This is Cookie ‘o Maniac. It sounds the name of a lesbian, Irish serial killer. It’s actually a cake.
In Korea only newer, Western-style apartments have we’d think of us an oven- 4 burners, big and boxy, with a huge steel belly to roast and bake in. As a result, every single bakery-style outlet from Dunkin’ Donuts (Yes, that Dunkin’ Donuts) on up has a dazzling array of beautiful cakes. It’s not uncommon to see Koreans sitting on the subway with one of the tell-tale takeout boxes, especially on weekends.
I don’t think I really need to explore the fact that this is one of my favorite things about Korea. Cakes change with the seasons. For awhile, cakes in the shape of houses with cookie roofs were big. There’s a mocha cake in the shape of a giant cappuccino. There’s one in the shape of a piano whose flavor remains an enticing mystery. For Murray’s birthday I got a chocolate ice cream cake studded with chocolate meteors and a white chocolate UFO the size of my fist. I will take literally any opportunity to buy one of these.
Which is not so say buying one is easy. They come pre-packed with all kinds of strange questions from the staff. I’m used to the brusque in-and-out of small Italian bakeries where they tie the box with twine and send you on your way with a minimum of verbal exchange. Here there are questions about dry ice and the anticipated time on consumption, queries about the kind of candles and age of of the eaters. All cakes come with those little booze bottles with a string you pull to make them explode in a shower of confetti strings.
Anyhow, if you’d like to peek at a cake selection, poke your nose over this way., although the selection on that page is just about half of what you’d find in any place you walked into.
Gamjatang (Literally, ‘Potato Soup’, although that’s a misnomer, hold yer horses) has quickly become my go-to “Feel better and try not to beat anyone up” meal. Mary found it first, introduced to it by a Couchsurfer she stayed with. She made somw inquiries with her students and they directed her to an literal hole in the wall in a nearby market.
One of the most shocking things about Korea- and Asia in general- is it’s strange verticality. A Western sensibility tells us that anything worth visiting is on the ground level. This goes double-triple in New York- everything above 1F is businesses and paperwork. Not so in Korea where PC Cafes, restaurants and bars rise up to the 14th floor and beyond. I’ve really learned to look up, but that’s a different topic.
Back to misnomers- While the name literally translates back as potato soup, Gamjatang is actually a red, spicy soup whose primary distinction is the great big hunks of primal-looking pork spine swimming in it’s hellish depths. For 5,000 won (About $5,mentally, something like 4.75 literally) you get a big stone bowl of the stuff with enough meat to make a satisfying meal of. The idea is to pluck the great big hunks of long-simmered spine bones out of the soup and to use your chopsticks to pry the soft-like-cotton meat from their crevices. A great deal of fat and something unidentifiable, but marrow-ish, comes along with it.
The meat itself is a major delight. This sounds a bit strange, but the first thing that comes to mind (at a good Gamjatang place, anyway) is corned beef- Salty, musky-gamey, a little mysterious, completely delicious. The broth is spicy and salty and has that weird Korean soup flavor going on- Something earthy and deep, like oregano, maybe Ginseng. I poked my nose at a few recipes and it seems to either come from the very, very, very generous shake of black pepper most Korean soups get or possible ground sesame leaf.
So, for something called potato soup, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of potato, does there? When ordered in individual bowls, Gamjatang comes potato-less. But if you’re in a group of 4 or more you can order positively massive cauldrons of the stuff for between 20 and 30 dollars, depending. If you order the larger size, that’s where you get your potatoes. I’m not sure why the smaller sizes arrive without potatoes. They’re not expensive and available year round. Go figure.
Gamjatang feels like a quintessential Korean traveler’s meal. It’s strange and unique, it’s got a terrifying cut of animal in it and it’s cheap. I’m not sure what the availability is like at American Korean restaurants, but if you see it on the menu, give it a go.
If you’d like to give it a go at home, I found this helpful little video. It might take an in-depth visit to an Asian grocery, but I can vouch for the results.
