Kim Jong-Il Victim or Bust

Best day

2011-07-14T07:18:00.001-07:00

I'd been back in Korea a couple of weeks by then and I was feeling restless. It was high winter and winter had been going on too long. I was glad to be back and there wasn't anywhere else in the world I wanted to be, but I wasn't working and people were away. While I was gone a record snow dump had covered the entire peninsular and the landscape had changed and all of it somehow made me uneasy.

I went for walks around Bonggok-dong. I had a strange fear that there were parts of my town I would never see. I wanted to walk down all the streets and know my town completely. The days were sunny but cold and the snow beside the roads and footpaths melted slowly; I would tramp over it in my boots and feel its crunch beneath my feet.

I would go to my local cafe. It wasn't one of the Starbucks-style chains, but an old school da bang. The coffee was instant but it only cost cheonobaek-won. You could smoke in there and the coffee was brought over by an ajumma who mixed in powdered milk in front of you. I would go there in the mornings and sit for hours and write in my journal and try to study my Korean. Sometimes when I was done I would walk up to the turtle fountain in Bonggok Park, but if it was too cold I would just go home again.

I got propositioned in the da bang by a girl in an eye-patch. At least I think I did, but these things were easy to misinterpret in Korea; like the time my naked co-teacher offered to scrub my back in the jjimjilbang. I knew about da bangs, but was surprised just the same. My copy of Lonely Planet Korea, a smug book that was always irritating me with directions that had me coming out the wrong subway exit, archly noted about da bangs that “sometimes the coffee girls offer more than coffee.” But my local place seemed respectable enough; I figured it wasn't that sort of da bang.

One day, when I was studying my Korean, a girl came in wearing an eye-patch. She seemed excited to see me, but it didn't seem like more than the usual novelty of a waegukin. She came over and spoke to me. Her English wasn't very good. I showed her my Korean book and she laughed at my attempts at Korean like everyone did. After a few moments, when we'd exhausted our stocks of each other's language, she announced, “We go together.”

I wasn't sure what she meant. My confusion embarrassed her. I wasn't sure if she was embarrassed that I hadn't understood her offer, or that I hadn't understood her English.

She was the roughest-seeming Korean girl I ever came across. Besides the eye-patch, which leant her a piratical flair, she was hefty and forthright and completely lacking in feminine grace. Anyway after that, when I'd come into the coffee shop, she'd wave to me and come over and I'd practice my Korean and she'd practice her English. But both of us were inept, so the conversations never went anywhere.

I saw a dead kitten in the snowbank by the side of the road near my apartment. It was from a family of kittens that lived in the vacant lot across from me and whom I'd tried to befriend. I was feeling creative and some strange emotion that was like a pleasant sadness or a pre-emptive nostalgia for my life right here, right now. I was aware suddenly that time was passing and it felt like an ominous foreshadowing of something. So I wrote a strange essay about the dead cat and the snow. I tried to use those things as a metaphor for – well, I wasn't exactly sure; this strange mood I was feeling. The result was weird but seemed interesting to me, so I sent it off for the committee's newsletter. I didn't think they'd publish it, because it was about dead cats and snow and not about how to cook bulgogi or classroom tips. They published it but left out the last paragraph where I strained to make my incoherent metaphor work, making the piece even odder than it was to start with. I didn't mind.

My essay caused some trouble. When I went back to school my mentor teacher told me that the head of Gyeongbuk TaLK had called her up, wanting to know how it was I'd gone off to Australia for three weeks when I only had ten days holiday in my contract. My mentor teacher lied and said that I'd made up for it with Winter Camp. She told the director that Winter Camp was a gruelling death-march of eight hour days. A month later the committee announced that they weren't going to publish any more stuff unless it was about teaching, and I stopped submitting to the newsletter.

Nobody was around. It was just me. I got bored and announced on Facebook that I was going to go to the bus terminal and catch a bus to a random city. I did it, but cheated; I took my Lonely Planet and went to a city that I had a map for. Jeonju.

Jeonju was like every other Korean city. I wandered around downtown, then got a room at a love motel. It was a very love-motelly love motel. My room was lit a fluorescent orange and there were porn tapes. I took some photos. In my mind I was working on a love motel scale. I called it the lurve scale. It went from vibrating beds and complimentary condoms to The Green in Daegu. The Green was a zero on the lurve scale.

The next morning I got up and looked at the folk village, which was very pretty, all covered in snow, but otherwise was like any Korean folk village. I ate Jeonju bibimbap. They set seventeen side dishes all around me and I felt dumb, eating alone, surrounded by so much food. I bought a postcard on hanja paper, thinking I might send a postcard to someone, and came home.

School started again. It was Fake Winter Camp. Fake Winter Camp was like Real Winter Camp but without a budget so I had to buy my own lunch. It felt pointless; it was make-work, and I'd used all my best ideas for Real Winter Camp, not knowing that Fake Winter Camp would be a last minute addition to the schedule.

Fake Winter Camp was relaxed. I had no ideas for it, so decided to bite off two things that seemed achievable, and really drive home the point. The first was to make sure my third graders through sixth graders knew their basic phonics, and the second was to teach some new verbs in past, present and future tenses.

The phonics idea had come about because at the end of the previous year, I'd discovered that one of my sixth graders, Meg, couldn't read. These sixth-graders had been my greatest failure as a teacher. They were a bunch of too-cool teenage girls, all smart, all hitting puberty, and completely divided between the two alpha girls and their respective followers, who wanted to play games, and the bookish beta girls who wanted to study. Both groups were insanely jealous of each other and any lesson I did failed with at least half of them. Meg had been lost in all of this. She was a sweet, unpopular girl who was far behind the rest of the class. I'd ignored her because I didn't know what to do with her. She came early to class and lined up the desks in perfect parallel lines and after class she would walk in circles around a certain tree in the playground. I was pretty sure she had obsessive compulsive disorder and tried to communicate this through the school hierarchy but it got lost in translation, or else nobody cared all that much. She seemed to exist in a horrible, frozen world of self-recrimination and social isolation. I said, “Hi Meg,” and “Bye Meg,” to her every day and hoped that one day she'd say it back to me.

Amidst the mess I'd made of that class I finally realised that Meg couldn't read at all. I spoke to my mentor teacher and got her to ask Meg if she'd like me to teach her reading after class. Meg said yes. So for the last six weeks of the year I did that almost every day. I taught her the letters, a few at a time, some consonants and some vowels, and then gave her three letter words from those letters and got her to sound them out. Bat, cat, tag, rag, can. She wasn't dumb and she learned to read and I felt good, knowing that she was going off to middle school with at least one tiny area of English being something other than a hellish nightmare. There were enough things about middle school that were going to be nightmarish for her; I felt good that I'd helped a little bit. She was always respectful but never spoke to me in English and there were no grand scenes at the end where I felt I'd made a connection, but I'd helped and done my job.

I realised that if these kids somehow missed out on learning phonics in grade three – if they were sick those days, or not paying attention – then they never had the chance to catch up and were from that point on lost in English. So I decided to make sure that they all knew their damn phonics.

My method wasn't super-imaginative, but effective. I just gave them a test every morning. I stood in front of the class and gave them a sound and some example words and asked them to write down the initial letter. Twenty-five sounds, twenty-five questions, c and k both being represented by the hard kuh sound.

For my genius third-graders, it worked. They were that smart. Katie got most of them wrong the first day, cried, went home and memorised them, and got one hundred percent every day after that. By the end of the week almost all of them had it down.

The rest of my plan was built around a picnic story I wrote. I chose five new verbs for them and wrote a story that used the verbs in past, present and future tenses: planning the picnic, going on the picnic, remembering the picnic. I planned a half-dozen activities around these verbs and tenses. My kids hated it. By the end of the week they were all, “Nick Teacher, no picnic story! Picnic story is very very bad story!”

They were right. It was a terrible story. I felt bad. On the Friday, my mentor teacher (and, for that week, co-teacher) called in sick, and I was overjoyed. I did the spelling test with them, but then blew off my awful third day of picnic story-related lessons, and we played games instead.

That was a great day. We went outside, and it started to snow, and we had races around the snowy oval and played 2-5-10 on the climbing equipment and listened to Bo Peep on my handeupon, and they spent all day talking in English, telling me about their lives, the music they liked, how to play the games they wanted to play. When this happened their English skills went up amazingly and I was blown away by how smart they were and what great people they were.

They were a great class; the best I ever had. Next semester a bunch of idiot boys came along and ruined it. The class split between my schooled-up genius girls and two great boys and my new, idiot boys; there was nothing I could teach that wasn't baby-stuff for one group, or far too hard for the other, and the class was never the same again. I'll never forget them, though: Jin Hee, Son Hee, Katie, Lisa, Stella, Juliet, Joe and Tony. They'll go on to do something special, all of them, if life doesn't screw them somehow.

*

I still hadn't done much since getting back to Korea and I was bored. The week before, when doing invitations with my third graders, one of the boys had drawn a birthday invitation for a trip to Geumo Land. “Let's Go Geumo Land!” it said, and there were drawings of the exciting things you could do there: sledding, ice-skating, a Viking ship.

I had forgotten about Geumo Land. My mentor teacher had mentioned it to me when I first arrived. “But Geumo Land is not safe,” my mentor teacher darkly told me.

I have a thing for carnivals and bad amusement parks. I decided I wanted to go to Geumo Land. I sent Stella text message asking if she wanted to go with me one day next week and she replied in characteristic brevity and all in caps, “SOUNDS GOOD 2 ME.”

I wanted something to happen. On the weekend I got a message from the committee, asking if I'd come to Gyeongju on Wednesday to help with the orientation of the fourth generation teachers. The message was very mysterious. It said that the invitation hadn't been sent to everybody, and warned me not to mention it to other scholars. I immediately sent out a message on facebook mentioning it to everyone I knew. I figured that if the committee had sent it to me, they must have sent it to nearly everybody. My reasons for this were pretty logical: it seemed to me that whenever I was at social functions organised by the committee I was usually off in a corner, smoking a cigarette, scowling, and making snarky comments to my friends. Also, I sent them weird essays about dead cats in the snow.

I asked my friends who else was going. No-one was. None had got the email. They were all a bit offended and I was a bit flattered. I realised it was something I did want to do. I thought it would be nice to go back to the Kolon Hotel, this time to dispense knowledge, rather than receive it. I sent off my acceptance. I heard nothing back.

Being a paranoid person, I realised what had happened. There had been a confusion of email addresses. They had meant to invite someone else, and had misclicked on the contact list. Now they were looking at each other and saying, “Shit, him? Arrgh - and he wants to come, too. What are we going to do now? I'm not telling him – you screwed up the email!”

After a bunch of messaging on Facebook, Lisa decided to come down from Yeongju and go with me and Stella to Geumo Land. She was off work and going crazy in Yeongju with nothing to do. This was working out well. I'd teach school in the morning, then meet up with two of my favourite people in Korea and check out Geumo Land. Then I'd go to the bus station with Lisa, get a bus to Gyeongju, maybe eat dinner with Elizabo and go to Kolon Hotel the next day. It was a plan.

*

“Ba ba ba ba ba baba ba bap! Good morning! Good Morning!”

It was early; definitely before seven. With my eyes still closed I reached for my bedside table, found my phone and silenced the alarm. There was no way to change the song that awakened me each morning. It was cute and cheery – Korean – and didn't match my morning mood at all.

I'd had maybe five hours sleep. I still hadn't adjusted to morning classes; I was still staying up until two in the morning and I couldn't seem to change this. I would try to catch up by napping in the afternoons but I was building up a sleep deficit and knew that today, napping would be impossible.

I got up and lurched to my kitchen. I sloshed the kettle to check it had water, then put it on to boil. I dumped two sachets of Maxim instant coffee mix into a mug and when the water was somewhere close to having boiled I filled the mug and took the coffee back into my room. I'd developed a fondness for Korean instant coffee. I'd come to like the taste and the pre-mixed milk and sugar powder cut two steps from my morning routine, which I appreciated. I sat down on the floor beside my bed, turned on my computer to check my email and facebook, and smoked about a thousand cigarettes with my coffee. Eventually it got to the time where I could no longer sit on the floor and smoke cigarettes, so I got up, washed my face, and dressed for work.

I stopped at the convenience store to buy some candy for the kids. There was no way I was getting through this day without bribery. I bought a can of coffee, too, because there was no way I was going to get through the day without that, either, and I loved Korean canned coffee like I loved Maxim coffee sachets. I walked to the bus stop and caught my bus to school.

The failure of my picnic lessons hadn't stopped me from recycling them for my fifth grade class. Theoretically it was 5/6 grade, but the sixth graders were about to graduate and they hadn't turned up for Fake English Camp. I didn't know the fifth graders too well. I taught them once a week as an assistant to my mentor teacher. They were nice kids; rowdy and not too good at English. Tenses and verbs would work just as well or as badly for them as they had done for my genius third graders.

According to my lesson plan, I gave them the phonics test, then lined them up from perfect scores to none correct. I made the winners play off against the losers in a lightning arithmetic competition and gave candy to the winners. I showed them the picnic story, gave them some new emotions adjectives – confused, hurt, hopeful, excited, anxious – that were used in the story, then played paper-scissors-rock game and arrow game with them to drill the words. Then I got them to make picnic invitations. The truth is I don't remember much of it, other than that a couple of the invitations took the concept of “token effort” to a whole new level. Lunch went for a long time. My heart wasn't in it.

*

I left school and went over to the bus stop. It was quiet with school out for the winter. During regular school, on days when I wasn't getting a lift with nurse teacher, I caught the bus home from here, and the bus stop would be surrounded by rowdy kids from the neighbouring middle school who practised their English on me. “Hello! What is your name? Where are you from?” They'd point to their friend and say, “He is stupid boy,” and the friend would attack them. But now it was quiet. Just me and Apo; this weird town I'd come to like. Apo had a dusty, Mediterranean colour to it. It was an ugly, falling down town with houses made from cinderblocks and corrugated iron; houses that kept chickens and meat dogs in pens. Near the school were a couple of unlit general stores that catered to the after-school crowd. There were two downmarket love motels, a noraebang, and a hagwon near the elementary school which had ancient, rusting playground equipment in front. After school, while I waited for nurse teacher outside the Rose Motel, I'd see my students coming out of this hagwon to catch the vans that took them home or to other hagwons. Sometimes they'd run in pairs to the general store to buy thirty cent frozen ice blocks and when they saw me across the street they'd wave and call hi to me. Around the corner from the school was a dokkboki booth that opened up after school to sell dokkboki to the kids; it was near where I would hide and smoke, and once, as I rounded the corner to go there, little Joy saw me and asked me with big, serious eyes, “Nick Teacher dokbokki?” I said yes.

