Joe and Grandma

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I "teach" monsters. They are mostly all seven years old, wild, disrespectful, unable to speak any English, and I dislike most of them. One howls like a wolf whenever I try to say "be quiet". Another regularly takes naps under his desk on the floor, and is unresponsive to any sort of remonstration, other than the 13 year olds I sometimes employ to "give 'em shit" in Korean. And yet another little bastard spits on me and tries to bite me whenever I drag him out of class for being an irritating little shit.

So it was with great joy that I managed, on Tuesday, October 24, to convince my boss to give me half a day off in order to pick up my mom from the airport. My mom had amazed me... before this, she had never ventured outside the borders of North America. But after hearing about Dad's adventures here this summer, and of course the stories and photos of an ever-growing Joe, she was convinced to make the trip here herself.

Unfortunately, we were unable to take any time off work during the 2 1/2 weeks Mom visited. But we made several trips into the city (to Namdaemun Market, Insadong, Gyongbokgung Palace, Itaewon... all the big tourist stops). But we all knew the real reason behind her visit... it was not to see Korea, nor really to see Matt or me... no, it was all about Joe.

Look Out! Here comes the Spider Joe

Can he swing from a thread?......
Well not just yet, but given the chance I'm sure he'd try.
Our son is a Spiderman-a-holic. He runs back and forth in our little apartment, shouting "boy's running like spiderman", he has spiderman poses and even a spiderman face. Joe is addicted to spiderman.

When we had trouble with him using the potty at his babysitters it was "his" spiderman we bribed him with.

Then on one glorious day in late October, his Grandma came to visit, whom he hadn't seen in nearly a year. If there was one thing that could break the ice it was spiderman. Is there anything like preening over yourself in the mirror admiring your new Spiderman pajamas?

(Hanna's aside: Back when Matt and I were "just friends", he would often talk about how he wanted a child, just in order to train him to be a superhero, specifically one that was imbued with the amazing superhero assets one could only obtain through the bite of a radioactive insect (or arachnid, for you nerdy biology types). Personally, I am more inclined to admire and empathize with the Green Goblins or Dr. Octopuses of the world - even though they suffer the inevitable downfall inherent in all supervillains, they, well, always seem admirably motivated to accomplish their lofty goals, like taking over the world. Spiderman, and other superheroes, seem, in comparison, predictably reactionary. As a child, I would always watch Inspector Gadget, not because I liked the cartoon, but because I harboured the faint hope that "today, maybe today, Dr. Claw will finally get that damn Gadget!!").

(sigh.....Matt's aside to Hanna's aside (could this get more ridiculous). Why is it that older siblings tend to have a penchant for siding with evil? some sort of quick excuse for the crimes they commit against their younger brethren....I'm not sure. I do know that I grew up with a brother who always had to be the bad guy. He was Darth Vader to my Luke Skywalker, Shredder to my Ninja Turtles, Megatron to my Optimus (seriously I can go on and on) Mummra to my Thundercats, (does anyone remember the Visionaries?) He was the bad Visionaries to my good Visionaries. I kid you not, he was, when we were children, the Germans to my Allied forces (Yes that's right Dave, I remember "The Battle of Britain: Their Finest Hour", the computer game.)

So Matt wonders why we older siblings feel this inclination to the evil side of human nature... with our "younger brethren" so uppity with their "morals" and "righteousness", all we could really do was counter it, our yang to their yin, etc.... Or just punch them twice when our parents weren't looking. Or frame them for crimes they hadn't committed. Or steal their cookies. Or lock them out on the roof of the house when you were supposed to be taking care of them for the afternoon (I slap my knee with mirth at the very memory).... ahh, delicious deception, enforced through brute strength.

And who can blame us younger siblings for desperately hanging onto to some out dated twisted perception of justice? There just had to be something coming for our older siblings, didn't there? Shouldn't they be struck down by God's fury, or at the very least suffer something utterly humiliating in front of their friends, perhaps along the lines of what they did to us infront of our friends? Doesn't it seem right? DAMN IT GOD, WOULDN'T IT BE JUST??!!!!!!! Why did they always win?......What the hell happened to Karma???????

Somehow, somewhere along the way I think we forgot we were talking about Joe. He's doing great and learning "that with great power comes great responsibility"....(At least as long as he remains the only child).

