Sometimes people think I’m just kidding when I talk about vague Koreans can be about their plans. But I just had this conversation, verbatim:

“Next week you will go to new school and teach new students in afternoon, Monday-Friday”
“Wait, what? Teach them what?”
“I don’t know”
“What grade level are they?”
“They didn’t say”
“Where is the school?”
“I don’t know yet”.
“What about my other classes here?”
“They will be canceled”
“So I’m going to an unknown school to teach an unknown class to unknown students while my regular students have their classes canceled?”
“Please understand”

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.

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 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.

When we finally arrived it was a little past 4. Mingwha is supposed to be a big temple for foreigners to visit, but when we arrived the only other white person around was a Russian woman enduring a 7-day vow of silence. Not that we went to be around other white people, but it may have been comforting.

Shortly after arriving they showed us to a surprisingly modern room- Heated, with running water and a private toilet. They gave us the daily schedule- Prayers at 5:30, dinner at 6, tea at 7, tea ceremony at 8 evening meditation at 9, free time thereafter, but lights-out at 11, wake up at 4 AM. Buddhists are, duh, vegans, so dinner was interesting. To be completely honest I’m blanking on the details, but I remember some kind of pickled bell pepper that was totally unlike anything else I’ve ever eaten. It hewed more towards that shocking pucker of neon-colored candy than anything I’ve ever come to expect from a vegetable.

Prayers were. Well, I think everyone else was at ease, but here’s whats between the lines: I spent the entire stay in a state of neurotic disease. I didn’t want to offend. The monks were deeply understanding and didn’t seem to care one way or another how many prayers your offered or how deep your bows were, but I couldn’t help but keep track myself. The prayers were a 4-step process that felt more like the Macarena than a religious devotional- Bow and chant and clasp your hands and unclasp and down on your knees, bow your head, feet crossed, hands at the side of your head and then up and down and I think I’m out of sync and I can’t remeber if I’m supposed to bow this time or not and. I over-thought it. No one noticed, but it’s hard not to feel under the watchful eye of some celestial-CCTV when you’re faking your way through religious ceremony in a 500+ year old temple.

The tea ceremony was also an amusing bit of theater. When we walked into the small building housing the ceremony, I was the only man in the room. They quickly directed us to a seat in the back corner where I was happy to kind of hide away. There were about 16 participants in the ceremony, 8 on each side of the room and everyone else watching from the periphery. What happens next is kind of a blur in my mind, but I ended up being the 16th member of the tea ceremony. Surrounded by women dressed in Hanbok, all of whom could probably conduct the proceedings blindfolded. The ceremony itself was plagued with technical issues. The soothing meditation music was subject to that going-the-way-of-the-dinosaur problem, the CD skip. This gave the candlelit room less an air of soothing calm and something more like a public access How-to-Meditate TV show directed by David Lynch. The Twin Peaks of zen calm. There is a deep contradiction there.

Anyway, my major problem was that I was seated cross legged from the entire 90 minutes. I vaguely remembered a story about a famous-to-me guitar player who had passed out drunk on his legs and nearly lost them. By the end of the 90 minutes I could no longer feel my legs, just a broad pain-y pain and the enduring sense of vertigo that comes from a deep psychological belief that you longer have legs supporting your form. This led to a good deal of panick-y fidgeting, followed by immediate hissed corrections from the Korean tea-pro grandma on my right. It was less Buddha under the lotus tree (?) and more Charlie Chaplin. If Chaplin lost his legs in some old-timey accident. Hit by a Model T or something.
By the time bed time rolled around, I was more than ready for a bit of passing-out-and-away. Which I did, promptly, interrupted only by the glow of an iPod. Did we really bring- and then turn out- iPods to a Buddhist temple that’s older than our home country? YES. And I’d do it again.

4 AM wake up and everything else in the THRILLING CONCLUSION to the Temple Stay story.

We still owe you a story (or a dozen) about vacation and I am just now finally settling into the 400 photo backlog I have waiting for me. It is coming! But of interest to you might be the story of the temple stay. Sometime around the hosting of the World Cup, Korea’s largest order of Buddhist monks decided to open up their temples to outsiders. For about $50 per person, per night you can sleep, eat and pray with the monks. Mary and I had a 3 day weekend and decided we’d temple stay one night and go see a nearby city for the other two days.

So, we decamped on Thursday evening. In keeping with late Winter Korean weather, it was drizzly, foggy and largely unkind to living things. We hopped on one of those hi speed trains and headed way down south to a coastal city called Mokpo. Mokpo has no beaches, but it has like 7 ports or something. Party! By the time we arrived in the late PMs, it looked like the set of a grisly horror movie- Creepy mists curled around our ankles while no other living thing seemed to be awake. Most larger cities have a selection of skeevy hotels available (Some rent by the hour, I’m sure you can provide the necessary calculus to divine why that is a popular option), but Mokpo seemed to have none. I made Mary angry by insisting that I heard heavy footsteps following us, pestering her with a made-up story about the Butcher of Mokpo and doing my best dramatic slow read of Korean shop signs (“You-mahn-skeen, I wonder what that means”).