A bus came along and I caught it. Stella, Lisa and I had been exchanging messages about when to meet. Lisa was limited by the buses that came from Yeongju and Stella was concerned about a package from G-Market she was waiting for. I wasn't terribly understanding because I wanted to maximise my Geumoland time and because I figured the package would somehow reach Stella whether she was there or not, and because we all pretended and half-believed that Lisa lived in Andong, where there were lots of buses and civilised things, and not the obscure town where she actually lived. This would frustrate her. “You guys! I don't live in Andong. I live in Yeongju.” “But it's close, right?” “It's like an hour away! It's a whole different city!”

The result of all this was a compromise: Stella had given up on waiting for her G-Market package, Lisa had found an earlier bus that came via Andong, and I was going home for an awkward hour before leaving again. I was feeling OK with this right now. I wanted to catch my breath. I got off at my usual stop and crossed the river and walked up the four flights of stairs to my place. I dropped my bag on the floor; turned on the computer, and made myself another double coffee. Soon, it was time to head off again. I caught another bus for Gumi.

I was always surprised by how close I lived to Gumi. In a couple of minutes the spread out vacancy of rice fields and outlet stores was replaced by the cluster of high-rise apartments that signalled the entry to Gumi proper; a moment later I was in downtown.

My phone rang. It was Stella. She was late, predictably, and although she'd given up on her vigil for her G-market package she was still miles away, somewhere on the long road from Seonsan to Gumi. Lisa had called and wasn't sure of how to get from the bus terminal to the train station; could I go over and rescue her? I said sure.

Some of my buses went all the way to the terminal, but others shot off at unexpected moments for Honggok-dong or Gumi Indong. I couldn't remember which bus I was on, and whether it went to the terminal or not, and I didn't have the Korean to ask. So I got off at the yeok and caught a taxi to the terminal, probably pointlessly.

When I got to the terminal I remembered as I always did my first time out in Gumi, when Stella and I had arranged in our ignorance to meet at the terminal instead of the much more convenient yeok. How I had caught a random bus and stayed on it far too long as it looped out into the suburbs and back again; how, one-by-one, each passenger disembarked until I was alone on the bus, and how, panicked, I eventually got off somewhere amongst the anonymous grey buildings and highway overpasses. How I'd been forced to catch a taxi and instruct the driver with phrases from my phrasebook, and eventually made it to the terminal twenty minutes late, and how when I got there Stella came running down the long walkway and hugged me, and how glad I felt then to have a friend and not be alone in Gumi. But I was an old hand, now.

I looked around the waiting area but couldn't see Lisa. I went outside again and had a cigarette on the steps in front of the terminal. Koreans looked at me the way they always looked at me when I sat there – a mildly amused look that seemed to say, “Hey, look at the waegukin smoking in front of the terminal building,” and nothing more than that. It didn't feel hostile; it was just Korea. I finished my cigarette and got out my phone and called Lisa.

“Where are you?”

“I'm just coming in to Gumi,” she said.

I told her I was at the terminal waiting for her. Then I decided to go meet her where the buses arrived. Some buses came, but I didn't see Lisa. A few minutes later she called me from the waiting room – she was here, where was I? We found each other. We went out to the street and I outlined the options for her. We could wait for a bus, or pay a couple of cheonwon more and catch a taxi. We caught a taxi.

We waited for Stella outside the yeok. Lisa was impressed by Gumi. “Wow, you guys have shops and stuff,” she said.

“Don't you have that in Andong?”

But she wouldn't rise to the bait of this old joke. “There's nothing where I live. You guys are so lucky,” she said.

She took a photo of me outside the yeok. I look stiff and awkward in the photo, though happy. My collar is awry.

*

Stella arrived like she always did: late, loudly, and with such enthusiasm that I would immediately forget she was late and just be glad to see her. As it turned out we'd managed to get ourselves together with more time than we could ever need to see Geumoland, so we decided to get some lunch. We walked down to Second Street to find a place. Lisa was impressed, again, by Gumi's moderate if busy downtown. We avoided New York, New York, which Stella and I had mistakenly gone to on one of our first trips out in Gumi – bad fake western food – and decided on the sushi place.

We went upstairs and got a seat and looked at the menu.

“I want something salmon-centric,” I said. The girls deciphered the various combinations and set meals on offer for me. I was always depending on my Gyeopo friends for anything language related; without them I was helpless. It took some figuring mostly because the prices were so cheap. “I get ten pieces of salmon?” I said. “You're sure?” We ordered, and soon the food came. We talked about our make-work winter schedules, and Lisa complained about going crazy in Yeongju. We debated the ideal proportions of wasabi to mix into the soy, Stella holding out for an amount that seemed to me excessive.

We finished and went back down into Second Street. There were a thousand clothes shops but I walked quickly so the girls wouldn't be distracted. There was a bus that went to Geumoland, but who could be bothered? We caught a taxi from the station. We circled around the station and went up the incline towards Geumo-san. We saw the paddle-boats on the reservoir and Stella thought they might be part of Geumoland, but then the taxi driver pointed out its entrance to us. We went in and figured out the ticketing system – entry was cheonwon, and you got three rides for an additional yukcheonwon. That was our deal; we bought our tickets and went into the park.

Geumoland was almost deserted on a weekday afternoon. A few families with young children; some teenagers who clearly weren't getting in to Seoul National. The weather was warm, the first warm day in a long time, and I took off my light jacket and enjoyed the feel of the sun on my skin. To our right Geumo-san arced above the park. Above us, to our left, was Geumoland's incredibly awful rollercoaster. It was dead-flat. Pedal powered. The sled ride was shut down with the passing of the snows. Near the entrance was a bizarre petting zoo containing only hares, and a depressed looking monkey in a wire cage on a concrete floor. We spent a while looking at the hares and the monkey. The hares were clustered at the edge of their cage, soliciting food from a toddler, but the monkey wasn't doing much. Geumoland had taken its toll on the monkey, you could tell.

It wasn't a good fun park, not by any interpretation. You could ask the sad monkey that; he would tell you. But it had a charm to it.

We found the bumper cars. The Korean carnie stood by the ride, bored, waiting for someone to come along. I love bumper cars. I amused Stella by calling them dodgem cars. “They're bumper cars! You call them dodgem cars? That's so funny.”

I told Stella and Lisa that I was a dodgem car fiend. I told them that I would try to hit them – as hard as I could – and if I took a bump myself in the process, so be it – that it was a price I was willing to pay for the joy of slamming my friends. They said that was fine. They told me to bring it, or at least Stella did; Lisa might have been a little wary of my maniacal enthusiasm.

We each handed over one of our three tickets. I had spotted a car in a good position (not blocked in, facing the right way) and claimed it. I spun the wheel to each end and back again, making sure I was at twelve o'clock. Opening seconds are important in dodgem cars. The carnie threw a switch and the electrical grid above our heads was electrified; I headed towards the outer edge of the rink, ready to swoop.

Now, the ideal way to hit someone in a bumper car is to get on their outside and hit them at a forty-five degree angle to the front edge of their car. That's when you really knock them about. I got a few good ones in. At one point I found myself stuck against the middle barrier and looked up to see Stella, foot to the accelerator and a wild gleam in her eye, heading for me at the perfect angle. She got me good. It happens.

At Geumoland, all the rides went for longer than you would expect. After a good run the electricity was shut off and our cars rolled to a disappointing stop. It had been fun. We went in search of further thrills and came to the tagada ride. It looked like a fast, spinny sort of ride; a little fun and a little cheesy; a good break after the bumper cars. We had not idea what we were getting ourselves into.

I've since learned about this sort of ride. A tagada is a ride that would never be allowed in Australia due to the lack of restraints. It was probably what my mentor teacher had been thinking of when she told me, “Geumoland is not safe.” Tagadas are popular in South Korea and parts of the former East Germany. Cultural practices vary. In some places they are like discos, where people attempt to dance while riding them; in other places, the fun of the ride comes from being mocked by the carnie as you flail about. The common element in all of them is this: the fun of the ride comes from knocking people out of their seats so they tumble about the ride, out of control.

A tagada is an inclined, circular ride, with a piston action at its apex. So you spin around, centrifugal force pushing you back against your seat and against the railings, and as you reach the high point of the incline, the piston bounces you, causing you to come out of your seat, rise in the air, lose your grip, fall dangerously to the floor. The tagada at Geumoland had no particular complexity to it. What it had, instead, was hard seats.

(On a later trip to Geumoland, I discovered that normally the seats were covered with padded cushions. It was a far more tame ride then. I don't know where they were that day; perhaps they'd been sent out for cleaning during the week.)

So we handed over our tickets and got on the ride, laughing to ourselves, thinking we were in for a fun, not-too-exciting time. We sat equidistant from each other, so that if you'd drawn a line from each of us to the centre of the ride, you would have a Mercedes symbol. The ride started up. We spun around, laughed, looked at each other and sarcastically said things like “yay” and “woohoo”. Then the piston action started.

It was gentle at first, if surprising. Then the ride gained in speed, and we each suddenly found ourselves being bounced a foot into the air and landing on our tailbones on the hard plastic. It was impossible not to scream a little when this happened. Then you were past the bouncy point, and looking at your friends being flung into the air and landing on their asses, trying to hold on, trying to find some way to avoid the pain. So we would go around, and it would go like this: “Ow! Christ! Ahahahaha. Ahahaha. Argh! Ahahaha.” We were all screaming and laughing at the same time. And, of course, because the park was nearly empty, it went on for a really, really long time. Then the ride slowed down, and stopped. We were relieved. Then it started again, going in the opposite direction. “Oh my god, let me off! Ahahaha. Jesus Christ! Ahahahaha.”

A crowd of Koreans had gathered to watch us. They were laughing and pointing. They knew about this ride. Eventually it ended and we left the ride, bent over, in pain. “What the hell was that?” we asked each other. “That ride should not be allowed.” It wasn't fun, merely painful – yet I hadn't laughed so hard in so long.

The Korean spectators were giving us the thumbs up and smiling broadly. We hobbled away. We walked towards the back of the park, now, and passed the House of Horrors; it looked amusing, and we thought about going on in later, but our next ride by common agreement was to be Viking ship.

The Viking ship was at the very rear of the park. There was nobody operating it, and we had to go find a carnie, who agreed to fire it up for us. We got on. Lisa and Stella sat at one far end, and I sat at the other.

What is there to say about Viking ships? It was satisfyingly steep, with a slight thrill of dangerous uncertainty when the ship reached its zenith and again started down. When that happened you rose in your seat a little, and the bar across your lap wasn't so secure as to stop you from wondering if you might come out of it. It made me feel I need to brace myself into my seat with my knees. I kept my arms in the air; Stella one-upped me by not only keeping her hands in the air but dancing in her seat to the k-pop tunes. There were tunes, plural; it was a really long ride. At a certain point I thought I wouldn't mind getting off, now; and when it ended and we got off I asked if we could sit down for a bit. I was a little worried I might puke.

*

There were wooden seats near the Viking ship and we sat on them and took some photos. I wandered off by myself to have a cigarette. I was feeling good, I was having a good day, but I wanted to be by myself for a moment. I wanted to collect my thoughts and calm down.

I came back to Lisa and Stella. They wanted to go ice-skating. I wasn't thrilled with the idea. I had nothing against ice-skating, but I'd had bad experiences with winter sports. I tended to injure myself. My injuries would follow a pattern: I would start off, all awkward but gamely trying, cautiously edging my way around the ice or snow, and then I would get the hang of it – or at least think that I had got the hang of it. And then overconfidence would set in. I'd take off, marvelling at my own prowess, imagining the comments of others as I passed: “Gosh, look at him, such style! He only started a few minutes ago.” And then I would fall over and injure something permanently. Both my knees are shot; the left from a skiing accident when I was twelve, and the right from my first and last attempt at ice-skating, more than a decade earlier.

I didn't want to be a killjoy, so I said I'd come and watch – but then Stella said, “Are you really just going to watch?”, and I thought fuck it. I said I'd give it a go.

We found the ice-skating rink by a process of elimination, it being the only building in Geumoland large enough to conceivably hold an ice-skating rink. We went in and went over to hire some skates. I couldn't remember what my shoe size was in Korean, and Stella asked me what size I was in Western shoe sizes, and I couldn't remember that, either. This, to her, was like not knowing who were the founding members of S.H.E.I.L.D. - ignorance of unimaginable proportions. Eventually I got some skates that fit, although my memory is that I had to change sizes more than once.

When we finally got out to the rink it had been cleared for sweeping by a zamboni. “Oh, look, it's a zamboni!” Stella said.

“A what?” I said. It was a new word to me. According to Stella I was too ignorant to live and not knowing about zambonis was like not knowing your shoe size or the difference between The Avengers and the Fantastic Four. She told me about YouTube clips of zambonis falling through thin ice into rivers and the like.

The zamboni finished its perambulations and we went out onto the freshly cleaned ice. My ankles bowed outwards and I hobbled along next to the railing, but after a circuit or two some muscle memory was triggered and I began to get the hang of it. It must have been all those weekends in my youth when I went to rollerskating, because I'd only been ice skating that one injurious time. So I started cautiously venturing further from the rails. Stella and Lisa each went over once, but I was still entirely upright and feeling pleased with myself. I whizzed past some Koreans and they went “wah!” with the same impressed tone that they used when I said “anyeong hasseyo” - ice skating, like simple greetings, was apparently something non-Koreans were not thought capable of doing.

It was fun but exhausting and after ten minutes or so I left the ice and took a break. Stella came and sat with me on the wooden seats and told me about her tumbles and near misses. Then she started trying to teach me to say “yeah yay-er” which was a California expression I could not pronounce and which was a project of hers. It had a peculiarly American combination of vowel sounds and I couldn't get it right. Apparently there was a special hand signal that went with “yeah yay-er” and she showed it to me. I imagined Crips saying to Bloods, “Bring it,” and the Bloods saying “yeah yay-er” and doing the hand symbol before they rumbled. Lisa came over and asked us what we were doing and we laughed and she took a photo of us doing the “yeah yay-er” with hand signal.

We went back out onto the ice. I was whizzing around, but getting tired. I skated up to Lisa and Stella; they were getting over it, too. I said I'd go around a couple more times and then quit. I accelerated on one last circuit, and was heading towards the exit – I was aiming for the barrier to one side of the exit. I straightened up as I approached it, and felt me feet start to move in front of my centre of gravity. I tried to adjust, and couldn't do it – I was falling over backwards.

I was conscious of how I'd hurt myself in the past, landing on the ice, so I reached out with one arm to grab the barrier. I caught it, but couldn't stop myself from falling. I held on to the barrier, fell over backwards, and nearly wrenched my arm from its socket.

I sprung up, wanting to give the impression that I'd only taken a light tumble, as always more worried about what people might think of me than anything else but I could tell I'd hurt my arm pretty badly. I left the rink and sat back down on the wooden seats. My arm felt numb. I rubbed it. Cautiously, I tested it. I could still move everything. After a few minutes the pain faded a little, but I could tell it was the sort of pain that was going to return later, and much more severely.

The girls finished their skating and came off the ice. They hadn't seen my fall and I told them about it. I told them that I thought I might have hurt my arm pretty badly, but for the moment, it was OK.