Dog Food

I am amazed at the, shall we say, creativity, with which human beings the world over approach the universal need for food.

Imagine that you're feeling a little hungry, and in need of a quick snack before work. What do you do? Well, head down to the Lotte Mart of course, where they keep live squid swimming around in a large aquarium. State your preference, and your friendly squid attendant will deftly scoop out the chosen one into a net and onto the cutting board. Before you can say "don't forget the spicy paste," the employee has brought out the gleaming cleaver and hacked the recently-deceased (is 'deceasing' a word?) squid into dozens of unhappily writhing, bite-sized pieces, and deposited it onto a paper plate with disposable chopsticks and packages of spicy paste for your dining pleasure. I'm told you have to chew fast, or the tentacles will stick to your teeth.

I have never considered myself intolerant towards other cultures and their penchant for certain foods that simply strike me and my North American sensibilities as revolting. I simply choose not to eat certain foods, but I don't think it's at all my place to say what is or is not right when it comes to taste.(After all, we Canadians can't seem to cook vegetables to save our lives, and any condiment other than ketchup or mustard is considered a little too exotic for our mild and unabrasive temperament. And don't even get me started on our nonsensical aversion to tofu, or curry, or spices other than dried basil and oregano (GOD FORBID we even think of using fresh-ground spices or, think of it, FRESH HERBS once and a while!!!), or the fact that we need a heart-clogging pound of flesh thrice daily in order to feel nourished). Ok, ok, so maybe I feel a little more justified in passing judgement on my own culture than one which is so very foreign and that I will never truly understand.

That said, there is one aspect of Korean cuisine which does bother me. It's not the squid, nor the popular street snack ppeondaggi (stewed silkworm pupae that smells 100 times more potent than freshly roasted grasshoppers stuck to a car's radiator on a steamy Saskatchewan summer day), but something that hits a little closer to home.

We all have a soft spot in our hearts for abandoned and abused critters, and while we don't all support the SPCA with donations, the majority of people I know at least think the organization is a good idea. Koreans, while they adore their little rat-sized fashion accessory dogs to the point of lunacy (these once-upon a time canines commonly sport doggie jewellry and dyed fur - yes, Joe talks about the "purple puppies" he sees), have a spot not in their hearts but in their stomachs for another, less fortunate breed of dog (that just happens to taste good in a soup called "boshintang")!

Now, remember what I said earlier about not passing judgement? Hindus think hamburgers are atrocious, and us Jews avoid (among other things) the "insects of the sea", those crawling, scavenging creatures that feed on carcasses and other garbage adorning the ocean floor. Well, who am I to think that eating dog meat is wrong? Is it any different? Not really - it's just a matter of taste, so to speak. The thing that, well, really gets my goat is the manner in which the dog is killed. The dog is tied down and beaten to death, in the belief that it tenderizes the meat, making it tastier and a more effective libido-booster for men....(shudder)....

So, how do you take the leftovers home? Why, in a doggie bag, of course!

Finally, a few photos!

Gyeongju - Bulguksa!.

The Korean Summer

My computer is disallowing me to upload photos at the moment, so check back soon because there will be some here shortly.

I am startled with how little we have been writing recently, and so my apologies to those kimchilovincanuck lovers who check our posts regularly - here we go, so stop with the irate emails! Actually, the irate emails aren't bad... it's so nice to know someone cares!!!

Joe has been having a tremendous summer, namely because his Grandpa came to spend a month with him (and, to a lesser degree, his parents). Dad arrived on July 9th, and left on the 5th of August. It was a little cramped, as we put our space juggling skills to the test again in order to accommodate three adults and a rambunctious toddler in our studio apartment for a month. Funny how it changes your perceptions, though. After Dad left, we couldn't believe how much space we had! (Just an aside - it's funny realizing how much less important you become after you have a child, both to yourself and other people. Before leaving for Korea, my parents both informed me that they were perfectly willing to care for Joe while we spent the year in Korea. They also showed no hesitation in telling me that they weren't going to miss me at all - "of course, if you didn't have Joe, things would be completely different, and we wouldn't really care if you went or not" - and the only one who was on their minds was, of course, our little man. It's as it should be, really).

