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.

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.

To be blunt about it: I’ve been busting my ass the last few days. I have a hellish afterschool class that is best titled “Me Vs. 25 1st Graders”. I don’t blame them (THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: You are 5 years old. A weird Korean guy walks into the room and tries to teach you Korean, but he only speaks Korean. What do you do?), but it has quickly become the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. My spare time has evaporated as I scramble around trying to think up new ways to keep them from tearing ass around the room, ripping everything off the walls while I futilely attempt to hold back the torrents of trouble that are amassing. I’ll recount the finer episodes later. This is about “In C”.

“In C” is the piece of music that puts my head back together when it has been rearranged. It is the piece of music that almost single handedly sponsored the American minimalist movement in contemporary classical music. Dudes like Steve Reich and John Adams might not be about were it not for Terry Riley’s harebrained idea to change music by destroying it. Radiolab (The 100% foolproof barometer for how much I like a person is how diehard of a Radiolab fan they are) recently did a small piece on it. And it was wonderful.

Anyway, the original recording of In C, part one, here:

Those of you with ambitions can find literally dozens and dozens of covers, remixes and performances of In C. They are almost all totally lovely. They put me back together.

What’s the opposite of a groove? A peak? A sharp, prickly peak? Yeah, that’s what I got back into. First day of school in Korea is such an enormous nightmare. To wit: I’m now teaching 3rd Grade, which is fine in as far as anything that doesn’t kill me dead is fine, but they threw out the old books before the new ones came in. I literally have no book from which to teach. I’ve also been told that the new curriculum has no English language teacher’s edition.

Do with that what you will.

Mostly I’m glad to be back. I like having routine and purpose. But juggling my free time is always tricky. I have that very unannounced project lurking down in my task bar, I’m still staring down a stack of vacation photos a mile high and I’m pecking my way through learning to plot waveforms in a tracker so that when I get down and out about being a miserable guitar player I can make cute little Gameboy songs to cheer myself up. I like having lots of free time for goofy projects. I am not always the wisest executor of it, but when I get under the gun (Haha, that means “Have a job”) I get kind of frantic and hop from project to project without any real regard for making progress on any of them. I need a personal assistant or something.

4 Months in Korea from Scott Stephan on Vimeo.

This is something I wanted to try for a while. It took me a long time to find video software I was competent enough to use. Now, after a grueling 30 minutes, it’s done! Ta-da! Enjoy.

There’s a natural kind of impulse to always think of consequences as bad things. I don’t think it comes from a conceptual place- We understand the difference between good and bad outcomes, of course- but it’s probably linguistic. ‘Live with the Consequences’, etc etc., it’s usually used to indicate that we’ve done something undesireable and will be made to suffer the course of things. More, there’s an implication that there are logically bad consequences ahead- i.e, they are a certain result of our actions.

As you get a little older you tend to realize that this is rarely the case. Bad people get away with terrible things all the time and good people suffer as a result. Consequences are often anything but logical and results can seem to come with all the dependability of a dice roll.

Still, it would be safe to say that Mary & I have been the recipents an extordinarly good set of consequences. We’ve gotten to see a lot of the world and live in weird places. We get to eat well and meet interesting people and pursue weird jobs in languages we don’t really understand.

For all the good stuff, there’s bad stuff, too. This a profoundly weird time to be away from home. It hasn’t quite felt like Christmas since college, really. I’ve enagaged in an increasingly severe set of ‘Christmas Bootcamps’, designed to jumpstart the old feeling. I’ve watched every terrible Christmas movie released between 1990 and the present day. I’ve tried drinking myself stupid on the days leading up to and the day proper (PROTIP: DOES NOT WORK). I’ve tried reading Christmas stories and novels, blah blah, etc etc., I have put in my time on this.

Point being that maybe you don’t get it back because it’s just not there to get. Which is weird because I got it back this year without even looking for it. Maybe it’s hanging out with kids, maybe it’s not working crazy hours for pocket change, maybe it’s having a little more free time. But some zillion miles and 50 languages away from home it came roaring back. As a kid I could never wrap my head around the fact that some people find Christmas depressing, but I get it. I’m not planning to throw myself in front a Subway train, but there is a distinctly melancholy look to this Christmas season.

Which is, well, back to consequences. This is one of them, having to be nowhere near anywhere and accepting the fact that, like Tom Waits sang, “Home is anywhere/I lay my head”. That’s some real growin’ up right there. It concides neatly with the growing importance of religion in my life as it commands a kind of faith: You either believe in what you’re doing because you need to be doing it or you don’t. There are costs and they’re paid as straight off as anything else.