We were done with Geumoland. We returned our skates and changed back into our regular shoes. We left the park and caught a taxi back to Gumi downtown. Lisa and I compared bus times, and we both had an hour to kill. We decided to go get coffee.

A while back Stella and I had discovered this amazing coffee place in Gumi downtown and had decided to make it our regular, although opportunities to go there hadn't really come up and we hadn't been back since. It was a second floor coffee shop across from the Alcoholic Landmark, a bar whose owners had presumably typed something like “memorable place for drinkers” into an online translation service. The coffee shop was incredibly cute in that Korean way. It had a nice view over the street and was run by a young Korean man who was so poor that he gave us loyalty cards while telling us that he couldn't give out free coffees, yet, but hoped to be able to do so in the future. But his coffee was great and the froth designs on their tops were works of art, individually matched to his observations of the personality of each customer; I never saw him repeat a design. A true artist, he never rushed things, so sometimes you had to wait a half-hour for your coffee, even when there was no-one else in the shop, but it was worth it. A month or two later we tried to go back there and found the business shut down. A neighbouring shop-keep told us the young man couldn't make a go of it, and we felt bad. We should have gone more often, told more people about it...

We ordered our coffees, and some biscuits. We talked about friends who had gone home and took photos on our cell phones of the hilarious signs for the Alcoholic Landmark and when our coffees came we took photos of the intricate designs in the froth. My arm was starting to hurt. It was alright if I kept it steady but if I moved it in a certain way I got flashes of incredible pain.

Stella asked me if I still needed to get my multi-entry visa as she was thinking about taking a trip to Daegu to get hers. I'd actually managed, as far as I could tell uniquely, to get my multi-entry visa online. It had involved installing about fifteen spammy Korean security programs and I was still getting weird popups in Korean accompanied by alarming symbols, but I had a printout from the immigration office saying that I could leave the country and return, if I wished. I told Stella about this but said I thought it would be a better idea to just go to the immigration office. I said, “I've already got mine, but I'll come for a ride to Daegu for the hell of it,” because I was still on morning teaching schedule, and trips to Daegu were fun.

We talked about – what? I can't remember. Eventually we got onto stories from our past and Stella wanted to tell Lisa a story I'd heard before, and while it was a good story there were parts of it that I found disturbing, so I said I'd go down and have a cigarette and meet them downstairs.

I went downstairs. I squatted on a ledge and put my coat on. The sun was going down and it had become cold. It was evening and Second Street was busy, now, and the neon lights were on and I looked at the lights and the people moving past me. I lit my cigarette and pulled my coat more tightly around me. I had to smoke left-handed due to the shooting pains in my arm.

I finished my cigarette and eventually the girls came down from the cafe. We said goodbye to Stella and I said I'd see her Friday. Lisa and I went back to First Street and caught a taxi for the terminal. The taxi driver was watching a drama while he drove, as Korean taxi-drivers tended to do, and I talked to Lisa about a drama she was watching, and asked her for tips on a drama I should try. She said I should give the movie My Sassy Girl a go, and told me how they'd made a terrible American remake of it. We got to the terminal and bought our tickets. Lisa's bus was about to leave and I went with her through the doors. Her bus was there; we said goodbye and made plans to catch up soon in Daegu or Busan. She got on her bus and I sat on a bench and waited for my bus to make its way across from the other side of the parking lot, where I could see it already waiting. I lit another cigarette and smoked it, because that's what I did when I had five minutes to kill, and also what I did before a bus ride.

The bus to Gyeongju came across the parking lot and I got on it. There weren't assigned seats on the Gyeongju bus, and it was only half-full. I took a seat towards the back and leaned against the window and closed my eyes to rest. Soon we were under way and I looked again at the highway that led out of Gumi and the mountains before it became too dark to see anything at all. Mostly I rested, and wondered if anybody from the committee was ever going to get in touch with me about what I was supposed to be doing the next day.

A little while out of Gyeongju I got a call from Elizabo. I had vague plans with her to meet up for dinner in Gyeongju, but it was getting late. She'd already had dinner, but wanted to know if I wanted to get dessert. I told her that I wanted to get myself a motel first, and that I'd call her once I'd done that.

The bus pulled into Gyeongju. I got out. It was another Korean bus terminal and I had no idea where I was, but I trusted Korea by then. I knew that somewhere around me would be a bunch of love motels. I got outside and smoked a cigarette and looked for the direction that seemed love motelly. There was always such a district near a bus terminal, and they had a feel 'd learned to recognise: buildings of a certain size, neon lights, alleys of a certain intimidating narrowness. I saw what looked like a likely direction and set off.

The first love motel I came to was new-looking and had an English sign saying “motel”, which made me think it was probably a more expensive place. I checked anyway, and sure enough it was 45,000 won, which was above my limit. I never paid more than 30,000 won, except in Seoul or occasionally Busan, or in desperation. The next I came to looked more promising; the sign was in Korean and it looked older. I went in, and sure enough there was an old woman on a cot sleeping behind the check-in counter, which I had invariably found to be a good sign. I woke her up – I felt bad, but what could you do? It was 25,000 won. I checked in, the ajumma gave me a toothbrush and disposable razor, and I went up to my room.

It was a decent love motel. About a four on the lurve scale. It had satellite TV, a double bed, an elaborate sexy shower, and a good selection of complimentary toiletries. I called Elizabo. I was pretty tired by then, and she didn't want to come out to the terminal. She asked if I wanted to catch a taxi into downtown, but I couldn't be bothered. We made vague plans to catch up the next day, if I finished up early at the Kolon (actually, the orientation would stretch into two days, but that's another story).

I went downstairs again. The ajumma was awake. I asked her if there was a PC Bang around. She smiled and motioned for me to follow her. We went out on the street and down to the next block, and she pointed out a PC Bang to me. I was moved again by the extent to which Koreans would go to be hospitable. I bowed to her and went off to check my email, hoping there would be a message from the committee.

There wasn't. I didn't want to pay for two minutes of internet use so spent some time bumming on facebook, then finished up. It was about nine o'clock by then and I was hungry. There was a restaurant close to my motel. I went in and ordered a dolsot bibimbap. There was no-one in the place except me; the elderly proprietors were watching a drama on a TV. I ate my dinner quickly because they were cleaning up.

I paid and went back to my motel. The ajumma was sleeping again but my key was in a basket on the counter. I took it without waking her and went up to my room. My arm was hurting really badly. I took a hot shower under the bizarre love motel shower fitting, which resembled a UFO. I got out of the shower, turned on the television. My bed had an electric blanket and I switched it on to high, thinking it might help with my arm.

I knew what I probably needed to do was ice it, not heat it. I got an idea. I looked in the bar fridge and sure enough, there were two complimentary cans of iced coffee. I drank one of them. Man, I was so tired. I opened the fridge again to get the other iced coffee, and on second glance noticed that there was a package wedged into its very top, right next to the cooling mechanism.

I pulled it out. It was a plastic bag of fish, left behind by a previous resident of my room, now frozen solid. I put it against my arm. It seemed to work for a little while, but after a few minutes it began to melt and a smell of rotten fish filled the air. I put it back in the fridge and took out the remaining iced coffee. I resisted the urge to drink it, knowing that I needed it for my arm, that I'd want it the next morning.

I sat on my bed and watched TV and iced my arm with the canned coffee. I remember watching CNN International, which had a very long show about the two Koreas on it. It was a nice piece of synchronicity and I watched it with interest. I was feeling tired and happy and a numbing pain from my arm that changed to lightning bolts of agony whenever I shifted in an unfortunate way. The electric blanket from my bed heated up under me, and I would shift across to cooler places. Eventually I got tired; I set my alarm for the next morning, wondering what the next morning would bring. I turned off the light and came back to my bed, turned down the electric blanket to something more sensible and got in. My arm by then was hurting in almost any position, and I arranged my second pillow under it, and lay there, stiffly on my back; I wondered if I would be able to function at all with it the next day; and eventually, with surprising ease, I went to sleep.

*

A story like this needs an epilogue; some sort of justification, hopefully a better one than my attempt to explain why a dead cat in the snow had anything to do with anything.

The next day I got a call from Nicole, confirming that I was, indeed, meant to be at the Kolon Hotel. I got directions to go there and caught a ridiculously long bus to the place. I did my best to help, both in an official capacity – showing the Gyeongju scholars how to break down and teach a second grade lesson on body parts – and in an unofficial capacity, providing general encouragement and advice on being a TaLK scholar - i.e., I got drunk with a bunch of cool fourth gens. I made some new friends, and left feeling pleased with myself for having acquitted myself as a sociable, engaged and interesting instructor. I caught a bus back with Nicole and taught my final day of fake English camp. The next week I started back on regular classes, and I was into a new semester in Korea.

I don't think I fictionalised this too much, but can't swear to the accuracy of all of it. I remember it as the best day of a lot of good days in Korea, but even after having written all this I can't say why. It was a day with a lot of seasons, a constant motion to it, and that's part of it. It came in a good week, a week that included my snowy day with my third graders, hanging out with the fourth gens at Kolon Hotel, a random trip to Daegu with Stella to extend her visa, a fun bus ride back from Gyeongju with Nicole. Maybe it was the best month – rediscovering Korea after having been away, feeling very good about being there, feeling comfortable with it.

Or maybe it wasn't. Was it around then that I tried to quit smoking and had a private emotional meltdown, like I always do when I try to quit smoking? That day – did I know it was as good as that at the time? Is it possible I was tired for a lot of it, that I was stressed that Stella waiting for her package would leave us not enough time to see Geumoland, was I grumpy that Elizabeth didn't come meet me at the terminal, did my arm hurt much worse than I remember, was I worried for a lot of it about whether I was just supposed to show up at the hotel the next day, and how was I going to get there, and what people would say when I arrived? It's possible. Maybe even probable. It's strange; because I'm in a different place now, and I have to construct a bridge to get from here to there; as well as I remember it, there are gaps where I wonder what we talked about, was the light truly as I remember it, was it that time, or another. I wonder if there's a concrete reality to it, or just a mythology I've created. I wonder if other people remember it the way I do.

"...something vaguely pretentious"

2010-04-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

I'm also - and this is the ambitious part - going to try to work really hard and do lots of things and find a truer integrity, an artistic integrity, so that I can actually be an artist and stop pretending I am one. (Hence the "something vaguely pretentious" of this blog's new subtitle.)

The social side of things will also be interesting. I'm definitely intending to spend a lot of time writing, hopefully with the perspective that supposedly comes to a writer far from home, but this is not meant to be some On Walden Pond-type thing. According to the forums I've been reading, one can keep very busy on the weekends and see all of South Korea by making lots of friends during the orientation period ... Another interesting experiment in extroversion. So hopefully it will be Charming Nicholas who turns up, and not the other one. People tend to think I have more control over that than I really do. We'll see.

It's gone quickly, but it's also been a long time. A long time since I wrote the above, since I first posted the Google Earth image of Apo and speculated about whether I'd be living in a shack in a corner of the Apo cloverleaf or a "boxy high-rise in Gimcheon or Gumi, one of the neighbouring small cities." I can now trace my path to school along that map. Gumi is my 'hood; "let's meet at seven at the yeok [train station]" is a sentence I or someone else will say most weeks. I've got a little bit of an accent - American As and Korean Os - and sometimes catch myself stressing the first part of words in a very Korean way. "MP3", for instance.

I've been thinking a lot lately about whether to extend for another six months. There are reasons for and against, and I haven't made a decision yet, but this week I'm leaning towards going home. The big reasons seem to cancel each other out and the simpler, more emotive ones start to feel more important. I will have been here for a year, seen all the seasons, and perhaps a season in Korea is maybe enough (there's a definate Korean flavour to the way I used 'maybe' there, by the way). I have a feeling that I want to see it out with some of the great friends I've made here, and not stay on after they're gone. A feeling that it is better to end it while it's still good, and not risk staying too long, until it's not fun anymore. Which is something I've done in the past.

I've been thinking about the "something vaguely pretentious" that I declared myself, half-jokingly, to be looking for when I left. I did make lots of friends at orientation, and I have gone off somewhere and done something most weekends. I went to see the cherry blossoms with my friends on the weekend. I was talking to Lisa, one of my friends here, and we agreed: the first six months were easier, they were about partying and having fun; the next six months are harder, and when the internal journey takes place. We both felt we were more confident and independent. Lisa, by the way, has recently put up a great post on her blog of observations on Korea. About half of them are things I'd worked out, the other half are interesting to me; she has the advantage of speaking Korean. It's here.)

I suppose I've learned that it's a slow process. I go back and forth. I realized that I'd changed when I went to the Kolon Hotel to help coach the new 4th gens. That was a great experience for me, to return to the place where I'd once been a novice, now in a teaching role. Watching the fourth gens' demo classes, seeing them make their mistakes, seeing their nervousness, I knew that yes, I'd changed. I feel more confident in being dropped into an unusual situation and being able to cope, both personally and socially. I feel more confident that I'm somebody who can make friends easily and whose company people enjoy. There is still Charming Nicholas and The Other One; I still have little control over who will show up. I've realised that tiredness has a lot to do with it. And I think I've become much better at untangling the internal feelings and unreliable perceptions I have when I'm in that mood from external reality. It was The Other One in Jinhae for the cherry blossoms, I was feeling incredibly self-conscious the whole day, although I had a really nice time and I don't think other people noticed.

I was learning about mindfulness before I left, and that was one of the principles of it; to become conscious of your own mind's furious activity, and acquire a bit of distance from it; to become an observer of your own mind. That's a bit of wisdom I've internalized: to realise it's not so much about changing your feelings as about changing how you let yourself react to them and the thought processes that lead to and come from them. And that, ironically, can lead to a positive change in your feelings.

I'm learning wisdom from other people: Koreans, friends. I like a lot of Korean attitudes, in moderation. Respect for your elders and responsibility to your juniors, viewing friends as family, a good work ethic, veiwing yourself as part of a group and not a selfish individual, hard work, politeness and propriety. Those last two are not quite right; I forget the Korean word for it, but I heard it well-defined once as "understanding what is expected of you by others without having to be told." Generousity, grace - all these things combined. There are certainly problems and traps with these attitudes and expectations - you see that as well - but there's a lot to learn from them.

The writing? It hasn't gone as well as I might have hoped, but in this too I'll try to forgive myself. I've written a couple of essays that I liked, and I've been keeping a journal. When I came back in January I decided to make a serious effort at getting a big chunk done of the novel I'd had in mind for a long time. I tried to write every day and put an amazing amount of time into writing not very much. I found it painfully difficult and it went very slowly. It was completely unlike what writing is like for me when it is going well, and I hated what I wrote. I think I've decided to abandon it. The problem is that the themes of it, which seemed so important to me once, now seem completely self indulgent. It was about pointless heroism, something which I used to find admirable and moving, but which I no longer see as heroic. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense - it's quite personal - but I can't get emotionally invested any more in those ideas. I just didn't like the characters I was writing about. So that, too, can be seen as emotional progress, rather than failure. I think. My plan now is to go back to the kids' book that nearly got published and spend my last few months here trying to fix that up, so I'll at least go back with something. I haven't read it in over a year, so it will be interesting to take another look at it.