We have returned from being abroad and the effect is, well, underwhelming. A lot of people told us they ‘admired’ us or ‘really wanted to do what [we're] doing’. I don’t think they completely understand that in between the temple exploring and peak climbing and sun rises in places not on a map, is a 9 to 5 marathon of cultural misunderstanding and irritation so broad and awful it nearly led us to quit after one year.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the kids and I like the teaching and I understand fully that this is a sweet deal, but the kinds of weird requests and bureaucracies and implied expectations you face from the environment you work in is just. It’s like a fun house, but instead of those mirrors that make you look fat, there’s someone spraying mace in your eyes.
Let me relate a little story from this morning. I walk in and I get this:
“We need a picture of your scanner”
“A what? A picture of my scanner?”
“Yes. For new ID card. We need a picture of your scanner”
“Oh, a picture of me. Scanned. Like a computer picture, a JPG or whatever?”
“Yes, we need it now”
“I don’t have one now. You just told me you needed one.”
“Okay, but we need it now”
“I don’t have one. You just told me you needed it like a minute ago”
“Yes, but please understand we need it”
Those two words. ‘Please Understand’. They may as well be the official motto of Korea. These are the words they use whenever they’re either trying to screw you over (As in ‘You cannot have any vacation that week. Please understand’) or when they’re asking you to bend space time (i.e., the time they asked for 26 lesson plans to be due in HALF AN HOUR.). I’d rather press my face against a power sander than ever hear the words ‘Please Understand’ again. In any instance where they’re uttered, no sane person could ever possibly accommodate the logic needed to understand the request.
And that’s how I work out my anger.
I had to go get a second health check today. The last time we had to do this was our first day in Korea and it served as a sort of introduction to the myriad challenges of living abroad- Following directions in pidgen English, interpreting hand signs, learning when to say ‘Yes’ and smile nice. In a lot of ways this second check served as a kind of, well. Let’s just be cute about it: It was a check-up in two ways. The first was the standard blood test, pee test, eyes and weight/height. The second was to see if I was any better at all about navigating a foreign country.
They sent me off on my own today (Last year we had an escort) and things went about as well as they could have. After some initial confusion about the nature of my visit, I signed my name in a couple of places and they sent me upstairs. This part I was okay with- Years of playing video games have left me with a freakish ability to memorize the floor plan of a building the first time I set foot in it. Stepping into this hospital for the first time in 11 months it was like I worked there. Into the elevator, 2nd floor, take a left, blood lab on the left, X-ray on the right, general check up at the end of the hall. It turns out I needn’t have worried. The first moment I stepped out of the elevator I hear someone call “Scoot?”. It turns out they had entered my name into the computer as ‘Scoot’ and for the next 40 minutes anytime I betrayed even the slightest look of bewilderment someone would call ‘Scott’ from down the hall and that was that.
Just like last year I flunked that colored-dots/numbers test and the nurses buzzed about nervously acting like there was no way I could be doing as badly as I was. Every time something needed to be said the four of them would confer and then the youngest girl would step forward and offer one of two words of English and I’d offer a word of two of Korean and we’d reach a rough and uneasy understanding that ended in a lot of whiteout on the official forms.
Anyway, the whole thing went okay except that I forgot there was a pee test involved which went kind of hilariously because I had ALREADY PEEED (?) before leaving for this little obstacle course. It ended with me chugging water from a soggy paper cone in the hallway, half-filled pee cup in my free hand. There’s something about that that feels particularly futile and obvious. Could you be any more transparent- figuratively and literally- than standing by a water cooler with a pee cup in your hand? The answer is No. For a little while I think about trying to just add water to the pee, but I figure that’s gotta come up as 400 kinds of shady when they do the actual test. When I’m lingering in the bathroom waiting for the urge to strike an old man offers to help me fill it up. I actually think about this for a moment before I imagine my mortification when the test announces to my school that I’ve got syphilis, liver problems and god knows what else. On the embarrassment scale, showing up with a quarter full pee cup is a bargain next to having explain that you let a disease ridden old man pee in a cup on your behalf. Okay, enough about pee. I eventually retreat with my feebly-filled cup and the woman just kind of shrugs and takes my blood and that’s that.
I started writing this in kind of a sour, meditative mood. But the longer I’ve written for the prouder I am about how I kind of managed this whole thing without much issue. So, that’s how you go about doing anything here- Blind faith, a lot of nodding and a deep, illogical faith that things will ‘work out’.