July with Dad was a lot of fun. He quickly became friends with Kim, Kim, Kim and Oh, the regulars down at the Wa Bar, as well as the servers. In fact, not two weeks after his arrival in Korea, they had a framed photo of Joe on his Grandpa's shoulders hanging over the bar. I really enjoyed showing Dad around this crazy and fascinating country that we currently call home. I think what he found the most impressive of all though, and truly it is amazing to contemplate, was the well-organized and incredibly efficient public transportation system. After his first trip on the subway, Dad did some quick research on Wikipedia and found that the subway has 8 million visits ... a day. A few clicks of the mouse later, he informed us that Seoul and the surrounding cities (essentially just a never-ending conglomeration of urban banality connected by well-organized public transit) comprises 23 MILLION people!! It's mind-boggling.

The seasons in Korea are well-defined. Winter is, well, cold, as my beginner students eloquently tell me. Spring is beautiful, warm and filthy when the dust blows in from China. Fall is apparently the best time of year in Korea - it's warm and all the leaves turn amazing shades of red and gold that colour the mountainous landscape. And summer is divided into two stages - rainy and humid, and DAMN FREAKIN' HOT and humid! Korea gets pounded in July with monsoon rains and typhoons from the Pacific, and everyone's favorite fashion accessory becomes the umbrella. And it's not the refreshingly cool rains that we get back home. It rains, the 12-inch trenches they call gutters fill to capacity, becoming small yet raging rivers capable of carrying away those irritatingly tiny, yappy dogs, and the humidity doesn't even think of dissipating. For three or four consecutive days last month, there was a constant downpour. The day after the heavy rains let up, I remarked to my students how nice I thought it was, because for the first time in months, the sky was noticeably more clear than usual. They looked at me very strangely before telling me that this was the heaviest rain they could remember, and that in South Korea alone, 25 people had died, 50 were missing, and thousands more were homeless (and apparently, the situation is much, much worse in North Korea). I felt like an ass and realized what an incredible bubble of ignorance I live in, considering I don't speak the language, and the news I read is almost always of Canadian origin. Imagine something of that magnitude happening in Canada, a couple hours drive away from where you live, and not even knowing about it!

In any case, the monsoon season has passed, and the dead heat and humidity of August is now sitting on Seoul, sapping me of my strength and will to live. The only thing that keeps me going is the constant blast of the air-conditioner in our apartment, and the thought of falafel and baba ghanoush from Pharaoh's, a little Egyptian restaurant in Itaewon that we first visited last month. The owner/chef is a fantastic man who makes fresh pita bread, loves Joe and always encourages our guy to race around the restaurant to his heart's content. And I'm just thrilled to eat something that is not rice.

We had a week of vacation at the very beginning of August, because the owner of our academy decided to renovate. We took the opportunity to attempt another visit to Gyeongju, this time with Dad. Admittedly, I was a little nervous to board another 4-hour bus trip with Joe, not frightened by the prospect of potential misbehaviour, but more by the thought of having to sit in dampness for hours on a bus reeking of vomit after having been successfully rained out of our vacation, which is exactly what happened in May. Well, Joe was fantastic on the bus, but the first week of August also happens to be the one week where everyone in Korea goes on vacation. We chose the precise moment to travel chosen by every single Seoulite, and found ourselves in gridlock on the highways for the first 4 hours of the (ordinarily) 4 hour trip. 4 hours into the trip, we began to leave the outskirts of Seoul. I have never been so happy to reach a highway speed of 50km/hour.

Gyeongju was magical - it's a region where a thousand years of history seep out of all the nooks and crannies, where houses are still built low to the ground, with curled tiled roofs and tiny courtyards, and where massive burial mounds of famous historical figures dot the landscape of the city. We visited Bulguksa, an incredible palace complex from the Shilla Dynasty, before ascending a narrow, winding mountain road at breakneck speed on a teetering bus to see Seokguram, a great stone figure of Buddha carved into the side of the mountain in approximately 750 A.D. Seokguram is a UNESCO World Heritage site (as is Bulguksa), and is thought to be the most important piece of Buddhist artwork in East Asia. Unfortunately, it's encased in glass and photographs are not permitted, so we stocked up on postcards at the gift shop.

The temperature in Gyeongju was an incredible 35 degrees Celcius, not accounting for the dreadful humidity, so a particular highlight for me was the air-conditioned hotel room and the cold beer from the corner store down the street.