This has been a very vivid experience, and I want to write about it when I get home. I thought of writing a travel book, but I'm just not sure it's a daring and dramatic enough travel experience. Of course it's in how you write it. Bill Bryson has made a career out of writing travel books based on some pretty humdrum, touristy sorts of experiences. But in terms of marketability I'm not sure stories of trips to Daegu with my friends would cut it, however amusingly told. But I've been thinking about Alex Garland's The Beach. It's a great example of taking what I suspect were some pretty common travel experiences and turning them into a gripping, fictional narrative. The idea of doing something like that is appealing, if I can think of a "gripping fictional narrative" to attach to my memories and observations of Korea.

What's left? I hope that in my last few months here - if it is my last few months - I'll be able to calm down and find a peace with myself. It's something that seems within grasp, and I hope I can achieve it. Slow down my frenetic, overactive mind; stop worrying things to death; take each moment as it comes. Spend more time in the present, observing the world and enjoying it, and less time lost in my head. There are lots of cliches there which have truth to them. "Love yourself", "live in the present", "don't make mountains out of molehills", etc. Somebody here was telling me something like that recently - it seems people are always telling me something like that - and I had to explain to them that those ideas, which some people know instinctively to be true, are things it has taken me years to prove to myself, and which still approach and recede on a daily basis. I think that's the "truer, artistic integrity" I was looking for. I still hope I can get there.

Korea

2010-03-19T09:49:00.000-07:00

There are times here when I feel lonely. At other times, probably more often, I feel such a deep love for this country, this city. In the last week - after classes, being called over to the swings by Son Hee, Jin Hee, Amy and Katie, and playing with them while arguing about whether the next day would be "Candy Day" or not (it was. And a great class. Me giving out sweets to them for formulating sentences like "Candy is delicious." or "I like melon. I don't like orange." or "I give to my sister.") And now, coming home drunk from Gumi Yok, and a nice evening with the local third generation TaLK people, and a couple of new fourth generation people. A dinner with some local Koreans Nicole and I befriended, then the waegukin bar Corona, and the strangely named Alcoholic Landmark...

People go home from this program, and they update their facebook statuses. The gist of them is, I'm fine. But it's not Korea. I miss Korea. The colour and excitement, the cafes and noraebang, I want to be back meeting at exit ten, I want to be back saying next weekend in Daegu or Busan?, I want to go for samgyeopsal...

I don't think I've ever regretted this, and I know when it's gone it will live forever in me when I see some Hangul script or hear a fragment of Korean, when I see the facebook posts of friends from around the world with whom I share a secret knowledge of a place, a time, a country.

(A little drunk, 2am, Saturday Morning, Suseong Heitch, Bonggok-dong, Gumi-si, Gyeongsangbuk-do, Korea.)

Back in Korea

2010-01-14T04:01:00.001-08:00

I know it's been horribly long since I updated this. Trying to catch up seems mostly pointless. I had an ambivalent month in November, then a fantastic time in December. When I left here I felt very good about Korea, and felt very comfortable with the friends I'd made. I felt I finally knew who my friends were, and felt close to them.

Since I got back things have been decidedly shaky. Although it was nice to go home for two weeks, doing so made me very aware of time's passing, and since I've been back - almost a week now - this feeling, that I don't have an infinite amount of time here to do what I want to do and accomplish what I want to accomplish, has been bothering me. So I wrote the blog post which precedes this. I wrote it for the Gyeongbuk newsletter, which is put out by the TaLK committee of our province, and which it is semi-compulsory to submit things to. I'm not sure if I'll submit it - they seem to only publish very cheerful things - but I like it as a piece of writing.

Hopefully things will slip back into place next week, when I start teaching again. At the moment this mood has had a few odd consequences, one of which was that I hopped a bus by myself to Jeonju for a night, just so I could feel I was doing something. I've also been a little bothered by some of my friends, the ones on six month contracts who didin't extend, leaving. There are two people - Jun and Tiffany - who I'll particularly miss. It just seems to have added to that sense of turbulence which has bothered me. And that sense of being in a groove, of knowing who my friends are, being confident in what I'm doing, seems to have been lost.

It's strange, because on the one hand some things from the early days, like orientation, seem so long ago. On the other, it's scary how quickly time is moving. The weather - consistently in the negative numbers - hasn't helped any. As is often the case, I probably just need to relax a bit.

Wintery Sunday afternoon

2010-01-14T03:59:00.000-08:00

Back in Korea. I missed a blizzard and the country turned white in my absence.

A couple of months ago a family of kittens arrived in the vacant lot I cut through on my way to the bus stop. Korea’s has a combination of advanced and primitive garbage collection laws: all foodstuffs must be seperated for recycling, but then they are merely dumped in a large pile on a street-corner, and this means there is a feral cat problem. All the cats, I was told, have diseases, but of course I tried to befriend the family of kittens anyway. I was unsuccesful. They always ran off when I approached, no matter how much I tried to fascinate them with twigs scratched erratically across the ground. Over the weeks they grew, and eventually scattered.

This afternoon I found one dead in the snowbank by the side of the road. It was half-grown and very thin. I don’t know why it died: the cold, hunger, a car. And it wasn’t my pet, and I won’t say it filled me with grief, but I’d watched it play, and watched its mother hunt for scraps in the rubbish-piles, and I felt bad that it was dead, and bad because it seemed to represent a feeling that had been with me since I got back to Korea yesterday.

In the last issue of the Gyeongbuk newsletter I wrote in a somewhat breezy and flippant way about how I was soon to return to Australia for a couple of weeks, and I didn’t know how that would make me feel. Some of my predictions turned out true – I did find myself saying “neh” to shop assistants, and once even bowed farewell. Other predictions didn’t come to pass. I had fun, saw friends, ate a lot of food. I cut all my hair off – I now have the shortest haircut in all of Korea, I think – and got tanned at the beach.

But the most intense feeling I had was one I couldn’t have predicted. I wrote in that essay about how, in being here, it seemed as if Australia had faded, had receeded and become dream-like; how I had neglected friendships back home, not out of any lack of care, but simply because Australia seemed so distant, not only physically but emotionally. And I’ve heard other people here express something similar. I had thought it might be difficult to adjust back to Australian life, but after a day or two of slight disorientation – everybody had such strong Australian accents, and dressed so badly! – I found it almost effortless.

What I hadn’t expected was that after a week or so, Korea would start to recede in the same way Australia had. Gradually, then suddenly, Korea acquired the quality of an intense dream: luminescent and unreal. Like a dream, it was an experience that seemed wholly believable when I was in it, but in retrospect seemed impossible. The memories were of a place too vivid to be real: too much colour and noise, busy, foreign. But it was a good dream, and I missed it.

Of course I knew intellectually that it was real, and I was going back to Korea soon. But on some emotional level I couldn’t process this. Home was so normal, and though it felt like it had been a long time since I’d been doing these normal things, it didn’t feel at all strange to be doing them. And this added to my sense of the unreality of Korea.

During my second week home, I began to feel increasingly agitated, anxious to get back and assure myself of Korea’s reality; the reality of my town, my won-room, my friendships. And since I’ve been back I’ve been keen to walk around, make contact with friends, touch things, see things…

I’ve only been back a day, and I still feel emotionally shaky. Korea feels real again, but what is new is this: the feeling, the certainty, that time is passing. Today I saw a post on facebook, a friend from here who has now gone home, and I caught my breath as my mind shied from the evidence of time's passage. For a long time, my future here seemed to stretch out forever. A year seemed infinite, it was always still only beginning, I was just getting started. I extended my contract without much thought, because the feeling was so strong that I had only begun here, and it felt wrong to think of this time as half-over. When I left to go back to Australia, I noted to myself that it had only been a little more than four and a half months since I’d arrived. No time at all! But now it is well past five, heading towards six, heading towards a time when by any calculation the end will be closer than the beginning. I’ve always had this vulnerability to time – a sort of pre-emptive nostalgia, where I start to miss things before they’re even gone – and it’s come over me today. I still want to do so much here... I like this dream, and don’t want it to end, but there is a touch of something about it now – a sense of finality, a hint of mortality, the dark promise of the changing seasons. A dead cat in the snow is far too strong a metaphor, and I won’t call it a harbinger.

A caution, maybe: time is finite. Six months is short. Let’s make something of it.

Merry Christmas from Korea

2009-12-23T17:51:00.000-08:00

Girl group T-ara performing a Christmas style rendition of their hit "Bo Peep". Love it.

I will be home from the 27th December until the 10th of January!

Saying the alphabet backwards...

2009-11-12T07:47:00.001-08:00

A while ago I offered my second grade kids the opportunity to win a highly coveted, almost impossible-to-get shiny sticker if they learned the alphabet backwards, which several then did in a couple of days. I meant to film them at the time, but my camera broke. So today, with a new camera, I decided to document it. They were a little rusty - it had been a couple of months - but their memories are extraordinary at this age, so they had it down again in five minutes with a little bit of practice. Here are two videos.

Sue gets her N and M back-to-front, but this video makes me laugh, mostly due to Punky's determined efforts to derail the performance with the funniest silent comic performance since Charlie Chaplin.

Yeti and Jessica. Just adorable. Also another fine cameo by Punky.

I live in dread of one of them asking me to say the alphabet backwards. They think I'm so smart, my credibility would never recover.

I have a camera again!

2009-11-03T00:41:00.000-08:00

Some photos of my students, mostly.

The adorable grade 3 girls. I love my grade 3/4 class. Lacking Emma (beautiful tomboy), a couple of boys, and the two grade 4 girls who are also lovely but painfully shy. Something seems to happen to them between grade 3 and 4 whereby the girls become extremely self-conscious.

Favourite students #1 and 2, not ranked in any order: Jin Hee and Son Hee. Twins. Geniuses. Poor Son Hee got clocked in the face during some rough-housing which I lacked the language to ever fully understand the details of.

#3. Dragon Man (his choice). Reminds me of River Phoenix in Stand By Me: good looking, muscular, a natural leader. Was a problem student until I appointed him my deputy in charge of smacking the boys into line. One of only two boys in my grade 1/2 class with any interest in English.

Grade two kids in costume dress rehearsal for a school play. They spent about fifteen minutes sneaking up to me then running away squealing when I pointed the camera at them, then decided they wanted to get their pictures taken.

Trouble: 1-2-3. Far right is Wolf, the other boy in my grade 1/2 class who is worth a damn, and two kids I don't teach. But I really like this photo.

Favourite student #4. And possibly my absolute favourite. Yeti (god knows who named her). Just like how she looks - really smart, sweet, happy, sensitive, funny, serious. Likes jumps, hitting me and laughing, and teaching me Korean. Drew a picture of me, which is on my fridge.

The grade 6 girls are too cool to pose for photographs, unfortunately.

Elizabeth, me, a French-Canadian girl whose name I forget, and Stella. Elizabeth and Stella are two of my best Gyeongbuk friends. Enjoying the Autumn on our hiking cultural experience trip last weekend.

Won Cashing

2009-10-22T07:40:00.001-07:00

Commercials just don't get better than this. A little taste of Korea.

Busan meat dogs

2009-10-12T01:08:00.001-07:00

While I was in Busan on the weekend I visited a market where they had meat dogs for sale. I'd heard that the meat dogs were a special breed of dog, raised on farms. I imagined that they were somehow more like farm animals, and not companions. So I saw these dogs, and... they were dogs. They looked at me. They wagged their tails. They wanted to be patted, and played with.

I haven't mentioned this, but many people who read this knew my dog Dawson. A couple of weeks ago his cancer came back, and he had to be put down. It was one of those moments when it feels rotten to be so far from home. I miss him a lot. And I thought of him when I saw the Busan meat dogs. I don't think I'll be eating dog after all.

Travel map

2009-10-06T05:17:00.000-07:00

OK, that took a long time. You can now follow my travels on the above map. It's a little confusing due to all the doubling-back, but basically I landed at Incheon in the North, moved down to Suwon for orientation (with side-trips to Seoul); then went to Gyeongu for our provincial orientation. Then to Gumi, from whence I have ventured forth in a variety of directions. This weekend was Chusok - Thanksgiving-ish holiday of sweet foods and ancestor worship for Koreans; a four day long weekend for me. I went down to see Katie in Hamyang, went across to Jinju (which should have had a lantern festival, but didn't due to Korea's swine-flu hysteria), then back to Gumi. Feel free to zoom in. Does anybody other than my parents read this blog?

Korea

2009-10-01T04:48:00.000-07:00

My sixth graders are currently studying five hours a day for a massive exam which determines which middle school they get into, and hence the rest of their lives. I was talking to them today - some are planning on going to the neighbouring Apo Middle School; others are setting their sites on a more selective school. Today they were telling me about their latest practice tests; some scored a triumphant 0, while others got a question wrong and got a dispiriting -1. And some came very late to class due to doing very badly and being kept back; I didn't find out their scores. Presumably, minus two or worse. Tough marking system.

One of my favourite and most difficult class 6 girls is Victory (I didn't name her). She is very bright, does a million activities, and has serious attitude. I can see her going off the rails in a few years. Her favourite English sentences are "Shuddup shuddup!" and "Why?". On my first day in the cafeteria she asked me my name and then declared "I am a genius." She's pretty bright. Yesterday I surprised her and another girl in the second English room playing with the magnetic letters on the board. They jumped and hastily rearranged the letters, leaving a rather telling circle of FCUK. "What's that?" I asked. "Fox," was Victory's snappy comeback.

I have a vague appointment to eat dog meat with the Special Needs teacher. Koreans' seem to find eating dog meat as strange and humorous as Westerners. My mentor teacher was very amused explaining about the Special Needs Teacher's guilty fondness for dog meat. "She has a dog," she said. "To eat?" I asked. "No, no. To take care of. But she likes dog meat. It is very ironic."

Very rushed catchup

2009-09-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know it's been criminally long since I updated this. I'm tired a lot of the time. And this won't be the reflective and detailed blog entry I'd like to write.

What has happened? My hood in Bonggok-dong is now familiar to me; a big change from when I first arrived and went out for walks exploring in cautious, expanding circles so as not to get myself hopelessly lost. I've been to Busan and Daegu, and next week I'm off to Daejeon, which will complete my tour of South Korea's four largest cities, and will mean that I have been on all of Korea's subways. In Busan I went swimming at Heyundae Beach, which is Korea's most famous beach. It's prettier than Bondi, and the water is warmer. Similarly full of tourists, but Busan was a lovely city, one I'll get back to again soon. The next day Katie and I went to the fish markets and picked a fish from a tank that was being fried for us minutes later. Daegu's main attraction is shopping, but it's been two months since any of us earned money, so we mostly wandered around and looked for things to do. We went to an arcade, sat in a park which had chipmunks in a cage, had a long lunch, long coffee, and samgyeopsal - my favourite Korean food - for dinner. Daejeon next week for the big reunion of my group from Kyung Hee and orientation, for Rosa's 21st birthday - haven't seen most of them in a month, and am really looking forward to it. We get our first month's pay on Friday, so it should be a fun night.