I was riding the subway back home the other day. I was alone, although I can’t remember why, and on the 2 line that, for a few minutes, crosses the Han River outside. It’s summer and humid and hanging somewhere in the 80s, so in the distance the smog settles like London fog against the rows of utterly identical apartment buildings, but they look so far off they may as well be at the end of the world. The sun is popping off the water- it’s late so it all looks like gold. And in that weird moment, in the way sunset-to-dusk tends to do, I feel like I’m at home and then like I’m lonely.
These moments are infrequent but each one is a kind of miniature revelation. One of the really surprising things about traveling and living abroad is the sudden discovery that down to the very most basic, common experiences of life, other people in other places simply think and feel differently about them. Let me re-make that point: Most Americans have a semi-similar kind of childhood. Play outside, watch TV, cereal commercials etc. In the long run we tend to normalize our already unreliable memories in a gesture of social capitualtion- We want to fit in, so we do. And in that way most American people share a kind of national experience, an emotionally-atomic similarity. Go somewhere else and those atoms get split. Different cereal commercials, different games that got played outside, different ways of being in love. It’s fascinating but at least a little disturbing. It’s one of those ways you see yourself growing up, the abandonment of the idea that anything at all might be the same forever.
Anyway, miniature revelations. Live abroad for long enough and you start to feel between things. You file away your common-atomic experience because it’s useless to you. But give your brain enough leeway- taste something familiar, smell something you remember- and it’s like opening up a little wormhole into your past life. A piqued fit of nostalgia. It comes and goes like a bolt of lightning, you’re here and then there and then here again. I ate 2 of the world’s worst sausages last week because they tasted like the kielbasa my grandfather used to buy at one of the now-shrinking-number of Polish butcher shops. I regularly eat my schools unbearably watery and terrible Kimchi Jigae because it bears a passing resemblance to my mother’s stuffed cabbage (Not that your stuffed cabbage is watery or terrible, Mom).
I am not really a sentimental man, but these things flit like ghosts in the back of memory popping up to jump out of dark corners every now and then. They’re important. While our time here feels like. I mean, it’s the present and the present feels like forever until it isn’t and then it’s just a footnote, but. You can’t see the future. I forget what my point was except that it’s easy to forget that this present will eventually depart and these small reminders of a life lived across an ocean, in a different alphabet, on a separate continent will probably be present tense all over again, raised like Lazarus. And the watery Kimchi stews and lousy sausages will be the things that sit in the dark corners waiting to rouse the memory of standing on a subway car all alone, crossing the Han River.
Living in a country where World Cup soccer is a going concern is, as far as I’m concerned, as important an experience as visiting the landmarks and learning the language. For Americans soccer is still a D-List sport, maybe a rung or two above Jai-alai. It’s gained some peripheral traction in the zeitgeist, but it’s professional standing is nearly non-existent. Of course, to the rest of the globe it’s the only thing keeping us from nuclear war, the only thing that confirms their pan-global, common sense of person-hood. Knowing this and seeing it turned out to be two separate things, however.
Point A: Saturday night was the first big game of the cup for Korea. Mary & I were out in area that’s usually pretty packed on a Saturday night. It is not an exaggeration to say that once the game started we were the only people on the street. It would’ve been like walking in a ghost town if not for the fact that every restaurant, every bar, every cafe was packed top-to-bottom with spectators, participating in the creepy spectacle of one or two hundred people per room all staring, unblinking, in the same direction.
Even street vendors who were unable to leave their post had small televisions or watched the game from a cell phone. People who couldn’t find a table to save their lives stood outside of restaurants and bars and looked in, drinking beers purchased at a convince store. I cannot understate how absolutely thorough this was. I’ve never seen this many people engaged in the same act at the same time.
That said, neither Mary nor I are people with a keen interest in sports. The two of us headed to our favorite bar, a place with a strong pour and a frankly apocalyptic Long Island Iced Tea and found it completely empty. They had no TV and, hence, had no customers. It was just the two of us and 4 bartenders, crowded around a cell phone, watching soccer.