Stomach Linings are for Sissies

It seems that everyone and their grandmother here is suffering from stomach cancer. Korea has the highest rates of stomach cancer in the world (if statistics, particularly the ones we've read, are to be considered true), and it's no real surprise when the men drink gallons of soju. (Soju is an alcoholic beverage much like vodka but uses rice instead of potatoes - at least in its original form. But the common, cheap stuff you buy in tetra packs, bottles or multi-litre sized jugs from the convenience stores (what everybody drinks) is in fact made from watered-down ethyl alcohol - silly North Americans... we were always told that stuff'll make you blind...wait, maybe it does, as that would explain their driving habits). Aside from the soju, which the women don't drink nearly as much of as the men (they use it as a cleaning product), you have the gochuchang, or the ubiquitous red pepper paste (or, as Matt calls it, the very fuel that all of Korea runs on). It is piled into pretty much everything they eat - it's a key ingredient in kimchi (the national food), soups, stews, barbecue dishes and is a product other than soju which can be purchased in pails of 20 litres or more.

Our personal favorite dish that uses gochuchang can only be purchased from the restaurant in the main floor of our apartment block. We don't actually know the name of the place, because... well, we've never really bothered to learn it (the sign is in "fancy-lookin'" Hangeul (Korean), so it is simply known to us as the "Spicy Tofu place"(where's the echo button? asks Matt).

The story of the spicy tofu began on New Year's Eve. We prepared an elaborate dinner, including pickled, spicy sesame leaves, ramyen (mmm...instant noodles), kimpap (Korean "sushi" - don't EVER call it that, though!), kimchi (of course), rice, and the legendary "Tofu.....fu....fu...fu".

When we ordered the food, the cook and the waitress both tried to discourage us, saying it was much to spicy for foreigners, but we managed to convince them we could handle it. We had no idea what we were getting into....

Matt accused me of trying to kill him with the spiciest food he'd ever eaten, and I think we both had several heart attacks after the first three bites (the crazy thing about spicy tofu, though, is that you can't stop eating it once you've started). So, with eyeballs sweating, and barely able to breathe, we made it through the first encounter. Matt prayed it would be our last.

But once that tasty MSG/BBQ spicyness bites, you can never go back!!! The craving for Spicy Tofu can get so intense, that some nights, when they would run out of tofu, I would run down to the tiny, family-run restaurant with a brilliant smile and a block of tofu from home in hand, and the owner/cook would spy the tofu, clap her hands and laugh. But she'd cook our tofu for us, in her inimitable spicy way, AND give us a discount! (The language of "Spicy Tofu" relies not on words).

Now, we have become trusted customers. If they have no tofu when we order our beloved dish, the cook will unhesitatingly send out her daughter (also the waitress) into the monsoon rains to buy a block of tofu from a shop down the street.

It's been nearly seven months since that near-death experience on New Year's Eve, and Spicy Tofu has quickly nestled its way into our hearts and through our stomach linings.

We love you Spicy Tofu!!

Culture Shock

Websters dictionary describes Culture shock as a sense of confusion and uncertainty sometimes with feelings of anxiety that may affect people exposed to an alien culture or environment without adequate preparation. A colleague of my brother put it, I believe much more eloquently, "If you're in a foriegn country and you think everyone else is crazy than you have culture shock".
I generally agree with this.

Matt

We've been getting lazier and lazier with this blog recently. I am finding it easy to be distracted by Joe and his continual adventures - today he discovered how delicious sand is, a consolation to the unhappy fact that his friends at Lotte Mart (an aquarium full of squids) had all been eaten (raw, still writhing, but with spicy paste) and were no longer there to greet him when he walked through the door. Well, Superstore has the All-Beef hotdog stand (a real stomach-turner if you happen to be Hindu), and Lotte Mart has the raw squid stand, so there's not that much of a difference. One of my students responded eloquently when I told him that many people in Canada would never eat the squid: "Why? It's delicious! Have confidence!!" How true, but not enough for me to taste it.

We've also been distracted by preparing our place for my dad's visit, an event Joe has been looking forward to for the past month or more.