The teaching is exhausting, frustrating, rewarding. Although the teaching itself doesn't take up much time, the "exhausting" part, combined with the need to make lesson plans, is probably most of why I haven't updated much on here. When I get the chance soon I'll write some stuff about my favourite kids, although most of them are lovely in different ways. 1/2 class know nothing, but they're as cute as anything. They like to climb on me. 3/4 class is full of boys who don't want to learn and girls who are serious and very keen to learn, but who spend most of the time before classes trying to teach me Korean so they don't have to speak to me in English. Two people on Monday (including the regular 3rd grade teacher) told me these kids really like me and like my classes, so that felt good. 5/6 was my Waterloo for a while, until I worked them out, and then they became my favourite class. They're mostly sixth grade girls, and mostly what I do now is talk to them, try to teach them something, and banter with them about whether we are going to learn lessons or play games. Teaching English by conversation and stealth, but I get happy every time they want to say something so badly that they get out their mobile phones to look up a word. (Mobile phones, by the way, are called han-deh-pones here, which is an example of "Konglish", a subject of frequent discussion, and which is the only part of Korean language in which I am becoming fluent.)

Anyway, that was true of 5/6 until I committed what my mentor teacher immediately identified as "big mistake". Due to a timetabling problem I have one class a week in which I assist in teaching her grade 5 class. So, I was talking to them - the noisiest bunch of kids I've ever seen, and I said - "Why don't you come to my after school class?" Ten immediately said they would. Disastrous, because the grade 5 boys are noisy, childish and competitive. They don't want to sit around being social and talking about movies and travel like the grade six girls. So if I try to deal with them and their noisy distraction, the grade 6 girls immediately turn their backs and start talking amongst themselves and playing with their mobile phones. It really is a huge problem - my mentor teacher and I are trying to solve it. The grade 5 boys are fine in their own way, but they need noisy, energetic games to keep their attention, which is what the grade 6 girls hated beyond belief. And they're ruining my relaxing last class of the day.

Once a week I have dinner with my mentor teacher and the special needs teacher in a sort of informal English/Korean lesson. I had a really good time last week - we went to an amazing Buddhist temple in Gimcheon called Jikju, then had a great meal. Tonight, much simpler - cafe food in Bonggok. But better, in many ways. We're all of similar age, they're lovely people, and I laughed a lot. The language thing is a bit tricky, but part of the reason we're doing it, as well, so it works OK. My mentor teacher is also the ethics teacher - yes, that's a class - and I have been trying to understand from her the nature of Korean ethics. It's hard, because although her English is strong, it doesn't translate properly. But today she got to something that I've been coming to understand, about the way generousity in Korea is linked to face, pride, and also shyness and embarrassment. It is hard to explain, but I'm starting to get it. But briefly - I've been the recipient of extraordinary generousity from everyone, to the extent I am uncomfortable with it. And it can be hard to get past that to something natural and warm, although I'm getting there with my mentor teacher and special needs teacher. (Kang Eun Ju and Kang Chon Hee - but even the name thing is fraught with formality and potential over-familiarity. As a foreigner all my transgressions are overlooked, but you try.)

This has been a horrible update, very rushed, and only scratches the surface of what I've been doing and experiencing. Topics for future blog entries - Korean manners, generousity, and reticence; my favourite kids; the joys of Konglish. Sorry. I really will try to update more often, but it is hard.

My address

2009-09-15T04:22:00.001-07:00

Go ahead and try to stalk me.

경북 김천시 아포읍
국사리 572번지
아포초등학교 Nicholas Carvan
740-860
SOUTH KOREA

I have landed

2009-09-02T06:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of updates - at the moment lesson planning and school is taking up all my time. But I'm getting the hang of it, and should be able to have more free time once I catch the knack of lesson planning and no longer have to spend an hour and a half preparing a forty minute class.

Briefly: I'm safely landed on the outskirts of Gumi in a lovely inner-city suburb called Bonggok which is filled with parks, restaraunts and trees. My flat is new, clean, and while not large is not ridiculously cramped, either. Ten minutes by bus to school, ten minutes to downtown Gumi, which is a really fun and lively city centre. The downtown centres on Gumi Station. Gumi Station is on the Gyeongbu line, which goes from one end of South Korea to the other, passing through all the biggest cities - Seoul, Daegu, Busan. By high-speed train, if you want to pay for that. Very lucky for me.

I teach three classes - Grades 1/2, 3/4 and 5/6. 1/2 are sweet, good and shy. 3/4 are noisy and competitive and go crazy for games. 5/6 cause me problems - they are too cool for school and just want to talk to each other and use their mobile phones. I gave up halfway through today's attempt at a lesson plan with them, and instead sat down with them and got them to ask me questions, and I asked them questions. Trying to figure out what they were interested in learning, and teach English by natural conversation. That went better, so I'll try that for ten minutes in each class with them. They're almost teenagers and have that attitude - pseudo-tough, but in fact very young. They all want to travel overseas and none of them have been anywhere, so I think I'll concentrate on functional, travel English and see if they're interested in that.

They're all really likable in different ways. I just want to figure out how to get through to the 5/6ers.

Here are the 3/4 kids going crazy before class today. They come running in twenty minutes before the lesson starts and start playing with everything - powerpoint presentations, the furniture, my camera. They jabber at me in Korean. Then when class starts they sit quietly down in their seats. At least for a couple of minutes, until they start getting bored again. How insanely great is the English room where I teach? Actually two rooms, class room and fun room. This video doesn't even show the "cafeteria" section of the fun room.

And some photos I like:

More on my week and landing in Gumi soon, I promise.

End of orientation

2009-08-26T04:29:00.000-07:00

It ends tomorrow. After nearly four weeks of orientation, three in Suwon, another one here. I think we're all ready. We're all tired, talking about teaching on Tuesday (we think). Talking about how we're going to get to our rooms and close the door and sleep for fifteen hours. This last week has dragged at times. Repetitive classes, locked in a dodgy resort hotel with nothing around for miles, with eleven o'clock curfews and no drinking. The orientation has been a great experience, but more than the training in teaching, it has been the social networking and the cultural lessons that happened mostly accidentally that have made it so worthwhile. I'm glad I found this program.

Homestay turned out to be a good experience for me, and for most of the people here at Gyeongbuk. I was picked up around ten by my family. I was introduced in halting English to "Mother" and "Father" - that was all I ever learned of their names - and was wondering how we would communicate, when Dennis, their twelve year old son, spoke up in fluent English. It was for his benefit that I'd been invited into their home, but there was little he needed from me in the way of English instruction. He spoke slowly and his grammar was occasionally imperfect, but he was completely comprehensible with a vocabulary that was near complete. They're taught by rote memorisation here, and the kids' memories are amazing. During the weekend Dennis asked me for the English words for some things, everyday things like "parsimon" and "pond-skimmer" (a type of bug). I had no idea; his mobile phone gave him the words.

Dennis was a nice kid; I liked him. He was very smart, a little chubby, keen to learn. I asked him if he was the best at English in his school, and he told me that there was a girl who was better. I knew how he felt - my mind going back to the one girl who always beat me in class when I was his age.

We first went to Potech, the university where his father worked as a manager of the maintainance department. The only drawback to talking always through Dennis was that there were a lot of conversations about action movies and computer games. We had a meal in the cafeteria, then went to their home and played Rubikkum (sp?). Everyone found it a little stressful at first, and afterwards the father suggested, "all of us little nap?" to which I enthusiastically agreed.

In the afternoon we went to a traditional Korean village and I talked some more with Dennis. I invented a game he found hilarious, where we would point to modern things in the village and say "traditional Korean fire extinguisher" or "traditional Korean television." At six thirty we went to pick up his eighteen year old sister from high school. Six thirty on a Saturday that is. She was in school uniform and everything. The West is so screwed...

Afterwards we had a huge dinner of salt pork at a restaraunt. I was not allowed to pay for anything the whole weekend. We went back to their place, watched some Simpsons episodes, and I went for a half hour walk to the local park with Dennis. We talked about Korean playgrounds and pets and the like. He didn't have a dog; he used to have pet slugs, but they died, and he told me he thought slugs were not very good pets. We came back, I had a beer with his father, we watched Simpsons episodes then went to bed.

The next day we went to Pohang, and to the easternmost part of Korea - the "tiger's tale" according to a stylised traditional image of Korea, now split in half by the North/South border. It was a really pretty beachside area with a bizarre pair of sculptures of hands, one in the water:

Then had a nice lunch before I had to go back to the hotel.

Dennis sent me an email that night with links to some stuff that we had looked at together on the computer, and a message saying he was sad that I had to go back to the hotel so early, and that if I had holidays I should come visit them again, and he would make me a music box. Sweet.

Me with my homestay family:

What else to mention of orientation in Gyeongbuk? It has, as I said, mostly been repetitive and not terribly useful. But it's been a good chance to bond better with some of the people in my immediate area. I haven't made any new friends - don't really need any more at this point - but have improved a lot of friendships with people I didn't know so well.

Yesterday was a nice day. We had another excursion to watch a demonstration class, then an interminable trip to Posco steelworks, which they are ridiculously proud of around here. But afterwards we had samgyeopsal, my favourite Korean meal (pork belly barbeque wrapped in lettuce with heaps of side dishes), then went to a field of blooming lotuses, then jumped a fence into what looked at first to be a playground, but turned out to be a royal park from the Silla dynasty; it was incredibly beautiful. A really good time with some people here whom I really like.

I met my Korean co-scholar today, who seems nice - it might take a while for us to bond properly, but it looks like we should be able to do so. And I have a place! I haven't seen it yet, but it's a single room flat on the edge of Gumi, close to the Gumi/Gimcheon highway, on which my school is located. A ten minute bus ride from my school, great transport by bus or train to most parts of Korea. This is ridiculously lucky. Others are off in fields, have to get lifts to their school at eight in the morning, need to take three seperate buses to get to any city, or have been told by their Korean scholars that "if you don't have a car, you're basically fucked." So I'm good.

Sorry these entries have been so prosaic and technically careless. Hopefully once I'm settled I'll have time for some more reflective stuff, but so far it's all been written in moments snatched between other activities. After today I don't know how long it will be until I can get internet access, so if I'm a little quiet for a while, don't worry.

Colon Hotel

2009-08-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

Really quick update to let everyone know that I am now at the Kolon (aka Colon) hotel in my province of Gyeongsangbuk-do, for the last week of orientation, which takes place in our individual provinces. Our province is one of the largest, or perhaps the largest. There are over a hundred of us here. The hotel, an alleged five-star establishment, is a Fawlty Towers-esque facility where the pool is apparently closed permanently, and where, in my room at least, showers are not an option, and baths must be let out at a rate of a trickle, lest you flood the room.

I feel like I should do a proper update about my weekend trip into Seoul, semi-solo and semi-with my friend Katie and a couple of her friends. There's some stories there. And our last week at Kyung Hee was interesting, too. We went to Lotte World yesterday, a terrific amusement park with the best roller-coaster I've ever experienced. Not that I've been on so very many.

Today was a bit of a mess. We had our final farewell dinner, and it was badly organized. When everyone wanted to sit with their friends who were heading off to other provinces, we were forced to sit with our provinces, who were the people - friends or not - whom nobody needed to sit with, as we are with them for another week. The food half-came out, then stopped, and ten minutes later the Jeju people, who had to catch a flight, started assembling to leave. From there it got messy as people ran around trying to say last minute goodbyes. Lots of people were crying, while the co-ordinators shouted for us to stay with our groups, and then assemble. Somebody called for the Chungbuk people to assemble and nobody was sure whether they said Chungbuk or Gyeongbuk (i.e., Gyeongsangbuk-do; my province.) Then 200 guys tried to get their luggage down the elevators in the same ten minute window, and, well, it wasn't how anybody wanted it to go.

Then the luggage couldn't be fit on our bus so we sat on the bus for an hour (again - but I'm telling my stories out of order) until a hire truck was arranged. Four hours to get to the Kolon Hotel, an OK dinner, a long Q&A session, and now everyone is exhausted but high and wandering around and netting from the hotel lobby, where the wi-fi is.

Tomorrow we have a "cultural experience" - a homestay for the night with families from our province. It's a more than slightly terrifying idea to me, but I'm trying to embrace the concept. Anyway, I'll try to write a more detailed update soon of some of the stuff I've been doing, but it has been hectic, and it might take a while. I'll handwrite it out if I get a chance, on some long bus journey or other.

Cadaverous

2009-08-14T06:54:00.000-07:00

While waiting for my laundry to be done on level 12 I thought I'd write a quick update. Things have been so busy here that it has been hard to find time for this. So I thought I might tell you about my day today as an insight into what life is like here at Kyung Hee University (Suwon).

Woke up this morning to the sound of my travel alarm clock, feeling exhausted after yesterday. Yesterday finished in a not atypical drinking session at the notorious Beer Plus (soju/beer bar across from the university gates), this time to celebrate Steph's birthday. Got dressed and slumped down to the convenience store outside the girl's dormitory, had a sandwich, a canned iced coffee, and a cigarette - so much for a healthy lifestyle, although I'm eating well, for the most part. Although I can't seem to put on weight - I must be really burning through calories. Then classes.

The first class was How to approach pronunciation for Korean Elementary School Students, which was actually really good - the lecturer was very engaging, there was lots of stuff derived from Chomsky, and it was useful. It was followed by the legendary "How to Utilize Drama and Storytelling". I'd been warned in advance so got a seat close to the air-conditioners and prepared to catch up on some rest. The nervous Korean woman who gave it read straight from the textbook, then we spent a half hour on a mind-numbing group exercise. Everyone slept through it. After that, lunch - I made the trek across the mountain to the cafeteria, which is such an arduous walk that many people refuse to ever go there. The food is sometimes really good, sometimes not-so-good. Today it was pork stir-fry, again. I ate a whole octopus. It was OK. I then went back to my room to rest up a little in the air-conditioning before...

Tae-Kwon-Do! The organizers have been very diligent in providing us with cultural experiences as well. I have bad memories of tae-kwon-do from childhood (don't ask) but quite enjoyed the class. Except while practicing spinning kicks, when I somehow managed to kick a bin instead of the air I was aiming for. It made a tremendous crash, everyone looked at me, mostly with concern. "Are you OK?" "I'm fine!" I said, perkily - of course my fear of being embarrassed outweighed the considerable pain I was in. I stuck it out for about eighty of the ninety minutes, but quit before the star jumps at the end. Afterwards we had yet another class detailing games we should use with the kids - we've had about six of these and everybody was exhausted from tae kwon do; I can hardly even remember it.

