpse of my cereal or orange juice when I get to check out. Occasionally people forget what they're doing, too; I'm just waiting for the day when the person in front of me gets so out of sorts that they walk out of the store without their food. It'll happen.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A month ago I was downtown with some friends. One of them looked over my shoulder and said in an excited whisper, "Look! A midget!" I'll be honest - I snuck a glance. Of course, I immediately felt guilty, and still do, but I'll still probably do it again. I am sorry.

There are over 200 conditions that cause dwarfism, which is defined as simply being less than 4 feet 10 inches tall when fully grown. Dwarfism affects around 1 person in 19,000. Here in Gwangju, waegukin-ism affects 1 person in about 2,000, so we're more common than little people (the word "midget" is most decidedly not PC), but we're still an oddity, to be sure. Add to that the hillariously ironic inability of Koreans to tell white people apart - people have told me that I look like everyone from David Beckham to "Spiderman" - and all the staring ceases to be much of a surprise. I mean, if Tobey McGuire was in line behind you at the Safeway, you'd notice, right?

And you know what else? Waegukin are kinda goofy. We're too tall, we have big feet and wide eyes, and let's face it, sometimes we do silly things in public. No, this doesn't really excuse all the staring and whispering and pointing, but come on. From time to time, we deserve it.

Mini-post: Noon wassayo!

Noon wassayo! It snowed!

In an unprecedented display of meterological cheekiness, Gwangju got dumped on two nights ago.








Check it out.
















I suppose this photo could have come from anywhere. But it was taken in Korea. So there.












General good will resulted among the student body, some of whom chose to celebrate by enacting an anime-style fight scene involving summoning energy from the ground and blasting it at each other.


In Korea, the first snow of the year is a time for love and romance. Max and I celebrated by going to our favorite jimjilbang (boy, are you guys in for something when I finally get around to describing jimjilbangs) and discovering that it has been completely gutted. Not cool.

Anyway. Today the snow is mostly gone. It didn't stack up very high against the snow we get in Vermont, but you know, you've got to take what you can get. Especially when it's November.

Hikes and Beauty

South Korea is a small place - about the size of Florida. Fortunately, it lacks the crocodiles, the confederate flag T-shirts (though they are a hoot), the city of St. Petersburg, and the annoying incessant mosquitoes. Instead Korea has huge, annoying, incessant mosquitoes that don't die off, they just hibernate from the middle of December until early February, then return to feast.

Korea is also blessed with a beautiful, varied mountainous landscape. Mountains are highly regarded in Korean society; monks build temples on them, many carry the respectful suffix "san" on their names like Japanese mountains, and one friend reports that on full moons people ascend the mountain behind her apartment and howl from the peak. Most cities have their own mountain, kind of like a patron saint. Gwangju's is called Mudeungsan, and its silouette appears on a bunch of the road signs with lines of light or inspiration or something emenating from it. When Ben first saw it he thought it was a poop with stink lines coming out.

This would be the appropriate place for a photograph. I'll get one soon.

Anyway, Max and I have hiked a few mountains since arriving. They're cool.
At Nakan Castle near Bolgyeo, with a guy named Sangho I met at a baseball game. He bought Max and I one of those sweet hats each. Max wore his. I did not wear mine.




Wolchulsan. Max is standing on the big rock on the left.
























More Wolchulsan. That's the valley down there.













This is near the summit of Hallasan, the tallest mountain in Korea. It's in Jeju, which gets its own post.

A couple of weeks ago, the school was invited to spend a night at a Buddhist temple in Geumsansa, which is of course located on a mountainside.
So it was quite foggy and nice. There was no meat in the food, no beds in the bedroom, and we all had to wake up at 4 and wear silly blue vests, but it was cool.







I liked the style.



















Helen and Hobbs liked their vests.

















The kids liked their manual labor. Mostly.










Max loved playing on the handcart.












Righto. Here's where we slept:
(Like I said, no beds. We had floor pads, though.)

And here is where we swept:

Sweeping here was nice. Korea can be pretty.

Moral of the story: If you ever have the opportunity to spend some time at a temple, do it. Even if you have to go with a bunch of high schoolers, it's still a nice place for some reflection.

Friends

Korea is a good place for friendship. People are naturally kind and generous, public transportation is easy and cheap, and when you go out to dinner, most meals have to be ordered in pairs anyway.

The Korean word for "friend" is "chingu." My new chingu Kara (that's her in the hat), who teaches at a hogwan (private academy) across town did a guest talk in my speech class, and taught us that the way to say"friend" in American Sign Language is to make two little fishhooks with your index fingers, link them together, and shake them around a bit.

The other teachers at the school also make good friends. Here's us doing some friend things:


This place is called "The Brewhouse" or simply "The Brew." It's where Mr. Ray, who is not pictured here, goes about 4 nights a week to hang out and drink the smelly, bitter fluid in the cylinder. The Brew has given him his own table, his own throne, and a special silver ornamented chalice from which he, and only he, drinks. I'm really quite jealous. The Brew's main selling point seems to be its sizeable population of drunk middle-aged businesspeople and their spouses, who, to be honest, are a pretty lively and fun bunch. No complaints here. Except about the beer.

I was also fortunate enough to enjoy a two-month-long visit from Ben Crane, a friend from Wesleyan.

Ben is a writer, and quite a good one, by all accounts. He lived on my couch for two months and during the day he wrote, ate ramen noodles, played video games (just a bit), read David McCullough's biography of John Adams, and wore pants maybe 30% of the time. Living the dream, baby. I miss him. If any of y'all want to spend two months on the couch, well, you should know you've got big shoes to fill.

I have a blurry picture of two more special friends:

Their respective names are "Max Elliot Winston" and "Friend 3," also known as "Little Friend." Max is the brunette. Friend 3 is the puppy.

Max is a graduate of Princeton University, where he did his thesis on the patterns of leaf fungus farms laid by leafcutter ants in Panama. More importantly, he is a native of Montpelier, Vermont, which is a mere 30 minutes from my hometown of Essex. By some twist of fate we have both ended up teaching at KFS and living together in a sweet 3-bedroomer on the third floor. More on the apartment later.

Everyone thinks Max and I look alike. I don't really see it. How about some more pictures:




















Please note that while I may have helmet hair, I do know how to frame a photograph. Anyway, I guess it's okay. I think it might be the Vermont thing - maybe we talk the same or something. All I really know is that it would be great if the students stopped calling me "Mr. Winston" and asking me if Max and I are twins. I suppose we might as well be. In the third week of school, we both left class, met in the bathroom, switched clothes, and taught each other's class. Max's students called me out after about 15 seconds. My students didn't know what was going on until I walked back into the classroom 10 minutes later.

White people all look the same, anyway.

Little Friend is the landlord's dog. Her predecessors, Friend 1 and Friend 2, both lived chained outside the apartments. Friend 1 was a friendly cocker spaniel belonged to the school's owner, but he was confined to the outdoors because he was "too smelly." The boss has never attempted to give him a bath. Friend 2 was a grown-up version of Little Friend, and she lived outside because...well, just because. They have both been deported to the bosintang farm down the road, which means that they are now soup. Circle of life, I guess.

Little Friend is living a slightly better life. After she sustained a prolonged and meaningless beating from the landlord for having pooped in the wrong place 3 days prior, the teachers had a sit-down with the boss and we worked out some ethical guidelines. Little Friend is now fed and watered daily, is not beaten, and will not become soup anytime soon. She's very happy and adorable. She's growing up fast, and has entered a rather bitey phase, but she's a great little friend to visit on the way to work. Let's close with another blurry photo.


Awwww.