Eventually we found a suitably terrifying alleyway filled with old Korean ladies who were asking us if we wanted to sleep. We passed them up and headed for the building at the end of the street that said HOTEL in enormous neon letters. It strikes me that if the Butcher of Mokpo wanted to kill and eat us, opening a roach motel with the only English signage in town would be an excellent way to go about it. The hotel was 25 bucks and we settled in for the night. We’d need to be awake in the morning to take 2 buses out to the countryside and then cross our fingers that we’d be able to find a cab to take us the mountain to the temple.

That turned out to be the real adventure.

The story of our temple stay tommorrow. I have a rare evening of nothing to do and I’m taking full advantage of the opportunity.

I don’t have enough on my to-do list. Add “Learn Guided by Voices covers” to that list.

So, we have all of these vacation pictures and videos and writings, but then Mass Effect 2 came out and everything is on the BACK BURNER until I DEFEAT THE COLLECTOR MENACE AND SAVE THE GALAXY. AGAIN.

That should take me a few more days.

Everything after Christmas:

Well, we did Christmas and you saw the pictures of that. New Year’s was, to be diplomatic, was a mixed-bag. We decided to go skiing! At this point it is important to know that I have never been skiing. But every Winter Mary begs and begs and I always manage to put it off until the temperatures rise to something more survivable. This year the invitation come from somewhere outside, Megan’s co-worker Rachel who, for some reason, finds us not only tolerable but entirely preferable.

So, after work we all packed into the back of Rachel’s boyfriend’s car and headed off to, uh. Somewhere. It was 4 hours away, which was just as well. We all took little car naps and watched movies on our iPods and generally enjoyed the now entirely alien concept of a long car ride. I haven’t been inside of a car that’s not a cab for months, let alone packed into one for a long trip. I know my parents probably came to fear long trips and I sort of hated them at the time, but I missed them in some deep way. You hate the trip but it’s ultimately just a signifier for going somewhere, usually somewhere fun. A change of pace, at least.

We got there around 11 and almost immediately packed back into the car to catch some fireworks down at the resort. New Year’s! I spent much of the fireworks show huddled as deeply into my jacket as possible. I hate the cold. Hate the cold. Hate cold. We got back around 1 and Rachel’s other friends had arrived. And a moment of cross-cultural awareness began: On New Year’s, Koreans start cooking and drinking somewhere around 1:30 AM. By 3 AM, being good company, we are all severely drunk and completely stuffed. What meal is it when you start eating around 2 AM? Early breakfast?

Anyway: Up around 10:30 because checkout was at 11:15 and off to the mountain. Cross-Culture Awareness moment #2: Lots and lots and lots of Koreans go skiing on New Year’s Day. Now, I’ve never been skiing, but saddled in something like 3 coats, 2 pains of gloves, 3 pairs of pants, 2 scarves and a hat, holding a pair of skis and 2 poles and waiting something like 90 minutes to get up to the top of the mountain should have been a sign that things were maybe going a little off-schedule. I had managed to rouse a pretty good mood, though. Our prior sports attempts had actually gone pretty well: I became an avid bike rider and a reasonably good ice skater. I was hoping that skiing would turn out the same. I had a lot of time to mull this over. Going up the top I began to entertain a ridiculous fantasy of becoming a ski instructor. My imagined-prodigious talent would surely carry me through.

Let me sum up the experience thus: If it took 90 minutes to get up the mountain, it took us the remaining 3 hours of daylight to get down. I am not good at skiing. I will never be a ski instructor and, in fact, I will probably never be a skier, either.

You may have heard we had a spot of snow. The biggest spot in SIXTY SEVEN YEARS. Which makes it sound like we got FEE AND FEET OF SNOW IN A MIGHTY BLIZZARD. It was more like, I don’t know, 10 inches? Korea doesn’t get a whole lot of snow.

Anyhow, hilarity ensues when a culture that is used to dealing with flurries gets something suited more to the East Coast. First: They don’t own any snowplows. The main roads are okay-ish because everyone is driving on them, but 2 days later the back alley is still full of snow.

Second: They don’t own snow shovels. They just get their brooms out and sweep at it.

Third: THEY USE MARBLE EVERYWHERE. SLIPPERY. I’ve fallen on my ass 4 times this week.

Still, they were decidedly non-chalant about it. I asked my co-teacher if they always get this much snow and she said “Yes, every year this much” and I wanted to call her a LIARYOULIAR. Once in a lifetime! Or once a week in any other cold climate

Merry Christmas! Check out the rest of our Christmas pics and video over yonder.