It turns out that we didn’t even need to watch the game. At every missed shot, every scored goal a cheer would come up from the street in all directions, in living surround sound. The broadcasts must have been off by a few seconds because we’d hear it from the north end of the street first, then traveling southwards and finally our cell-phone bound companions would cheer.
In an era of fractious political opinions and global tension, it was nice, at least for 90 minutes, to feel like everyone agreed on something.
We know this couple who somehow manage to churn out 2 or 3 fully featured videos a month. I do not know where they find the time to do it- Mary & I are either on adventures, recovering from adventures or working. Which sets up this weird thing where unless you are RIGHT HERE NEXT TO US or ROPED INTO ADVENTURES, it probably seems like we’re lazy and secret people who do not like to share their adventures. This is not true!
It’s probably a work flow issue. Or the lack of one? I teach 6 or 7 hours a day 5 days a week and when I get home I put in another 2 or 3 hours making tomorrow’s materials. I will spare you the sad arithmetic on that matter. The point is this: Leisure time is at a bit of a premium. But I’m making a resolution here, for my own sake, to maintain a strict 3-post-a-week diet if only to clear out my backlog of photos, videos and stories.
On the photo front: I took some 600 photos on vacation. About 150 of them went straight in the Recycle Bin for various reasons. Of the 450 remaining, I selected about 150 I wanted to bother with sharing. Of those 150, 60 are now available over at Flickr. I’ve got another 200 or so sitting on my camera’s memory card.
The entire process of dealing with a set of photos that large has done wonders for my decision making faculties. Or maybe I’ve just shut down my aesthetic sensibilities altogether. Publish or perish? Some variation thereof. POINT: They are getting out there quickly, whether this function of skill or necessity is up to you to decide.
So, a story: Last Wednesday was election day in Korea. No one at my school could tell me who was being elected, but a bit of sleuthing revealed that it was Mayors of cities, governors of some major provinces (Think: States) and some odds and ends municipal folks. The way you win a Korean election is like this: You rent out a pick up truck and make a stage on the back. For a month and a half before the election you drive this truck around town from 7 AM until, oh, 10 PM blasting things like Korean dance remixes of “If You’re Happy and You Know It…”. If you’re really in it to win it, you’ll hire some older women to sing and dance in the back. And if you’re candidate #8 (They’re numbered for easy recognizance) you sing karaoke from the back of your bumble-bee yellow pick up all day long, spending much of the evening looking more like someone who’s hijacked the truck than someone who paid for it.
In the evenings you park your truck at a busy intersection and 100 of your closest advocates get together to do enormous choreographed dances. And if you happen to walk by a column of them they all stop whatever they were tending to, bow deeply and shout in Korean at you. I felt bad after awhile, it was kind of like YOU DO NOT NEED TO BOW I CANNOT VOTE!, but it also made me feel important which is NICE.
Oh, look, here’s a video about it!
This video also managed to cause a hilarious internet shitstorm because anytime a white person says something about Korea, Koreans wig out! I like this place and all, but it’s. It gets inside you in weird ways. I keep complaining that we’re not going on an unlikely and exhausting vacation this summer, but it’ll be nice to come back to the USA and remember why we left, I think. Was that a bad thing to say, too?
The thing that’s a little loony about this particular Korean wig out is that they’re saying “THE ELECTION IS VERY SERIOUS AND YOU DO NOT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY”. Oh, gee, something about all the foam hands, the dance remixes of lousy songs, the mobile Karoeke trucks and the dancing candidates made me forget HOW SERIOUS THIS WAS.
Look, I get that it was serious. And the election results were an unexpected rebuke to the ruling parties handling of the Chenoan sinking and tensions with North Korea. We are discussing war! And possible nuclear annihilation! I just don’t how we’re supposed to take it seriously when, well. Look at that video. Does it seem even the slightest bit serious to you?
So, I don’t know. American elections are often called circuses, but it’s just a metaphor. Korean elections are literal circuses and the best dancer wins. Make your own deduction.
Every 4 months or so with the changing of the seasons Dunkin’ Donuts rolls out about 10-12 new donut flavors. They usually abide by a theme. When we first arrived in Korea the theme was “International Donut Festival”, which yielded the radically awful ‘Lentils Cacao’, a chocolate frosted donut spiked with uncooked lentils, and several varities of fried good covered in garlic-sugar glaze. Charitably speaking, this was a bad time for DnD.