Joe has been counting down the days until his Grandpa arrives (he gets here on Sunday evening). We have been madly organizing, dusting, cleaning, arranging, and all the while I become increasingly amazed at the vast amount of SH*T we've accumulated in the almost 8 months since we've been here.

As homework assignments, I've been giving my intermediate students instructions to make a list of places we should take Dad, and why. We've come up with a few good ideas - Suwon's Fortress Wall, a folk village near our city (known by foreigners as "the Fork Village" due to a humourous misprint on its sign), the many temples, palaces and parks scattered liberally throughout Seoul, a few mountain hikes, Namdaemun and possibly Dongdaemun Market.

Here's a few more photos of Japan - just click on them for a larger image.

What the Fuk..ukoka?!

I have the most amazing husband, and every day I think about how lucky I am to be blessed with a man like Matt, and an incredible son Joe.

For Mother's Day, my guys gave me an amazing gift. Matt and Joe sent me on a four day vacation to Fukuoka, Japan. Other than the occasional airport transfer, it was my first time in "the land of the rising sun" (strangely enough, Korea is known as "the land of the morning calm", but in my estimation, there is nothing particularly calm about the morning, nor any other time of day here, when the freeways are packed with automobiles full of cranky, stressed-out and terribly hung-over commuters filling the morning skies with the daily recommended dose of smog). Anyway, I managed to wrangle two days off work, left waaay too early on the morning of May 25, and arrived in Fukuoka after a quick 1 hour flight.

One thing I really love about solo travel is the opportunity to meet people that you would probably never encounter otherwise. In the airport, I met up with a couple whities doing their visa runs, and accompanied them to the Korean embassy, which happened to be a few short blocks away from my hostel. There, we found another couple of English teachers picking up their visas, and decided to go hang out in nearby Ohori Park, a massive oasis of green in the middle of the ("small") city comprising 1.3 million people. It was a beautiful day, and we strolled leisurely through the park before, much to our delight, we stumbled upon a traditional Japanese garden tucked away quietly at the end of the park.

On the plane, I had been doing some reading about Japan in an outdated travel guidebook I had inherited from a previous English teacher at our school. Apparently, the Yakuza are THE organized crime ring in Japan, and frighteningly efficient - like the Mafia, but bigger and much more powerful. Members are easily identified by huge, intricate tattoos that adorn their backs and wind over their shoulders and down their arms. They are also known to have unsuccessful careers as pianists: the Yakuza punishes its members for their transgressions by lopping off their fingers at the joints. Anyway, after we had strolled through the garden, we stopped at a shaded rest area for a quick beer. A group of benign-looking elderly men were sitting around playing some kind of checkers game and downing sake. One man, chattering rapidly to his friends, staggered to his feet as we arrived, and through his slurred, incomprehensible English, we managed somehow to discern that he was asking us where we were from (apparently, it's a game that Koreans play amongst themselves, too - "Guess where that white person is from!"). He was a friendly sort, and proudly showed off his tattoos to the girls, all the while saying "I love you, I love you!", before sneakily showing the two guys his half-missing pinky finger (look closely at his left hand). Sure, benign old men just sitting in the park, right?

Japan is extraordinarily expensive - I couldn't believe I was shelling out over 7$ US for a stupid bowl of udon, but incredibly beautiful, and worlds away from Korea. In some ways, Japan is a lot more similar to Canada than Korea is to Japan. I've heard that many comparisons can be made between Japan and England (for instance, they are very polite, but never say what they are thinking), and Korea and Italy (they're very intense and passionate). Stereotypes aside, though, the Japanese do seem to have a bubble of "personal space" that surrounds them, and they do not intrude on the space of others. Ha! Yesterday while shopping for our weekly groceries, I was forcibly elbowed out of the way by an old grandmother who didn't even otherwise acknowledge my presence. Not to mention the constant shopping cart crashes in the aisles. Personal space be damned! After a couple days in Japan, though, I started to feel exceedingly awkward at what I found to be their excessive politeness, and terribly clumsy as well, due to the fact that not only am I twice the size of most of the women, but I am also so accustomed to the common discourtesy of Korea. One morning in Japan, as I waited for the bus, I noticed a neat and orderly lineup of about 8 people that had formed as if from nowhere. Using my developing Korean mentality, I thought "like hell I'm waiting in that line" and smoothly elbowed my way first through the doors as the bus pulled to a stop. "Those Canadians! So rude!!"

