5 day weekend! It’s Chuesok, the Korean Thanksgiving. I’m told the cities essentially empty out over Chuesok, we’ll see. Anyway: Lazy Friday. I have 4 hours to kill and I’m doing it my favorite way: Pleasent Family Shopping. My infatuation with dead brands is matched only by my fierce nostalgia for a time that exists, for me, only in photographs. Toss in some obsessive research and lay-history and I tell you I kill DAYS at this site. For those of you with even the weakest interest in urban planning, branding, the history of surbab America, design, architecture or ‘the funny’, I cannot suggest this highly enough.

ADDENDUM: Dumpy Strip Malls is it’s bratty younger brother.

You're CRAZY.

So, this is a feature I’ve been really excited about: Stuff You Can Drink. My favorite part of heading abroad is hitting up the grocery store. The Anthroplogist-Smarty Pants in me wants to tell you that you can learn sooooooooooooo much about a culture by hanging out in their grocery stores. But the unabashed truth is that I just like to eat. And I like to eat things that are weird and unexpected. In this regard, Korean grocery stores are a revelation.

I’ve started with beverages because I love beverages. Those of you who spend time around me might be surprised by this- I’m largely a Water-tarian when it comes to drinking liquid. This is because most everything in the United States comes in a grotesque size that’s been absolutely stuffed with some of the world’s worst-for-you things. And part of that is a personal problem: If you hand me 16 oz, I will drink 16 oz. Again, Korea has been a revelation. The vast majority of drinks come in 8 ounce and under sizes. Most of them are not a whole lot better for you, but they’re half as big and sensibly portioned and most ring in under a buck. Hence, I cannot help but try everything once.

With that in mind it’d make sense to start off with something I’d suggest to people I like. But sensibility is not my strong point and so I bring you Pine Bud Drink. 10 words or less: This is something you’d crave if you were insane. Like, literally insane. Not “Haha, George you’re so crazy mixing all the sodas!” insane. Kill little boys because the freezer told you insane.

It tastes like it promises to. It tastes like someone made tea out of a Christmas tree. And not just the good pine-y part, but the tar-y, earthy bark part, too. It is nothing so much as a liquid tree, roots and all. It’s a deep, verdant green. It reeks. I don’t know who would drink this or why. Is pine a commonly requested flavor? I’ve never in my life even thought: ‘This could be improved with the taste of pine’. This is on the same plane as PVC pipe tacos.

As an addendum, I brought this can to class as part of a project. Most of my kids speak barely any English, but at least one of them mustered the skill to say: ‘Teacher, you DRINKED THIS?!’. I did.

Astute readers will note: “Dude, you got your internet installed and yet your website is still broken in something like 40 ways. What’s your deal?”. To you I would say: I am both lazy and busy. Which is, when I’m not busy, I’m lazy.

We’re sort of rounding a corner on our time in Korea. We’re getting more used to it and less exhuasted by teaching, but still trying to configure our free time in a way that doesn’t transmute it into OMG BUSY TIME.

Part of that means I spend too much time playing Team Fortress 2 and debating the merits of overseas shipping of merchandise. The rest of it means that on my big list of stuff to do in the quiet moments “Wrestle with Wordpress” isn’t in the Top 3. Yet.

We’ll be working this week to get an Archive in place (Since all of our older posts are dropping out of sight, even if they still exist) and make those links up top actually go somewhere. And over the next month or so we’ll set the rest in stone. But for now we’re just quiet and chill and letting our brains grapple with the reality of a place that sells cauldrons of soup for a buck fifty.

Yesterday we played a game where you have to unscramble the words in a sentence. The sentence was “Eat your soup with a spoon”, with spoon looking like “nopos”. One kid JUMPED out of his seat and read deliberately: “EAT. YOUR. S. S. SOUP. WITH. A. PENIS.”

I lost it. No one else laughed because they have no idea what a penis is. And I don’t think he did either.

Rotiboy. Rotiboy. Rotiboy. Say it thrice and know the true name of God, hidden in ancient texts. Rotiboy. This is Rotiboy. Rotiboy is a baked bun of some kind, filled with butter and maybe cheese.

The bun tastes like the an ice cream cone. Or a warm birthday cake.  It tastes like a compressed stack of pancakes.  It tastes like love. Like love. Like a first kiss.

