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.
Merry Christmas! Check out the rest of our Christmas pics and video over yonder.
My favorite Christmas song in the known Universe:Sufjan Stevens- Joy to the World
Sufjan Stevens gets a lot of shit for being a little too twee, or a bit too arranged, but when he brings his gift for melody to bear it is always a treasure. I love ‘Joy to the World’ because it’s about the good stuff, before the terrible stuff. This particular rendition always gets me all worked up, doubly so when we’re so far away from home. This has been my most Christmas-y Christmas in, gosh, 8 or so years? I don’t know what finally clicked, but. There it was. Thousands of miles from home and finally feeling like it was Christmas. God presents us with any number of strange personal challenges, this one felt particularly obtuse. But if there’s a lesson I’ve gleaned from our adventures over the past few years: Just say Thank You and be grateful for the good stuff, even if it doesn’t look like the good stuff. Anyway, pictures and videos are incoming.
TRIVIA: Sufjan used to attend our church in Brooklyn. One time Mary held to the door for him AND DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WHO HE WAS. GASP.
Alert: NOT REAL FAKE SNOW. When you’re done parsing that, make note of the fact that this is not real fake snow. It’s just shaving cream.
Among Korea’s many butchered-English slogans, the slightly-creepy Mr. Pizza holds a special place in my heart. The slogan of this upscale and inexplicably expensive pizza chain is “Love for Women”. It’s in their ads, on their take out boxes, on their billboards. Everywhere. What this has to do with pizza is several light years from my understanding. Is it like health food pizza? It doesn’t look that way. And it’s got that extra bit of creepy. It’s vaguely threatening, like a creepy boyfriend who won’t leave you alone. He LOVES you. He has LOVE FOR WOMEN.
Anyway: This gives me an opportunity to talk about something strange in Korea. The Pizza Gap. Pizza comes in 2 varieties, affordable and unaffordable. For some reason places like Mr. Pizza and Pizza Hut can command 20-25$ a pie. Meanwhile, there are multiple local and chain pizza places where a pizza for two can be had for as little as 5 or 6 bucks. I’m always blown away by that. That’s a 20 friggin’ dollar difference. That is THREE extra pizzas. How can this be?
At this point I should note that Korea has the same schizophrenic, anything-goes attitude towards pizza that’s so prevalent in Easter Europe and the rest of Asia. Beef ribs with jellied bones, corn, potatoes, mayo, mustard. These are normal. Pizza School has a crust made from cocktail wieners adorably called ‘The Vienna’. It will set you back an extra $1.50. Do it.
An interesting article on North Korean Food Diplomacy from the I-could-read-this-all-day Edible Geography blog. It looks like the North Koreans have a restaurant in Phenom Pen. We’ve been talking about taking a trip around Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam. Don’t know if we’ll make to Phenom Pen, but if we do then North Korean dinner theater is on the menu for sure.
UPDATE:A first-person account of creepy North Korean dinner theater.
We’re usually tired when we get home. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the way it is- Teaching is tiring. And yet whenever anyone asks me about my job I always reflexively answer: I love it. Trying to think on that more deeply can be puzzling: Which part do I love, exactly? Standing up for 8 hours? Talking over a room full of kids who’d rather be anywhere else? Scrubbing the moon-language graffiti from the desks?
It’s the little stuff that just. Wipes all that bad stuff right off. I have an after school class that’s a major challenge. It’s 10 kids: 2 1st graders, 1 2nd grader, 2 3rd graders, 3 4th graders and 2 5th graders. At one time. What do you teach that age range? We do a lot of arts ‘n craftsy type stuff because it tends to keep everyone equally occupied. Still, the young ones can be a handful. I spent some time last week trying to keep them from poking paper clips into the electrical outlets. Add ‘Saved Many Children From Death’ under ‘Accomplishments’ on my resume.
Anyway, they’ve been getting a little worse as the school year nears it’s end. They’re all arts and crafty for about 5 minutes before they rediscover the joy of RUNNING AROUND ALL THE TIME ALL DAY. Today we were supposed to be making little paper craft Christmas presents. One of the younger kids approached me with his scraggly box in hand. Before I could congratulate him, he begin tearing it to pieces. This seemed apace of things, so I offered a token, “No! It’s nice!” and let him go for it.
But he had a plan- He’d made a small gold star and tucked it inside the box. As he finished ripping apart his completed assignment he presented me with the star. Adorable, dude. That’s the little stuff.
This is our home address, in Korean and in English:
Korea
경기도, 광명시, 광명동 93 번지 6 호
힐탑오피스텔 903호
Mary and Scott Stephan
Korea
Gyeonggi Province, Gwangmyeong City
Gwangmyeong Dong 93 Bunji 6 Ho
Hilltop Officetel 903 Ho
Mary and Scott Stephan
And this is my school address, where I’ve gotten packages to make sure they’re signed for and taken care of. (There’s a guy at home who will sign for addresses, but he doesn’t speak English, so if there’s a problem, I wouldn’t know how to deal with it…)
Korea
경기도 광명시 광명6동 379-1
명문고등학교
Mary Stephan
Korea
Gyeonggi Province, Gwangmyeong City
Gwangmyeong 6 dong 379-1
Myeong Mun High School
Mary Stephan
Send away!
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.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
It took me a full month to get these pictures together, but this is about the time we went to Busan. Busan is a fairy popular resort spot in the south of South Korea. We hopped an evening express train and managed to get there in about 3 hours- Not bad considering the distance involved. It was Halloween weekend, but you wouldn’t know it from these pictures. Sunny and clear, about 60 degrees. On Halloween proper we ate crab a stone’s throw from the ocean. We went to the aquarium where I got really lousy pictures. We rode a ferry that had a view of Japan. Jaime and Justin ate live baby octopus- When we inquired about the possibility of doing so, the fish monger consented by lifting a baby octopus from from the tank and biting off one of it’s legs. This happened! It was crazy.
And that’s the short story about Busan.