There are some images, though, that I will always remember. One afternoon as I drank from the hallowed trough of American corporate culture (ah, Starbucks, you give my life meaning), four geisha came in to order their lattes. I will remember the man in the park, the temples and shrines, the businesspeople on bicycles and the general cleanliness and efficiency with which everything seems to proceed in Japan.

When I arrived home on Sunday night, I realized that the last airporter bus had departed 10 minutes earlier, and my only other option was a taxi for the hour-long trip back to Uiwang. Within minutes, I was involved in a "Konglish" screaming match with three drivers, as we all flailed our arms and yelled in each others' faces, while I tried to haggle the best fare - not because we were angry, but because in Korea, it's just how you talk to each other.

Gyeongju in 60 Seconds

This is the main street outside the bus terminal in Gyeongju, the cultural and historical capital of Korea, home to relics, shrines temples and palaces dating from the Shilla Dynasty and before... an ancient city, very different from Seoul and its environs (where buildings are constructed with an average lifespan of about 5 years)... this was our destination last weekend (also a long weekend), and our first real excursion out of the landscape of concrete highrises since our arrival here in November.

We arrived at the Seoul Express bus terminal armed with our baggage and what we soon discovered was a hopelessly outdated Lonely Planet guidebook (2001 edition). The guidebook wisely proclaimed that buses left every half hour, but we soon discovered we'd be anticipating an unprecedented wait for nearly two hours (like everything else in this crazy country, you never get what you expect - that's half the fun, if you can find the humour to see it that way). That's all fine and well and all if you're mature enough to be toilet-trained, but for those of us who aren't, it can seem like a mighty long time... not to mention the 4.5 hour bus ride that lay ahead.

The bus ride itself was an adventure. As we rolled through the rice paddies and mist-covered mountains, Joe made friends with the other passengers, and, to his delight, discovered he could gain even more attention and admiration (and candy) from them by proclaiming "ajuma" or "ajoshi" (which I later found out, upon asking my students, means something like "hey you, woman/man" - not really disrespectful, but not entirely polite, either).

Finally, we arrived around 8pm in the ancient capital. As we drove into the city, we marveled at the size and construction of the houses - that's right, houses -not massive apartment blocks. They were so wonderfully small, with curved tile roofs, pressed up tight together, creating narrow winding alleyways lit with brightly-coloured paper lanterns (it was Buddha's birthday, after all).

We found a motel with a traditional-style Korean bed (an ondol - essentially a mattress on a heated floor), and, oh wonder of wonders, a BATHTUB! (It's been a long 6 months). Happily exhausted, we fell asleep looking forward to the adventures of the morrow: hiking through Namsan Park (littered with temples, monasteries, pagodas and wood carvings) and checking out Seokguram (a massive and mysterious stone Buddha hidden on a mountain), before heading to Bulguksa, a famous temple, where each roof tile has been painstakingly carved individually, and every inch of available space is covered in ornate and intricate paintings.

Instead, we awoke the next day to the unrelenting sound of pouring rain. Disaster! All the things to see were outside, and all involved a certain amount of walking. After some deliberation, we made the decision to pack up and return home again, vowing that we would come back some other time to Gyeongju.

One difference I have noticed between Koreans and Candians seems to be our temperature preference. Canadians like the cold (I mean, Jesus, we've been running our air-con here since mid-March!) while Koreans prefer the stifling heat. The department stores seem to me always overzealously heated, as did the bus on the way home. The rain made everything seem even more humid, and the many people breathing inside added to the stuffy atmosphere.

Joe had a little trouble adjusting to the climate of the bus, but quickly achieved a fine balance a short 30 minutes into the (remember?) 4.5 hour trip, when he leaned over me and deposited a voluminous amount of vomit directly in my lap. Thank Almighty G-d for moist towelettes!!! (At least the bus driver turned on the air-con after that!)

Ah, Seoul... how happy I was to greet your concrete and steel, your chaotic, traffic-jammed streets and teeming sidewalks, your towering officetels and smog-filled skies, your neon, flashing signs, screaming indecipherably at me in a language I am blissfully unable to comprehend. Home at last....

I took a shower, put Joe to bed, ordered in pizza and curled up on the couch with Matt. Ahhh, life is good.