We did, however, get quite a nice Christmas tree at a peach of a price and it looks lovely, indeed.

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined? — Bertrand Russle

Fortunately, the semester is kind of winding down, so maybe we’ll get to all of the things we didn’t talk about yet. Like Samgyupsal and heated floors, the great huge pleasures of a Korean lifestyle.

So, Thanksgiving, as you might have inferred, is not a holiday that celebrate in Korea. They have a Thanksgiving-esque celebration in early October and a sort of vague interest in the concept of American Thanksgiving, but they’re not really paying attention. Which, whatever, of course. But this was our first Holiday away from home.

Thanksgiving is always kind of political- Whose family do you eat with? What house do you eat at? Who’s going to bring that terrible dish again? It’s a little bit barbed, but even at it’s most prickly we spent it among family. And we spent it in the warm and eager period of holiday bliss. Forget your test, forget your crappy car, forget your lousy boss, you’ve got two solid days of ‘Whatever’ time.

But it was weird because we never got that. What I kind of really hated was that Thanksgiving snuck up on me. We spent Halloween by the beach in Busan, but Halloween always kind of comes and goes and, let’s face it, beach weekend is better than ‘Get drunk and throw together a costume at the last minute’ weekend. But Thanksgiving is a Major God of the Holidays, sharing it’s lofty perch with Christmas and lording over the Minor Gods of President’s Day and Columbus Day. And so to just kind of wander into it was. Weird. Like walking in a fog.

Anyway, I’m not a sentimental man, really. I don’t miss much from back home, I’m not pining for America in any intense way. I like the constant challenge of being somewhere ‘else’. But Thanksgiving gave me this lackadasical sadness in my gut, it curled up in there like a grinning Chesire Cat. I couldn’t shake it.

So we decided to just have Thanksgiving. Now, if you’re doing this you have a few options. CostCo has frozen turkeys for about 60 bucks, but this presumes you have an oven. And if you do have an oven, is it larger than a toaster? I didn’t think so. So that one is right out. Option 2 is that a handful of international restaurants have Thanksgiving buffets available for a range of offensive prices. We considered this but the earliest reservation they had was NINE AT NIGHT. We were bummed about this. But, things as things does, someone told us that you could order a turkey from the military base. And to prevent TERRORIST ASSUALT, they’d just deliver it to the base gate. $94.95 for a meal fit for 12. We called in, made the reservation and started inviting people.

The problem was that none of us had ever been to the Military Base. And for an enormous military complex, it is stunningly difficult to find on a map. And Korean Taxi drivers don’t understand the words ‘army’, ‘military’ or ‘garrison’. Pantomiming a man shooting will not aid your cause. Regardless, our neighbor Jaime and I set out to pick up this turkey from the military base we didn’t know how to find. It took us 2 and a half hours and about 4 close calls.

I’m going to skip ahead here and say: THIRD, we went to the wrong military base. Did you know there were 2? There are. Do not go to the one with the guys in body armor WEARING enormous light up ‘X’s that mean ‘Go away’. But if you do, a six foot Korean who sounds like Ray Ramano’s TV brother will suddenly speak perfect English and sneak you past the guards and only then, on Korean military soil, tell you that you’re in the wrong base. Was that a test?

Anyway, he’ll also say, “Leave the base and go up the hill”, which sounds pretty easy. Except that the hill is half a mile away. Long story short: We got our turkey. We literally had EXACTLY enough money, down to pocket change. We took a cab home. We had 11 people, 8 Americans and 3 Koreans, and we ate everything. It felt like real Thanksgiving and the cat in my guts shut up and went home. And everyone drank too much because you can. It was, at the very center of it, nice.

What’s not so nice: A hangover, a school day that starts extra-early and a ‘Teachers Trip’ that is SEVEN HOURS LONG. It starts at 3. It ends at 10. I might die in the middle.

I’m dying for a better camera. I left the D70 at home because it was a bulky dinosaur that only accepted an obsolete memory format. Does it take pictures? Yes. Should I complain? No.

But all we have on hand is Murray’s beloved PowerShot (Why, yes, ther very same one used to take pictures of JESUS) and a surprisingly agile camera phone.

But if I just wanted pictures I could nab the D80, which is reasonable given that the prices are through the floor. But the D90 takes sweet, sweet 720p video. And I keep saying: ‘Dude, you do not need video’, but then I see stuff like this:

And money DISSAPEARS from my wallet.