Rotiboy is one of the Top 5 things I have ever put in my mouth. To try and be accurate: It smells like fresh ice cream cones, with the toasty, crisp texture and aroma of waffles, but a soft, maple-y fragrance like pancakes is also there. It’s everything that is really wonderful about that class of toasty, nutty breakfast foods. And if the whole thing was a big loaf of that, fine. But it’s not.

It’s hollow inside. And I struggle to tell you what’s on the inside- It has a salty, creamy tang as if they’d packed it full of dairy-fresh butter before baking it. But it’s also sort of savory with a deep umami flavor that makes me think of nothing so much as parmesan cheese. But it’s not really a savory/sweet thing. It’s something new. It is everything wonderful about melted butter and dairy and cheese, all that mouth-filling umami rushing up to rattle your neurons and fulfill your cravings.

I have had Rotiboy gifted to me twice by kind women whose entire place it is and was and will be on this Earth to ferry the Rotiboy to me. They are gifted muses, servants of a higher power whose only name shall be: Rotiboy. Rotiboy. Rotiboy.

There are 46 in Korea alone. If you ever wanted to get filthy, horribly rich, open a Rotiboy in New York. The line would stretch to Pennsylvania.

That last post was supposed to be called “Sleepy”, but then I got all hung up on making excuses and missed the point: I am sleepy.

Teaching is exhausting work. It’s a lot of work behind-the-scenes, writing lesson plans and conjuring Powerpoints, and then it’s a lot of work on stage. I have 6 classes on my busiest day and 4 on my least-busy. That’s between 240 and 160 minutes of teaching in a day. On some occassions that’s uninterrupted teaching, one class after the other.

My long list of post-collegiate careers (Office drone, ice cream scooper, cafe manager, short-order grill dude, Marketing Drone, web developer and now ESL teacher in friggin’ KOREA) sometimes makes me feel like I’m comitting some epic act of penance for an evil I can’t even comprehend. I am basically sympathetic to the entire universe at this point.

I can’t look at a clerk stuck behind a counter and not feel a pang of the kind of dreadful bordeom that eats at your desire to be here. I see a fry cook and my ankles ache. I see the lights on in Seoul’s tall office towers and I wince. I think about the teachers who put up with my myriad miseries and I can only say: I am sorry in a way I could not have been then.

Which is not to say that I hate my job(s). I really like my job(s) and I like feeling that, at 25, I could confidently walk into almost any career in the known universe this side of Bio-chemist and and get the hang of it. I like being someone who knows the pain of being a cog in the machine and the enormous pressure of being the machine entire. I like feeling a genuine solidarity with the girl who hands me my change and I think I’m more patient and understanding and hopefully generous than most of the people who wander in off the street.

The thing left unsaid is: Scott, what will you do, finally? And that’s a completely different thing. This one is just about being and doing and how they can, in rapid succession, change us entirely and push us into new modes of understanding. Closing comments via David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

and

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master”.

And Abraham Lincoln:

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

And so I guess this became the introduction to a much, much larger theme and I’m sure we’ll get there, but not now. File it away. This one was just about being happy and understanding the world around you, about finding yourself in weird places that tire you the fuck out but wake you up.

I’m sure you’re all dying for pictures. And we’re dying to show them to you! But we still don’t have internet at home.

When you get to Korea you have to apply for a special ID- An Alien Registration Card. You basically can’t sign up for any goods or services (Bank accounts, cell phones, cable TV or internet etc etc. Think of everything you need an ID for. Now imagine you can’t have it.) until you have one. It’s more paperwork. Despite the fact that Korean government knows everything about IN TRIPLICATE, it requires that I tell it everything about me again. And fork over 60 bucks for the pleasure.

So, we’re still waiting for our ARC. Which means we’re picking up internet where we can get it- Upstairs on the roof, downstairs on the street, at school, at the library etc.  It’s awfully unreliable and a total pain in the ass to boot. Need some clipart? Unplug your laptop, put it to sleep, walk down 9 flights of stairs, buy a drink from the C Store, set up at just the right angle on the flimsy plastic tables (I’m not kidding. 2 of the 4 chairs don’t get any internet. The other 2 have a great connection) and hope your connection doesn’t get interrupted by a passing bus.

Heh.

The good news is that our ARC paperwork is in! Which means that we should have internet in, uh. 2 or 3 weeks? Fingers crossed.