Afterwards I was smoking with my friends and some of the nice girls from my class promised me that they were going to seize my cigarettes whenever they saw me smoking. I went off to eat dinner with Junh - Korean blood sausage, surprisingly good - then the girls turned up and we had a second dinner of massive loads of fried chicken. The conversation turned to rating the current Hollywood super-hunks and that lasted about twenty minutes and showed no sign of ending, so I came back to the dorm to do my washing. Had to climb to the 12th floor to find a free machine. Had two oo-bek-wan coins for the washing machine, but none for the dryer. Came back down to my room; called home. Then went back out to the girl's dorms to find a change machine. Talked to the Unkrainian girl whose name I forget while having a cigarette (of course), about exhaustion, and going too hard. She has an infected wisdom tooth and a fever, and we talked about how we'd both wanted to give it our best shot, but were feeling completely spent.

It is exhausting. Today at least three people said to me, "I can't be bothered meeting new people any more. It's too tiring." It is. There are people I talk to and like, people I don't talk to, and a scarily large group of people who come up to me, know my name, and who I simply can't place. I say, "What's happening, man?" an awful lot. This has been tremendous fun, but I'm looking forward to heading off to my province at the end of next week, although that will provide plenty of new challenges.

Still - tomorrow, up at nine to go into Seoul and do the tourist thing with some of my non-Korean-speaking friends, because I was feeling too insulated by the Korean kids. They're great, but I always end up letting them order food for me. So for now it's suck-it-up and on-with-it. But I'm looking cadaverous.

Orientation at Kyung Hee

2009-08-10T20:09:00.000-07:00

Have been having a fantastically good time the last few days. Had a little rough patch last Friday/Saturday when I was very tired, and started feeling like everybody found me annoying, which had its usual perverse consequence whereby I become quite annoying through trying too hard. Had a restup and a think and went back to my call-centre job plan of just trying to relax and focus on each conversation I had with anybody and make it pleasant. Also to stop thinking about social dynamics and how people are perceiving me so much, and be comfortable with being by myself some of the time. On Saturday we went to a Nanda performance (hard to explain: comic buffoonery with elements of tai kwon do and percussion done with cooking instruments, but very enjoyable). Then Saturday I came back to the university, Rosa had bought herself a baby guitar, we sat on the amphitheatre steps with my favourite people here and played. That night we got drunk on soju and beer and did noriban (karaoke), and it was one of the best nights I'd had here. Everybody kept saying it was the perfect group, which made me feel good, because I was feeling that, too. I think it was because all the hyper-extroverts stayed out. Since then the social thing has been fine - I feel very comfortable with my friends here, and there are other people I talk to outside that group whose company I enjoy, and I don't believe I have a bad relationship with anybody. I can't remember going through a process like this since high school - a great sorting-out of a social structure - and it has been fun when it's been going well, and a little stressful when it hasn't. But I think most people have been going through something similar, and it has sorted itself now, and I'm feeling happy both with my friends and with being by myself some of the time. So that's all good.

Had our medical checkup today - tomorrow we are off to visit a school in my province (Gyeongsangbuk-do), then going to a supposedly amazing amusement park, Everland.

Here are some pictures mostly stolen from facebook:

Noriban

Playing guitar on the stadium steps with Jun

Eddie, Jun, Sam? and me in our finery for opening ceremony. It was ridiculously hot for a suit that day and successive photos show me deteriorating and becoming cranky and exhausted, but I looked good here.

What pas
ses for a soccer field at a regional university in Korea; where we mostly hang out

The girls: Blair, Steph, Rosa, Naomi

What soju does to you - I am laughing hysterically because I am unable to make a star corner with my fingers. Very, very drunk.

Assoyo

2009-08-03T00:04:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am here. There was some difficulty with power converters, the ones I brought being useless. Apparently those sockets are Old Korea. It seems everything I was told about this country is wrong; everything I was told is Old Korea, or just internet rubbish. I've brought way too much formal wear - it looks like Austinmer in the summertime. Clothes are cheap but cheaply made. Cigarettes are not $20 a pack - they are $3 a pack. This will be problematic. Everyone in my hastily-formed crew smokes; the Korean girls very self-consciously, as it is tremendously frowned upon for them to do so publicly. A three course meal is also about three bucks when split a few ways. Coffee is $4.50 at American-style chains. The bus to Seoul - about an hour and a half from here - is $1.50. Prices, basically, are cheap but erratic.

Four of the Australian TaLK scholars, including me, were seated together on the plane; it took about fifteen minutes for us to work that out. The other two were behind us; that took about six hours to get straight. It was a so-far unique piece of foresight on the part of the organizers of this thing. For all of the first day it was Charming Nicholas, and my god; I felt like quite the experienced traveller. Such a contrast. Once we were in Korea, though, my lack of any language skills became obvious. My new Korean-Australian and Korean-American friends are schooling me up, but I need to throw myself in to the language thing. I feel too dependent at this stage, and whatever this is meant to be about for me, it's something like the opposite of dependence.

The first night here, all of us hitting our third wind, was about a perfect first night in South Korea. Our hastily-formed gang left the university, found the local town, and I was introduced to soju, the national drink, which is so horrible that even Koreans complain about it. Unlike other forms of alcohol, it actually tastes worse the more you drink it. But it's about three dollars for a bottle, containing about six standard drinks. Tastes like nasty vodka. That and some Korean-style fried and barbequed chicken made for a good start, and we bonded. The night finished with karoake. Cool.

The next day Charming Nicholas had mostly dissapeared; me and Junh, one of my new Korean-Australian friends, met up with some American scholars in the morning and I was back to feeling quiet and awkward. I don't know what it is about; something to do with tiredness, some trains of thought, a chemical thing. Some plans were made for a trip into Seoul, but it was day two and it turned out everyone here was ready for the Big Trip Into Seoul. The group became about thirty people, it felt like a high school tour group, and things got ridiculously slow and clusterfucky as we waited for everybody to comprehend the subway system and the like. This greatly frustrated me and two of my new friends, Rosa and Eddie, so we and a few others split off early. Rosa: Korean Australian who speaks a brilliantly fluent Castle Hill vernacular that constantly cracks me up. Eddie: New Jersey Korean-American, who is really lovely and split off early from the Americans and joined our Australian crew, because he was finding the Korean Americans obnoxious.

Those two definately feel like friends, as does Junh. The social thing is definately in flux, though, and it's fascinating to watch as people's truer personalities are revealed and initial relationships change, become deeper or more cautious. So last night, as Charming Nicholas was a bit AWOL, I went back to my room (Eddie and Rosa were staying in Seoul for dinner with relatives). My flatmate is Victor, another Korean-Australian. Victor is lovely but seems very young to me. He thought we had plans with the others, which I thought were vague and not happening, so he went off to meet at the supposed meeting spot while I stayed back. He didn't return until about three in the morning, and I thought I'd got it wrong somehow and had missed a spectacular night, but the reality was different. Waiting alone at the meeting-place, he was befriended by a group of South Korean "students" who took him off into the wilderness somewhere and tried to insist he perform a religious ritual with them. When he demurred and tried to leave they became stroppy and insistent. He had somehow fallen into the clutches of a religious cult and had no idea of where he was, or how to get away. Eventually at three in the morning he "escaped", evading their insistent demands that he now owed them reparation, and threw himself on the mercy of some factory workers drinking at the end of a shift. Who kindly brought him home. Glad I stayed in.

Today it seems Charming Nicholas is back. Shopping at Home Plus this morning with Eddie and Rosa. I insisted on coffee (bringing a bit of my own culture to the table); we merged up with another group of mostly Americans and coffee went for three hours. Back now with my adaptor; off again in twenty minutes for soju at the rather awesome Greek-style amphitheatre in this rather awesome university. The South Koreans do architecture on a big scale.

Serious learning starts tomorrow, but so far, yes, I am having a very good time. Can't believe I am being paid for this - a sentiment a lot of us keep uttering at individual moments of amazement.

Shout "Korea! Korea! Korea!" while listening to Pavement's "Cut Your Hair"

2009-07-31T04:49:00.000-07:00

...Dear god, what have I done?

Leaving tomorrow morning. Too nervous to write properly. Too nervous to write in anything but self-consciously clipped sentences. Have made no progress learning Korean. Haven't got past the alphabet, and only half the characters in that.

It will be three months exactly since I got back. An interesting three months... an interesting year, one which seems to want to become the strangest of my life.

People generally ask me two questions. The first is, are you excited? Which leads to me discussing my confusion over my particular physiological expression of the differences between excitement and nervousness, which is my evasive way of saying that I am terrified. I think people are only looking for a simple "yes" (or perhaps, yes!"). So, yes!

I feel quite a bit less nervous than I did three months ago, although I sure wish it was Bree meeting me at Incheon Airport rather than the beaurocrats of the South Korean government TaLK program (Teach And Learn in Korea is the acronym; the strange capitalisation I cannot explain.) I find that if I concentrate only on the immediate adventure - my flight, the orientation period, meeting my fellow "c0-scholars" (ugh, but I think I need to get used to that phrasing) - then I feel something that is a sort of happy nervousness. Is that what you humans mean by - how you say it? - "excitement"?

The second is, what is this thing I'm doing? Well, this is the TaLK website if you're particularly interested. Really simply - though no doubt I will have plenty of time for more detail over the next six months - I get three weeks training at Kyung Hee University, along with either 300 or 600 other scholars, I can't quite work out which. Lots about this is confusing, and rather rushed-seeming - I was only sent my ticket yesterday, for instance. That suits my mood at the moment, and I'm trying to embrace it. We will be taught how to teach English, the Korean language if we need it, at either Beginner's or Advanced level (about 85% of the participants seem to be of Korean descent, so I imagine Beginner's will be me and a couple of dozen other scared white people) and some other quite strange things, like a one and a half hour lecture on Korean pottery. Then there is another week's orientation in my province (Gyeongsangbuk-do) with the other scholars of the area, then from September I will be teaching little kids in the lovely town of Apo-eup. Possibly in my new suit.

Accomodation is provided. A homestay is an horrific though seemingly remote possibility; hopefully it will be some sort of high-rise boxy studio apartment, perhaps in Gumi or Gimcheon, the neighbouring small cities. Or it might be a shack nestled into one corner of the highway cloverleaf in Apo-eup; I won't find out for three more weeks. Everything happens at the last minute with this. Apparently it's a cultural thing. The teaching is fifteen hours per week, and the pay is pretty damn generous for that, particularly when taking into account the free accomodation.

It's part of the Korean government's attempts to school up their children in the English language - along with everything else - so that they can rule the world. Which they will no doubt do in a generation or two, along with the Chinese, the Indians, and all those other citizens of stable countries who are willing to work really hard for a first-world lifestyle, and not just take their comfort for granted while they pretend to be an artist. (That went from the global to the self-indicting really quickly.) Me - I'm gonna cash in on the death-throes of the West while I can. I'm also - and this is the ambitious part - going to try to work really hard and do lots of things and find a truer integrity, an artistic integrity, so that I can actually be an artist and stop pretending I am one. (Hence the "something vaguely pretentious" of this blog's new subtitle.)

The social side of things will also be interesting. I'm definitely intending to spend a lot of time writing, hopefully with the perspective that supposedly comes to a writer far from home, but this is not meant to be some On Walden Pond-type thing. According to the forums I've been reading, one can keep very busy on the weekends and see all of South Korea by making lots of friends during the orientation period. There are vague-sounding "organized cultural experiences" offered as part of the program, too. So this is my first goal: make lots of friends during orientation. Another interesting experiment in extroversion. So hopefully it will be Charming Nicholas who turns up, and not the other one. People tend to think I have more control over that than I really do. We'll see.

Apo-eup!

2009-07-13T20:44:00.000-07:00

Apo-eup, South Korea.

View Larger Map
A centre of rice cultivation. Just a few kilometres outside of the small city of Gumi, where they make textiles, rubber, plastic and metal products. Lovely Apo-eup, which is quite the transport hub, situated attractively between a highway cloverleaf and a railway line. Population 8,799. Frustratingly one short of a nice round number.

I think they need another.

More soon.

Home Again, or, Around the World in 40 Days

2009-05-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

Home again.

A couple of stories from my last day. I left my bags at the hotel and went out to kill time until my flight. An hour before I was due to leave I was in an internet cafe when my taxi guy from the day before somehow found me. How? He wanted to know if I was going to the airport. You have to be *very* good to make it in the cut-throat world of Mumbai taxi drivers. So he took me to the airport, and on the way there told me of a little shop, where it so happened he got 100 rupees for bringing sucker tourists. Did I feel like a look? I had a few hours to kill, so why not. I was supposed to be looking at Pashmina shawls, but got distracted by some gorgeous hand-carved chessmen, and ended up spending way too much money on a set. Back to the taxi. I showed my taxi-guy my chess men, and he showed me the rice-cooker he got with his kickback. We were both quite pleased with ourselves.

Got my plane home, fleeing the swine flu which was about to strike India. When we reached Sydney the hostess read out an announcement regarding identifying yourself to staff if you had flu-like symptoms. Then, in a nervous voice, she announced that customs officers would be joining us on the plane for "an unrelated reason". I'd been chatting with the youngish traveller next to me for most of the trip, and jokingly said to him, "You don't have any drugs on you, do you?" He said he didn't. And then he started emitting this terrible panic-sweat, and tapping his feet in agitation. Whoops. As it turns out, the hostess was lying - the customs people were totally after swine flu. A passenger in business class had come down with something, but it wasn't swine flu, so we were allowed off the plane. A few hours later, the Australian government brought in thermal body scanners at all the airports - I just made it out in time to avoid that.

Went down to Dad's for the night - my car was there, along with my keys - then came back the next day, called in at Tahlia's to get some more keys - she'd been kindly watering my bonsai and checking my mail for me - and had coffee with her, then went home.

My apartment looked so odd - it took me a moment to work out why. It was evening and the evening sun was coming in through the blinds. It hadn't done that when I left. The seasons had advanced in my absence.

I put my stuff down and sat on the couch. And suddenly felt this horrible lonesomeness, far worse than anything I'd felt on my trip, no matter how far I was from home or how bad the accomodation or how foreign the surroundings. I felt the lure of old habits and methods of distraction, and wondered for a moment whether anything had changed at all.

You see, for a long time while I was overseas I wanted to come home, but also didn't. Home's been part of the problem for a while now. Somewhere along the way I became like a man so afraid of nuclear war that he builds himself a shelter and starts living in it, not noticing that outside the threat has passed and the sun is shining. That's a little too literal a metaphor, actually.

People have asked me, did I have fun? It's a hard question to answer, except to say that I had amazing fun, and at other times none at all; that I was variously really happy, and really sad, and excited and confused and lost and homesick and full of adventure and possibilities. It was an "experience"? Maybe. Seems a little simplistic. It was *something*, and for a long time I think I've been a little too content with mere contentment. I feel different in some crucial, undefined way. I want to do things differently now.

I guess that's the point of travel.

Thanks to all who read this and came along with me. Hope to talk to you in real life sometime soon.

I finally find some books!

