Before I got any further, ah-hm. The Korean Files!
"Biker Denim Speed Tested" (File this one under the ever-growing 'ouch' stack. Jacket.)
"The Semitol Leeching" (Are those even real words? Key ring.)
OK, part two of Ye Blog update is mostly photos. I guess that means I'm going to have a part three soon. Or maybe I'll just wait till next weekend to do an update. There's just so much to say and no energy to spend. The morning schedule is really taking its toll. Add to that the revelation via Gavin that Soju is nothing more than rice-flavored ethanol. Ethanol has many useful applications in our modern world. There are cars that run on pure ethanol, it's a great sanitizer, and with a freezing point lower than mercury, ethanol makes for a delightful antifreeze. I've been drinking this stuff. No wonder Makali Man shakes his head and waves a disapproving finger at me whenever I reached for the soju at the corner market. Don't drink that, man, it's bad news. I really shortchanged Makali Man. He's one of the smartest people I've met here.
I walked into ESS one day last week and found the 2E students lining the staircase with dictionaries in their hands. I figured correctly that this was one of Mr. Kim's ideas. Every two stairs for eight flights of stairs stood a student, pensively reading whatever page happened to fall under his or her thumb when the book was opened. Though these were the same students who had made forty-five minutes of my previous Friday pure hell, I still felt a pang of sympathy for these ridiculous flesh-and-blood monuments to zany leadership listlessly reading dictionaries in the freezing, dank stairwell.
Mr. Kim stood at the top of the stairs, beaming with pride, and immediately pressed me into documenting the odd, vaguely humiliating arrangement of the school's paying customers. Sure, I said. What living man could turn down an invitation to document outright buffoonery? My photos don't do the event justice. Check out Gavin's blog for better shots (his lens is wider than mine).
I spent part of Saturday shooting footage for an upcoming timelapse documentary of the Busan subway. Ever since I saw the movie "Baraka," I've been hot to get my paws on a camcorder. The problem is that to get five seconds of good timelapse you need to shoot about a half-hour of footage. This presents problems, the biggest one being simply finding time to kill loitering in a subway with a running camcorder. Being afflicted with ADD doesn't help, either. Luckily, I have started reading ridiculously long Russian novels (I'm currently plowing through Tolstoy's "Anna Karinina") and I still have my still camera to distract me.
The residents of Busan never have a problem killing time. Down time is nap time. I've seen people passed out in the middle of sidewalks, lobbies, subway 'meeting places,' and even in the middle of a mall. Exhibit A:
Over the weekend I also found time to spend with another American teacher name Kristen. She was very new to Busan and was wondering where all the other foreigners were. She contact me through this blog and we met at the Centum City subway terminal. We crossed the Gwang-ali bridge via taxi and went to Ole' 55 for dinner and a couple drinks. I shot some of the best pool of my life (which isn't saying much, sadly).
On Sunday Kristen and I took the subway to Seomyeon and wandered through the neighborhoods high up on the mountain circling the main commercial district. This weekend marked the Lunar New Year, and everywhere we went the Korean people were festooned in the bright, happy colors of their traditional dress: Hanbok. Don't pronounce the 'k.' Good, that's better.
Kristen and I did a lot of walking. Earlier in the week I bought a pedometer at a chun-un store for...chun-un (one U.S dollar). By the end of the day Sunday Kristen and I had put 15 miles and 25,000 some-odd steps on our feet. That's a lot of time to talk.
Kristen, a native of Chicago (pronounced 'Sh,' not 'Ch' for all you phonetics geeks out there) and a fan of strapping herself to a fiberglass board while being dragged around a lake behind a motorboat, had come to Busan only two weeks earlier. She worked for a small school in Suyoung with only a handful of Korean teachers and made pretty good money. A speech language pathology major in college, she is like many people in Busan: Searching for something. Is speech pathology the right path or should I make a turn and go down this teaching road? I know the feeling.
I figured a day of taking whatever path looked most interesting would probably do us both good. We went from Seomyeon to Daeyeon to the UN cemetery. We talked up and down a wide spectrum of topics. The presence of such an intelligent, engaging person was refreshing. Kristen is a much more experienced traveler than I, and I enjoyed hearing about her tenure living in Spain. By the time we parted at the Daeyeon subway terminal she had worn two blisters in her feet and my back screamed from lugging my tripod and camera gear around for two days. I was asleep before I hit the bed Sunday night and I didn't wake up till 10 AM the next morning. Consider this past weekend seized!
On Monday I was to meet my co-teacher, In-hye, and her twin-sister In-Gyeong in Haeundae and take the Mipo ferry out to Oryukdo to see the famous islets. But the weather was cloudy and so we made a dinner date in Nampo-dong. In-hye is tutoring me in Korean on Saturdays, and we've been getting to know one another in slow motion. She likes to swim and has dreams of working for UNICEF as a translator. So my weekly Korean lesson is also a chance for In-hye to polish her English.
You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.
Over a spicy dinner of gochujang-BBQ'd chicken, the girls quizzed me in Korean, and I tinkered with their conversational English. I always take advantage of these informal Korean encounters to straighten-out bits of Korean culture that are vexing me. FOR example, Koreans have different words for sister and brother depending on who is speaking. If a younger brother wants to address his older sister, he calls her his Nuna. If he is addressing his younger sister, he calls her his yadongseng. An older brother is called a hyung, and a younger brother a namdongseng. 'Onee' is a term of endearment girls call their older sisters. This gets confusing, especially when you bring twins into the mix. How did In-hye and her sister In-Gyeong address one another? There's no straight-up word for 'sister.'
"She came out first," said In-hye, indicating In-Gyeong. "She is my 'onee.'"
Mystery number 1,674,978 cleared up. Onward.
Well, that's all I got for you right now. I've got to sit down and really study this script for the "Creation" play. I'm God, you know. Later. --Notes
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