One of the great things about moving outside the US? Health Insurance. Yes, I had it at my last job. But my copay was $250. Which means that for everything below severe injury I was on my own. Need a course of antibiotics for strep? Even the “low-cost” clinic nearby was $65 just to get in the door.

We were talking with a friend who’s been here a while and had some kind of sinus disorder. She went to a Ear, Nose and Throat doctor here in Korea. She explained that he gave her the works- Cameras up the nose, some kind of test, an x-ray thing etc etc. The total bill? $7,000 won, about $5.75.

Right before we left Mary had to go to the doctor. Since we don’t have sub-standard, socialist, slow-ass medical care in the US, we only had to wait 3 hours. After visit and perscriptions? Nearly $400. And she’s still sick- We couldn’t AFFORD to go back.

We had to get a full work up here for our Visa. 40,000 won, about $30.00.  It took maybe 30 minutes from the time we walked in to the time we walked out.  X-Rays, blood work, visual, height, weight etc etc. Boy, this socialist single-payer system really blows, yeah? Where’s the wait? Where’s the obscene bill?

A reminder to all of our American pals and family members: There’s still a debate raging in Congress. It has unfortunately been hijacked by an insane and manipulated minority. Matt Tabibibibibibibibib, who can be a blowhard, does a great job of breaking it down on his blog.

Call your congressman. Just because you HAVE insurance doesn’t mean you WILL ALWAYS have insurance. This American Life recently did a heartbreaking episode on ‘Recision’, or when you go to use your insurance and they say, “LOL haha, no”. Private Insurance options only work for the extraordinairly wealthy. Help America to join every other developed nation in the world. Block out the buzz and do your homework and demand some serious change.

As for me, I’m just glad I don’t have to be terrified about getting sick anymore. And I’m glad Mary and I can finally afford to get her sinus infection cleared up. It’s insane that 2 people who worked 50+ hours a week couldn’t afford to see a doctor.  They had to get on a plane and cross the ocean.

As someone struggling to do mental dollar-to-won conversions on an hourly basis (It’s about 1250 won to a dollar, however a Won has a goods purchasing power of about a dollar, which means there’s a kind of perpetual 25% off sale going on as long as you’re changing in from dollars), I found this AV Club post amusing:

“I have a rough idea of what a car costs (and what gas costs, though that’s not an issue on The Price Is Right), and I go grocery shopping every weekend so I know what I should pay for Rice-A-Roni. But throw in a personal computer, a trip to Hong Kong, a jet ski, a hot tub, a sofa and a Cartier watch and I become like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. How much is a TV? About a hundred dollars. How much is a candy bar? About a hundred dollars.”

Also, re: a gameshow in a consumer economy that takes place on the internet, i.e. When everything is at a discount, what’s the real price again?

Something I did not know before coming to Asia: Asian bathrooms are terribly pragmatic. You may be familiar with the concept of a shower stall- Asia is not! Our bathroom has a toilet and a sink and a shower head that’s connected to the sink. The expectation is that you enter the bathroom and turn the shower on. And just pour water all over the bathroom.

Try this. Go ahead. Go walk into your bathroom, hook up a garden hose to your sink and just spray water all over the place. The obvious complications of this have already been addressed by a team of Korean engineers: One is a metal shield for your toilet paper. The other is a drain in the floor. But the floor’s not sloped and the shower head is positioned to flank the shield, so it leads to an enduringly amusing game where we pack all of our bathroom supplies into the medicine chest before showering. It’s also lead to the practice of keeping two old t-shirts on the floor by the bathroom door because anytime you need to use the bathroom for the next 4 to 6 hours, you gonna get wet feet, yo.* The light switch is also outside the bathroom and around the corner (Which baffled me until, haha, I realized the danger of having a light switch inside the room you wantonly water every morning), which makes me feel like I’m on a Korean version of Candid Camera every time I stumble into a dark bathroom and slap at the walls.

Otherwise, it’s just like showering at home.

*Sorry. Mary started playing Solitaire, which in Windows 7 has gotten a whole library of cute sound effects that mostly make me wanna poke my eyes out. I had to listen to Ghostface at max volume to keep from DYING, LADY.

We were warned that the weather in Korea would be unbearable. Surely, they said, our delicate western temprament would wither under the wicked onslaught of the blazing Korean sun.