2009-04-28T02:11:00.000-07:00

At the roundabout near Veer Narriman road there is an informal second hand book market. Thousands of English language books, scrounged from who-knows-where. Prices which, in Australia, you could only find in that sort of small op-shop where two old ducks like to put their heads together and debate whether a book is worth twenty or thirty cents. And there aren't many of those left.

I gazed on them in wonder. My god, the stuff! At the front were all the recent popular fiction, but buried in huge stacks at the back were some books I'd put down money for at any time. One dealer had the best part of an old naval library - books on compasses, ships navigation, naval history. Yum. Another had inherited a psychological library from somewhere - brilliant titles, obscure stuff like "Psychiatry and psychology in the USSR" and the like. Another had a big stack of Jane's militaria guides, which always sell for $40-$50.

And I looked on in wonderment. And went through it. And felt like crying.

None of them were good enough! Not good enough to cart back home, anyway. If I'd been in Sydney I could have pulled the car up, negotiated a bulk discount, spent the day going through it, then filled my car and gone away very pleased with myself. But as good as the books were, they weren't obvious WINNERS. There was nothing so clearly good that I would want to cart it home. It was just good quality stock, at very cheap prices. (I mean, take the naval stuff - no doubt there were $200 books in there. But I had no idea which. The only way would be to buy the lot and find the winners as you came across them.)

I went away. I thought of Daryl. He was shaking his head in sorrow. HE wouldn't have left a pile of books like that without finding something. I thought of his crazy dream, never realised, of saving up his US mail, buying himself a return ticket, loading his suitcases full of mail packages, and getting himself a free trip to Hawaii. I *had* to find something.

So I went back, and looked. And eventually found a very nice first edition Secret Seven, in dustjacket. It's only a fifty dollar book, but that's ok. It's cool, and I've never had a first edition Secret Seven or Famous Five with the dustjacket before.

Afterwards I went and had pizza, then ice-cream, overlooking the Arabian Sea at dusk. That was really nice too, and all-up was one of the best afternoons I've had on this trip.

Today, feeling succesful, I got a taxi and went around looking at antique shops and book shops for more treasures. The taxi guy was happy to stick with me for the entire morning, for about $10, but wanted to take me to super-fancy antique stores in the idea that I would buy stuff and he would get kickbacks, which left both of us frustrated. We worked it out, though - he would take me to places where he gets paid for bringing sucker tourists, I would spend ten minutes there, pretending to be interested in buying stuff, then we'd go somewhere I wanted to go. All cool - we were fine once we worked that out.

There's really only one decent old bookstore in Mumbai. Nothing too old, disapointingly - I think the books fall apart in the heat here. I got a couple of things that turned out to be junk, and a really nice, completely unavailable history of the Indian Signal Corps' dress and customs. That looks like it should be a hundred dollar book. One the way out I happened to glance at a spine, which read "Hound and Horn". That rung a bell from somewhere, so I got it down and glanced at the contents page. Yes! 1932 American literary journal, containing first publications of poems by T S Eliot an ee cummings, and a letter to the editor from Ernest Hemingway complaining sarcastically about something that had been written in the previous issue about him, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald. Nice! Lacks the original wraps, but whatever - at AUD $1.20, I'm always happy to buy a journal containing first publications by three of the giants of twentieth century literature.

So pleased am I with myself that I think I'm now going to go buy this $200 hand-cranked grammophone, which is almost certainly a piece of shit pieced together from a variety of parts that will stop operating in a week. But I love it anyway.

Berlin, now Mumbai

2009-04-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I haven't updated in a while. Sorry. In Berlin the keyboards had inverted Ys and Zs which drove me to distraction. Also, I felt there wasn't much interesting I could observe about Berlin in a few days, when I didn't speak the language. I wrote this in my journal, which was about the best of my observations, and will probably make it clear why I haven't shared more thoughts:

Amsterdam reminded me of a SimCity city - all those trams. Berlin reminds me of a different sort of SimCity city - the sort where you get bored, and lay down great stretches of the city at the same time, and just hope they'll fill up, then demolish and change industrial to residential and back again, then fill up every hole with parks...

Not too profound, huh. At some point - maybe when I left the English speaking world - it seemed to become less about what Ive seen and done, and more about some sort of interior journey - an exercise in sensory overload and emotional deprivation - and that's all interesting, and I have interesting thoughts, but they're not for here. What else? Great sausages, ubiquitous beer, everybody young, some great neighbourhoods and parks. Still, I was maybe just a fraction underwhelmed, perhaps because it was overhyped to me by everybody and I expected some sort of nirvana, perhaps because I just got sick of switching between the U- and S-Bahns at Friedrichstrasse all the time. When you don't speak the language and have only a few days, any insights you have on a city are bound to seem like faux-wise travel tips from Lonely Planet. Um, what else - German 19th century painting is fucking awful. It's all neo-classicism and peasant romanticism and Bavarian castles at night. Sometimes, these strands are hilariously combined. It made me understand more clearly than anythng where Nazism came from. The Art Gallery had some good stuff, but it was all French - the Rodins and as usual the Cezannes were my favourites.

No such qualms about Mumbai. This is one great, chaotic, shambolic city. Everyone living on any spare patch of dirt, everybody running a micro-business or some sort of scam, the buildings held together with bamboo and corrugated sheeting, the traffic devoid of any rule except "get out of my way, dickhead - can't you see I'm HONKING?"

It's damn hot, though. You know it's hot when even the Mumbaiaikans are bitching about it and mopping their brows.

One of the best things I've seen on my trip - cricket being played on Oval Maidan in the centre of the city. There are about fifty cricket games going on all at once - there's a formal game in whites, with umpires, surrounded by dozens of neighbouring pitches, all with somewhat less formal games going on, though still with teams. I don't know how anybody knows where their own game's fielders are. The rules are a little chaotic as well - tip and run seems a common informal variant, but there's no "over the fence is six and out" - it seems almost anti-Mumbai, somehow. How can Australia maintain its cricketing dominance against so many cricketers playing with such enthusiasm? I would think it impossible, except for one thing: all the bowlers are CHUCKERS. Every one of them. And the batsmen spend all their time trying to play reversed shots.

Have strippenkaart, will travel

2009-04-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

Some quick thoughts on Amsterdam:

* A city of bikes and trams would be a great idea, were it not also full of idiot tourists acting like idiots and wandering aruond like idiots and "getting into the spirit of things" and riding bicycles with stupid "look at me, I haven't ridden a bicycle in fifteen years but I'm *riding a bicycle*" grins on their faces.

* I am a total tourist. You are when you don't speak the language.

* I passed well enough in the university park to be hit up in Dutch for a light. Fortunately "got a light?" is universally understood through pantomime.

* The Dutch are so cool - brutally honest and wryly amused at the idiocy of tourists.

* I am such a tourist: I saw the Van Gogh museum, the Ann Frank House, smoked weed in a coffee-shop, and wandered through the red light district at a safe hour of the early evening.

* Van Gogh - did some nice stuff when he hit his stride, but was too often either hilariously maudlin or simply incompetent. Fortunately all the tourists were gathered around the postcard Van Goghs, and there were heaps of other really brilliant impressionist works to look at. And the stuff on the top floor was great, too - an illustrator called Redon who I didn't know, but was amazing.

* Ann Frank house - formed no sense whatsover of what it was like for Ann Frank, although it seemed a good building to hide an apartment in. Bizarrely labyrinthine. Short on stuff.

* Weed in a coffee shop - Amsterdam weed is kickass. It doesn't help that I still can't roll a joint for shit and ended up smoking ten times what I'd intented simply to thicken out a massive rolling paper. It was sold to me by a wryly avuncular Dutchman so used to the embarassed euphemisms of tourists that when I wanted coffee, it took a second or two to make clear I just meant a cappucino. I accidentally got completely bombed then promptly got lost and wandered around Amsterdam for a few hours.

* Red light district - Like a Disney version of a "wild west saloon". Far less sleazy than the backpacker district. The prostitutes in the window - I don't know. Personally I'd find it more humiliating to stand near-naked in a window while offering myself for sex before hordes of tourists than to actually BE a prostitute. But maybe they're all third generation feminists who see it as street art and are working their way through college. I tend to feel unqualified to have opinions on these sorts of things.

Berlin tomorrow.

Bored at Liverpool Airport

2009-04-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

Blogging from Liverpool Airport - at a pound per ten minutes - because I'm bored. I wrote this out longhand, first - I'm not that crazy.

A train trip and shuttle bus ride have not allowed me much of an opinion on Liverpool. I saw a muddy river (the Mersey?) and some kids who talk like John Lennon. The Beatles are big here, the airport is the John Lennon airport and its motto is 'above us only skies', which was probably a better choice than 'all the way the paper bag was on my knees' from Back in the USSR.

I got freaked out at the train station by a talking bathroom. It wouldn't shut up! It told me its name and manufacturer, the location of the toilet, the location of the handbasin, and at that point I got out of there before it started narrating my micturation.

I've been meaning to document the signs of terrorism hysteria I've seen, which in NY and London was 'not much', apart from the occasional paranoid announcement or poster about unattended packages. Just now, upstairs in the dining lounge, I was stopped by a couple of bored security guards. 'Excuse me, sir, have you checked in?' 'It's not open yet,', I said. I'm just the idiot who made sure all his flights were evening flights - to allow plenty of time to get to the airport - while forgetting that check-out times meant I'd be wrestling with my backpack for hours on end.

'As good a reason as any,' they chuckled, and let me through. There's still some official propaganda about, but the people in the trenches don't care. The immigration woman at Heathrow just wanted to chat about Mumbai (which will be interesting, in this area. It's more recent, there. And Indians tend to an interesting combination of beaurocracy and chaos.)

Which is not to say I'd want to piss off the London police force. I've really enjoyed reading The Guardian each day while I've been here - from now, I will have to learn of new developments in the Ian Tomlinson story via the internet. (No time for links! Try guardian.co.uk).

This aimless ramble is what happens when I blog from boredom...

So long, and thanks for all the fish and chips

2009-04-17T10:22:00.001-07:00

The booksellers of Charing Cross Road are very good and very expensive. Trans: I didn't find anything. Totally out of my depth. Not much Australiana, and what was there made me snicker at the prices. 50 pounds for a first edition of Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot?* It's a book that Australian booksellers always try it on with, at least a little, but wow. I should have brought a case of them with me. I talked to some dealers - I am already getting in the habit of talking to strangers, and will no doubt be talking to myself before long. Apparently the business of scouting - finding a bunch of books and carting them around to the high end shops - is pretty much dead in England as well. Everybody ebays these days.

Afterwards I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was amazing, but boy I don't think I can take any more priceless antiquities. I went around really quickly past things that two weeks ago I would have stopped and gasped at for ten minutes. So today I went to the Tate Modern instead. Lots of great Miros; weird, weird building. The weather today has been pretty miserable - I've mostly been lucky so far both in England and overseas - and just now while walking to get my dinner I got totally drenched by a car driving through a puddle, much to the hilarity of a passing tourist. I swore and he said to me, in heavily accented English, 'Like movie!' and made a camera-clicking motion. Ha ha ha.

Off to Amsterdam tomorrow.

* Daryl would be irritated if I didn't add, pedantically, that it's not REALLY the first edition, as it is a little-known fact that his books were published first in the US, unusually for a Commonwealth author. (Booksellers, by common agreement, never mention this).

York, Sheffield again, London again

2009-04-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in York I crossed an International Dateline of the soul and lost a day. The place in which I was initially booked was run by Indians apparently in the habit of conducting informal auctions on their rooms, then passing on the overflow to a neighbouring establishment, which is where I ended up. This was a lovely B&B run by a 'semi-retired' Yorkshire woman who had given up the game when bookings became computerized. She immediately took a maternal shine to me, perceiving perhaps that I needed it. My room was lovely and so was York: small, and easy to get around on foot. I saw the Minster - predictably amazing, although by then my standards for England's beauty had become unreasonably high. Mostly I just walked around.

My second day there was mostly concerned with my cash issues, as I was down to about 15 pence. It was Easter Monday and everything was closed; my father had to wire money to the only open Western Union outlet, which was a small grocery store in the suburbs. It was off the edge of my map so my father had to give me directions from Google Maps, over the phone from Australia, which resulted in predicatble chaos particularly as Google Maps' idea of a street is often, in York, an historical laneway that is now a bike track or an unsignposted gap between two buildings. After about an hour of wrong turns I managed to get myself approximately in the area and some locals narrowed down my target for me. Got money from a half-stocked grocery store while feeling nervous about the shady-looking lads lined up behind me and observing my cash-wad closely.

After two nights it was back to Sheffield to return the car, which had proved a reliable if somewhat over-sensitive travel companion. I was very pleased with myself for locating the correct A road after only two circuits of the York Ring Road, and went happily off down it, only slightly disturbed by the constant roadside references to a town apparently not on my map. Approximately halfway to Scotland, I realised I was heading in the wrong direction and turned around. Fortunately I had allowed several hours for my lousy sense of direction. Back on the M1 and I was soon back in Sheffield. Sheffield is a mid-sized city that reminds me quite a bit of Wollongong, which was no help in trying to find the car return place. I circled the city centre aimlessly, hoping to chance upon it (it worked in York!), kept stopping to ask people for directions (Northerners are all lovely), eventually got a map from a helpful newsagent guy. Found the right street, the grimly appropriately named Corporation St, then drove up and down it 5 times before finding the place, which was prominently located on a roundabout I had been circling, unnoticed by me due to my efforts at catching the correct exits.

I was sorry to be without the car, but also a little happy, as sooner or later I was bound to shoot off a roundabout into an oncoming lane and kill somebody. (Although by now I'd match my roundabouting skills against any Australian driver. Still, there is something to be said for traffic lights.)

I found where I was staying, dropped my bag off - though it was still too early to check in - and went to sort out a train ticket back to London for the following day. Then I called Tash to go get a coffee and see if we could make things right. I didn't expect much from it, as when we had left it off neither of us could speak without offending or irritating the other.

So we had coffee, and made slightly grim chit-chat. Then started talking, and had another coffee, talked some more, went for dinner, had a couple of beers at a cool cheap pub, and somewhere along the way remembered how to act around each other, and why we were friends in the first place. And it was really nice, and happy, and sad - good that we worked it out, and sad that it took us until the end to get there. And I kept thinking how much I wished I could call her up in a few weeks and go have a beer and laugh about things. And, as with Bree, how much I wished some of my favourite people didn't live across the world.

I said goodbye to Tash and went back to the pub where I was staying. It was a little late by now - though not very - but the pub was obviously not a hub of Sheffield night-life. It was closed; there were envelopes stuck to various doors: ATTENTION MR N CARVAN. YOUR ROOM IS 5. PROCEED UP THE STAIRS. YOUR KEY IS IN YOUR ROOM. YOUR LUGGAGE IS IN YOUR ROOM. I followed the directions and found my room, although there was no luggage. I was too tired to be all that worried - I figured my luggage was too heavy for anybody to want to steal in its entirety. I crashed out. A half-hour later, I was awoken by a knock. The poor manager was there, out of breath, having carted my backpack up three flights of stairs. 'I'm so sorry!' She said. 'I forgot.'