In the winter we had SUPER FRUITS FESTIVAL which seemed to be some kind of vague attempt to push donuts as a health food. They shoved pomegranate and acai into every conceivable variety of donut. Two things came out of this alive: A blueberry-frosted, yogurt-filled bismark and the concept of dropping big pop-rocks on top of donuts.
Fast forward, we’re on our way to summer and we’ve got some doozies. A green frosted, black striped ‘watermelon-filled’ thing, a banana-shaped banana filled donut (The uncomfortable Freudian associations are free!), several varieties of “fruit+coconut” rings, about 3 new bastardizations of the chewy, rice flour ring donut and several interesting stabs at the “fruit+fruit+pop-rock” donut introduced in the last collection.
Anyway, I hate when the new donuts pop-up because all of a sudden I feel pressured to try every single one. And I will. Today I started with the ‘Orange-Mango Chewisty’. The donut itself is crossing-guard-safety-vest-orange and the frosting is the color of whatever the water in Chernobyl looks like. The Chewisty is a miracle of donut science. This is a mishap of donut mad-science. Mango has that weird, metallic, intense flavor. Anytime you buy something that tries to approximate that flavor it ends up tasting like a mouthful of pennies. No exception here. Steer clear if the color of the thing wasn’t sufficient warning.
Next week: That watermelon thing. I will take pictures.
The story about Muuido Island goes like this:
It’s a swim-able distance from mainland Korea. But they run a ferry because people like to bring cars and whatever across and because if you had to swim to it, no one would ever go. That morning we called ahead to find out when the last ferry ran. We got two answers, 7:45 and 8:00. Both were late enough that if we left with enough time, we should be able to make it.
Events transpire! Our bus begrudgingly drops us off about a 1/2 mile from the ferry and even then the driver only does so with a breathy grunt that seems to indicate that he drops off a lot of white people on this muddy shoulder of the road. It’s 7:40. Our friends are already on the ferry. They are stalling the captain. From the shoulder of the road we have no clear view of the ferry, but what we do have is about 50 pounds of camping stuff. It’s a long story! It’s also a heavy bag to be wearing on your back. At any rate we end up doing this thing that can only be described as “bootcamp-y”, this kind of stooped run where we’re trying to go as fast as we can with more weight than we can probably bench press strapped to our back.
We make it the quarter mile or so to the water’s edge and have this weird, awful movie-moment: In the dusky twilight a ferry disembarks about a half-mile away. It’s 7:50, there should still be a ferry running at 8. We resume the boot camp run, this time to the ferry terminal. It’s not easy. There’s about a quarter mile of two-lane road and then another quarter mile of single lane road that runs out and across the water. It’s narrow and we’re dodging traffic as we go. When we get to the terminal the old guy working the booth just kind of laughs at us and says there will be no ferry despite what the clear signage on his booth says. We argue with him in better Korean than I thought we had. This goes on, back and forth, for 40 minutes or so. Our friends on the other side make an attempt to hire a small fishing boat, but it’s a no-go. The ferry sits anchored in the shallow waterway between the islands. I am a lousy swimmer and yet I’m confident I could, packless, make it.
We walk the 3/4 of a mile back to where the bus dropped us off. We need a place to sleep, the next ferry doesn’t leave until 7 AM. In the distance is a single neon sign on top of a 10 story building: PARK HOTEL. We walk another half a mile or so. The hotel is obscenely expensive, being near the beach and all. There’s an expensive but tasty Korean restaurant across the street. Murray orders for me, dduck bulgogi, a kind of marinated beef soup in a stone pot. The rice comes in those big, metal bowls that are meant to be filled with water at the end of the meal, forming the popular dessert of rice tea. I cannot fathom how anyone finds this an acceptable dessert, but I like it enough.