To you, Korea, I say: Ha! Having survived more than a handful of New Jersey summers so muggy you could bottle and drink them, Korea is certainly no worse. Since we arrived it’s been reasonable most days and even frankly cool in the mornings. Today was our first serious taste of Korean weather.

We still don’t have internet in the apartment, so we acted on the tip of another American- Buy something from the convience store downstairs and sit at their cheap, blue plastic tables. From there you have, well, not a feast, but a healthy portion of available WiFi signals to choose from. So, I popped down there this moning to Skype my parents and by 9 AM it was an oven. Today will kick like a mule.

Large parts of an Eastern seaboard winter are spent lamenting the fact that it’s too friggin’ cold outside to bother with thing like social commitments, bars and “going out”. What we forget is the dramatic, ironic inverse- The brutal, hazy days of summer we spend indoors, with machines in the window straining to keep the temprature down. Korea isn’t any wose than New Jersey or Brooklyn or Maryland, but I always forget what humidty feels like. Always.

I walked into school yesterday a bundle of nerves. I’d barely slept, tossing the whole night through. I have had any number of strange and difficult jobs in my life and yet every first day feels apocalyptic- This will be the job that outs me as a fraud and a loon, the man of a 1000 skills turns out to have just one, Pretending.

They thankfully talked me down. It turns out that I’d just be watching for a week. Phew. I could get my bearings, figure out WHAT I’d be teaching (For the previous week I drove myself insane trying to sort out 25 years of piecemeal grammar lessons so that I wouldn’t look like a goon the first time someone asked me about a past participle) and get some materials together.

On Thursdays I had 3 4th grade classes and one 6th grade class. I met with the 4th grade teacher who asked how I was in near-perfect English. Another relief! We could consult on lesson plans and discuss how to divide responsibilties without any serious trouble.

Only. Well. “Where are you from?” and “How are you?” turned out to be the only things she knew in English. And when class started she took a seat in the back, looked and me and said one other word she had picked up: “Teach”.

The average class size here is about 32, sometimes slightly more.  I’ve been in Korea 7 days. I have been a ‘teacher’ for 24 minutes. I have a textbook in Korean. I have 40 minutes between now and the next class.

It turns out the man of 1000 skills has one very good one: Pretending. I pretended to be a teacher. I did a silly game where we waved our arms. We talked about the weather. I pulled a clock off the wall and we talked about time. I looked at my watch: 30 minutes to go.

I remembered that the previous teacher had left  me a folder of stuff on the computer in my office. Among it was an English language version of the Korean textbook. Score! Only, sort of. There’s about 10 minutes worth of material in the book, with the literal suggestion being: Stretch it out.

And so we went through the material. And then we did it again. And again. And when they started yelling, I did a dance. And class was over.

And then I did the whole thing again. After that someone found a CD that I thought would be my saving grace. Show the kids the funny cartoons, discuss what happened, point out the core lesson, review, review, review. But as with the book, there’s about 5 minutes worth of stuff on the CD and it overlaps with the book. Which means that I replaced my trouble with more trouble. So, I pretended. And I made it through.

Today I have 4 of those same classes. I made a Powerpoint last night (Did you know that Powerpoints in Windows Vista don’t work with any previous version of MS Office? I didn’t!) and spent a frantic morning digging up a converter to make it work with the classroom computer, then troubleshooting the fact that the PCs here have no idea what to do with a USB drive named ‘SCOTT’.

I’d love to say that my dilligent Powerpoint-ing has saved the day and that I breezed through today’s classes with the deft hand of an adept, but I wandered in here with false confidence. I ran through the lesson, supplemented with the Powerpoint and took a look at the clock. I still had 25 minutes to go.  I had added a measly 5 minutes to my lesson.

Review, right? Play the video again! 23 minutes. Now what? Review! They actually BOO’ed me. Nicely, jokingly, but they boo’ed me. They really do hate this text book, as I’d been warned. These kids would not stand for my: “Say A, Say B, Say A again, Try B, Say A, B, A,B” strategey that had me treading water all morning.

But, closes a door opens a window, someone yelled “HANGMAN-U”. And it was on. So my classes, 2 days in with a textbook in Korean and a measly Powerpoint that needs to be converted everytime it’s run, are 15 minutes of solid learning, 10 minutes of recap and 15 minutes of the loudest game of Hangman EVER.