The next day, today, I caught the train back to London. I'm back in Paddington, which is the next best thing to home right now. Going to catch the tube to Notting Hill to get some dinner, then tomorrow will have another try at the Charing Cross booksellers. I'm still to find a single winner to help defray the cost of my trip. At this point I could really use a first edition of Macbeth, preferably signed.

North

2009-04-12T06:27:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of updates -innternet has proved harder to find than \i'd anticipated.

But I'm spending my last pound on this post, so I hope you all appreciate it. Turns out that for whatever reason, English ATMs don't recognise my account is a chequing account. Thus i've been forced to a variety of expensive methods for getting cash... I can get cash at money change places, provided I buy foreign currency first, and then convert it back to pounds. As you can imagine, this proves expensive.

A real quick update, I don't have time for many colourful details. After I said goodbye to Bree I took a much delayed flight to London. Discovered I could not obtain cash from machines, cashed up from a moneychanger who regarded me with kind pity at just how badly she was compelled to screw me. Got the train to Paddington station, found my hostel, and crashed out.

Got up an hour or two later and rang Tash. It was nice to speak to her again. We arranged to meet the next day in Kensington Gardens. Got some food, went back to my room and watched some television.

The next day - a Sunday - I tried to visit the Charing Cross bookshops, but they were all closed. Walked around kensington Gardens, nursing my bum foot, then went to meet Tash at the peter pan statue. We got coffee, talked, then went and looked at really touristy buildings by the Thames. Then back to our hostels, and later we went to a cool English pub to have beers, and I nearly left my bag behind again.

Next day: British Museum, which left all other museums for shame, and the Darwin exhibit at the Natural History Museum. We saw a play that night - I forget the name, but it was cool if a little overly portentious towards the end.

Then, the next day, off camping! We made it to Oxford and walked around there for a while. Found the camp site - horrible weather that night, terrible sleep - up early the next morning and saw the Uffington White Horse, which was interesting if not spectacular. Then off to Bath; wandered around the town, saw the baths, of course, which as it turns out you truly cannot bathe in. The next day we took a monstrously long drive to Hay on Wye in Wales to see the bookshops. I was driving, Tash was navigating, and I tried to get comfortable with England's roundabouts, which are ubiquitous and tend to shoot off at constantly suprising angles which Tash had to keep pointing out to me (generally speaking, Tash proved an awesomely competent traveller, while I proved an equally awesomely incompetent one, viz. particularly putting up tents and orienting myself.)

Hay on Wye was a little underwhelming and I found no valuable books, although I had a nice conversation with a natural history bookseller and spent about thirty seconds considering moving to Hay on Wye and opening a bookshop. The next day was Stratford on Avon; unfortunately by then Tash and I were getting on each others' nerves quite a bit so we went our seperate ways while I tried to get money, or arrange some accomodation, both of which I was unsuccesful at. That night we saw A Winter's Tale by the Royal Shakespeare Co, which was a really wonderful production.

The next day, back to Sheffield, I dropped off Tash and said goodbye to her, then took off north. I hadn't planned to be on my own at this point and was a little unprepared, though I still had the car so wasn't too worried. I saw Robin hood's Bay, which was the most spectacular landscape I've ever seen, and hunted unsuccesfully for ammonite fossils. Then went to Whitby, where I hoped to obtain a bed, but in a Mary-and-Joseph fashion this proved completely impossible at the last minute on Easter Saturday, so I tried to find a place where I could get fish and chips with a credit card (harder than you'd think), then had a beer and went looking for a place to stay for the night.

I found what I was looking for - the most boring, slightly prosperous town, with a pub and a payphone. I found a quiet cul-de-sac to spend the night in the back of the car, had a couple of beers, and felt just about as lonely as you can feel. It was too early to ring anyone back home. I had one of those nadir travelling moments where you wonder why you ever wanted to spend money to do this to yourself, when you could just as easily be home and comfortable. Eventually I went off to sleep in the car.

Unfortunately the car proved hyper-secure - it kept identifying me as an intruder and setting off the alarm whenever I rolled over, so it made for a pretty ordinary night's sleep.

The next morning I made some phone calls and felt a little better. I headed for York, where I am now, in a lovely bed and breakfast for two nights (more difficulties as they didn't take credit cards, but we worked it out with the help of a nieghbouring establishment).

I've walked around town a bit but haven't really done anything here yet; I think I want to go sleep. It's been a while since I've had a bed, and my room here is lovely.

Right now I'm a bit too metaphorically and physically North for my liking, but it's all good. I miss home, and hope I can figure out some way to get cash tomorrow, as it turns out there are still a real lot of things you can't put on credit. Anyway, more soon, hopefully.

America

2009-04-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

(Written in Washington Square Park, typed up in Paddington)

One thing I wanted to think about while I was here was my ideas about America. America in the way I've been thinking about it: Post Sept 11, post-Bush, mid-financial crisis.

My feeling about America from across the world was that it had grown fat, lazy and self-indulgent, over-confident and with an overstated sense of its own self-importance. I now feel that's only about half-true. The part that is true is its overstated sense of its own self-importance. The Americans \i've talked to, mostly college kids, show an amazing lack of curiousity about the rest of the world. Like the guy I met who said he was a student of WWII, then asked what Australia did during the war. 'Fought in Europe and Asia while the US waited for Pearl Harbor," I said (though not quite that pithily, in reality).

What isn't true is the idea of American laziness. The fabled American work ethic seems to be going strong, although not perhaps as a matter of choice. There is a man here who opens the door for you at Dunkin' Donuts. He doesn't work there - he does it for change. Subway stations and trains are full of buskers. Now I'm in Washington Square Park, and was just offered weed by a local businessman of the park.

But of course all these jobs, though self-motivated businesses in the American spirit, basically suck. I've found myself instead, since I've been here, thinking Marxist sorts-of-thoughts, which is very unusual for me. I'f I'd grown up here I might have been the sort who goes on a lot about the Capitalist Machine and how it oppresses workers. Those ideas have never appealed to me in Australia, but here they feel accurate.

America seems to me to be such a class-stratified society, which is interesting. There are the college-educated people - generally wealthy, that being the main requirement for a college degree here - and there are the immigrants and uneducated people, trapped by an appalling minimum wage, a lack of health-care, and the consumer dream which has been shoved down their throats (I've never encountered such miserable-seeming shop attendants as in the poor-area shops here - not the flashy Manhattan stores, which are staffed by perky white kids who are probably paid something livable).

But that indulgent, self-assured American arrogance, that sense of over-entitlement, does exist here in the college kids. They have this obnoxious insoucience - all of them.

Even the accent is different, American college girls in particular having the most grating accent, an over-loud, atonal sing-song that rises and descends a scale several times each sentence, and resembles in its worse form a duck's quack. Vowels whinily extended; 'like' used as a constant punctuation. I asked Bree why they spoke like that, when for the most part their elders don't, and nor do American actresses generally. She mentioned Jennifer Aniston and Natalie Portman as two who do; fair enough.

It does seem a society whose rules were created by the rich, for themselves. A little surprising that this should be my conclusion about the land of opportunity. I don't know what the solution is - but I can sure see why the proletariat (hahaha) whould take the financial crisis quite personally.

Letterman and Manhattan Chili Co

2009-04-01T22:18:00.000-07:00

Today Bree and I went to see if we could get put on standby for the Late Show with David Letterman. As we emerged from the metro station, a man in a jacket said to us, "Do you guys want free tickets to the Late Show?" Yes! After answering a simple trivia question and acting enthusiastically we were given tickets. That was easy. We had a couple of hours to kill - enough for me to get in one thing from my list of things to do in New York - go to the Manhattan Chili Co.

Most readers of this would be familiar with my Famous Chili. I am one of the few people in Australia who are into the very American dish of chili, and I learned my chops from what I consider the best cookbook I have ever owned - an early nineties recipe book from the Manhattan Chili Co, which describes in loving, technically revealing detail the elements of a truly great chili.

It was in the dining concourse of Grand Central Station; it was a tiny food outlet like any other in the middle of a food court. It wasn't what I had expected; I think the Manhattan Chili Co has come downmarket over the years. The various chili recipes were, however, the same as in my recipe book. I knew what I wanted: Numero Uno, which formed the basis for my own beef chili recipe.

The verdict: it was OK, tasted quite like mine. Probably not as good as my best, as certainly less attention had been paid to the details and balance of spices. I thought it was way heavy on the cinammon, and the meat could have been more coarsely ground. Dissapointed? No - liberated. I now feel more confident to strike out for farther chili shores on my own, without having in my head the impossible standards of the Manhattan Chili Co.

Anyway it gave Bree lots of opportunities to crack wise about how I was probably the only person to ever visit New York to see a food outlet in Grand Central Station, and how I should have told the cashiers about it as it would probably have made their year. Back to line up for Letterman. By this point it was freezing - even the New Yorkers were looking cold - and we had to line up for half an hour while an insanely peppy and preppy staffer got us in the mood with lots of leading moronic questions designed to provoke a reponding "Yeah!" from a crowd. We were asked repeatedly if we were pumped and I was under instructions from Bree to look enthusiastic so we were not assigned to the back rows.

So I was not in the mood by the time we got in the theatre, but the show was a lot of fun. The set looks quite extraordinary in real life, and Dave was in very witty and sharp form, although I didn't know any of the guests. Letterman is quite amazing in his wit and professionalism - there was not a bum note, and he works from only the very briefest of cue cards, extemporizing spontaneously in a flawless manner. The slightly intimidating sense one gets, though, that one has to laugh and applaud or risk spontaneous ejection adds a somewhat crazed hysteria to the whole thing. Perhaps that's the point. I sure laughed a lot - whether because I was amused, or brain-rattled, I couldn't tell you.

Plane flight

2009-04-01T05:16:00.000-07:00

The starting of this blog has been delayed by me not having access to a working keyboard; sorry!

The night before I left I went out to have a meal with my father at the Wollongong Golf Club. The meal was fairly average, but it was a club, and towards the end they came around offering us trivia sheets. Trivia! I convinced my father to play. We were only going to stay for the first round. In the first round we bombed out, embarassingly, due to a three point question on basketball teams - and also my father's hilariously obscure answers to the question of "name six countries outside the British Isles that end in -land." He generated obscurities from the past 5000 years, and, I suspect, Marx brothers movies. Anyway, this raised his and my competitive instincts, and in the second round our small team of two blitzed the field and we won a free bottle of wine. We didn't do so well after that, but it was a good night, and my father really enjoyed himself - I'm not sure I've ever seen him enjoy going out so much.

And I had a good time, too. Which was a good thing, as I've been generally not so great this year. Feeling bad about myself for a variety of reasons. And I was nervous about going away. The next morning - after my father and brother had seen me off at the airport, and I'd negotiated the exit lounge, purchasing along the way a bottle of duty free vodka (which will become important later), and got myself succesfully onto the plane, I felt good. Good to be leaving, excited about having some sort of change/break in my life. Overseas trips providing a useful sort of life division, I find; an ending of a chapter, if not a whole Part.

So I was undelighted to discover the proverbial, legendary overweight woman in the seat next to me. Well, she was large, and I reminded myself that I should not consider her "fat", for she might be a charming aeroplane neighbour. I asked her to slip by, and she grunted at me in an unfriendly fashion. This exchange proved the highlight of our plane relationship - man, she was a surly cow! She immediately took possesion of the arm rests, and a few inches beyond into my space. I tried to stake a small claim on the armrest - let her know I wasn't intimidated - but she proved to have no body consciousness whatsoever. Normally, a stranger will shy from casual physical contact, but not her. By the end of the flight I had retreated to the far half of my seat. Meals proved particularly difficult as her gargantuan chicken-wings flapped out a good foot to each side, leaving me with no room whatsoever to wield my terrorist-proof cutlery.

So, sitting there, I felt good, excited, relaxed. Then the pilot came on, and I'm not a nervous flyer, but he unnerved me. He mentioned we would be leaving shortly, that there was a small delay from traffic control - all normal. And then he started - there is no other word for it - bitching. "We'll be swinging out onto the north runway, then taxi-ing back south, we make a left turn, then a right turn - if you can believe THAT - and then, if it's OK with air traffic control, we might be able to take off." Whoah! Had he not slept well? Was he about to go postal? I sensed we would be in trouble if it came to an emergency landing on the Hudson.

Not much more to report on the flight - except for Fat American Woman's elaborate sighing whenever I had to get up to use the bathroom. We landed at LAX, I had difficulty finding where I was supposed to connect with my next flight. I was carrying with me a duty-free bag, containing vodka and cigarettes. Anyway I now had to negotiate the US homeland security's screening system. They only had one working metal detecting pinging machine, and the queue was a mile long. Everybody had to remove their shoes to ensure there were no shoe-bombers. The pinging machine was manned by a single asshole beaurocrat. Now normally, at those machines, you go through - you ping - and somebody waves a wand over you, and waves you on through. This guy had his own system. If you pinged, you were sent back through and told to figure out what was pinging, and removed it. Of course, everybody pings, so the queue wasn't moving. I removed all my metal and went through, and pinged. I was sent back. I said, "I have no metal other than my clothing!" This cut no dice. I searched my pockets, and found a single Australian 5c piece. I removed it and dumped it on a post. I went back through, no pinging this time. But more problems - they were concerned that my duty-free bottle of vodka might be used to create a bomb. I denied posessing the neccessary chemical skills for this. I said that I didn't believe anybody had those skills. I pointed out - to the girl, who was actually quite lovely - that if such skills did exist, and if I had them, I probably would have used them on the twelve hour flight from Australia. She escorted me back to the check-in section and told me I'd need to have my vodka stowed in the hold. (To her credit, she told me to come back to the front of the line when I returned). So the Qantas people and I discussed what to do with it. We wrapped it in a hessian bag with loads of tape and fragile tags, and together gave it one chance in three of making it. Personally I thought it a dumber idea to have a loose bottle of high-proof alcohol in a glass container rolling about in the hold, but I was given no vote.

Back to the pinging machines, and the asshole beurocrat. I was now late. I was pinging again! He returned me to the other side. "We just did this!" I said. "I have acquired no new metal." "If the machine pings, it pings," he said, profoundly and with a couldn't-give-a-shit shrug. He told me to remove my belt. I did so, and this time didn't ping. "Now you know," he said - smugly and menacingly. "Your machine is making it up as it goes along," I muttered. I collected my belt, and my shoes - again - and made it to my flight.

I got off at JFK, my bag was late off, and I started to worry. Then, after everyone else had left, my bag appeared - followed, a few seconds later, by bottle of vodka, remarkably intact. I left the terminal, and Bree was there, waiting for me, peering about blindly. I felt a great wave of affection and relief; it was really nice.

More soon about my time in New York, hopefully. Apologies for bad overlong sentences and excessive adverbs; this is all single draft and not edited this at all.