Before the food comes I decide to walk back closer to where the bus dropped us off figuring that there had to be a closer hotel. The whole area near the ferry is one huge construction site and for most of the walk I’m pulling my shoes out of ankle-deep mud and tripping over steel rebar. The only moment when I appear animated is when something emerges from a stack of tires next to a junkyard-y looking, dark corner of the area and I take off running before I can find out what kind of sharp-toothed thing makes it’s home in a stack of tires.
I find another hotel more in line with what we expected: A terrifying little upstairs of a strip-mall, one long hallway and 16 rooms and most of the lights flicker in a way that in the parlance of Horror films means: You are probably going to be chainsawed to death. But the room is cheap and it’s close to the ferry and so I walk back to the restaurant and eat and we walk back to the hotel and watch TV in English and fall asleep.
The rest of Muuido tomorrow, I am genuinely exhausted. Tuesdays are rough.
One:
So it’s 2:45. And she finally gets someone to tell me: “Last year we told you lesson plan 1 page. But now 2 page. Now lesson plan 2 page. 2 full plage okay?” and then she goes “And next week we tol you only 2 lesson plan. But now we need all 9 lesson plan, plus the 9 lesson plan for following week”. So, 18 lesson plans, 2 pages: 36 pages. Okay, when do you need them by? “3:30″.
3:30. They want 36 single spaced pages to appear in 45 minutes. I told them that was literally impossible to accomplish and the one lady started crying because I guess her boss was telling her that he HAD TO HAVE THEM by 3:30 and that he JUST FOUND OUT himself. So everyone is on everyone else’s ass about an act that is literally impossible to perform. Everyone is freaking out on everyone else because they can’t levitate a truck or fly to the moon or make make a house out of kimchi.
I managed to get 2 of them done. They were still upset. But here’s the kicker!
3 weeks ago someone handed me a piece of paper. They kept saying “Write a topic write a topic” and when I was like, “A topic on what?” they said “We don’t know. BOss give us this paper, they say write a topic”. So I wrote a topic. At 3:30 as my afterschool kids are walking in, some lady comes in and says, “We need your 6 page report on topic by 5″. More crying ensues when I report that, sorry, white people cannot bend space-time like Korean people. I tell them I’ll have it tomorrow which no one is happy about.
I also have a hilariously stern conversation with the Vice Principal and tell her that I need 2 days notice on these hijinks in the future. She says “Sometime only 1 day notice!” and I say, “Then it’s 1 day late. Or you can cancel my classes” and she says “No late, all classes!” and I say, “Then no paper” and we go back and forth and I try and be clear about the fact that you can’t expect someone to pull 36 pages put pof their ass AND NOW I AM CHUGGING COFFEE in order to write the most passive aggressive 36 pages ever.
Two:
To give you an idea of the kind of premium they place on English education here, let’s tell a story. It’s week 8 of the semester. My Wednesday 5th grade class has been canceled 3 times, with another class canceled tomorrow. I’ve had 5 3rd grade classes canceled (But I see them twice a week, so maybe it’s not as bad?), but today they canceled so the kids could practice their Track and Field games? Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to sit here and do nothing for money, but everytime a principal says “Oh, our students are falling behind in English!” I want to strangle them because it’s like they’ve never, oh, been in charge of a school before? Here’s a little pedagogical pro-tip: If you cancel 50% of your classes, your students will probably do only half as well!
Anyway. You could very easily write a monster thesis on the problems with English education in Korea, but some of them are stupidly obvious.
The new Sleigh Bells track is maybe probably the best thing to try and kill me in a long time. For a long time people liked to use the words “angular guitars” when reviewing music. This thing has guitars that are like 8th-dimensional time-space guitars, alongside speaker-annihilating crunk out booty bass and sugar rush, cheerled girl power vocals. It is the best of everything.
If you’re looking for something to listen to, NPR is streaming Owen Pallet’s live set from Webster Hall last week. I’ve seen him live a few times and he strikes me as one of the rare, gigantic geniuses of music currently working. He’s not just a fully accomplished and completely wonderful orchestral arranger, he’s got the soul of a pop songwriter. The two meet in the middle in the most striking and beautiful way possible. His live sets are always a special treat- He never seems to play a song the same way twice. Big songs get a minimal treatment and quiet songs get a little lusher. Add in a couple of live-only songs and it’s always a thrill when a full set pops up. Give it a listen.
