1) (a little belated)
En route to sanity, one of many first priorities: find (English speaking) friends quickly. En route to reality, one of many first realizations: this may take awhile. Temporary solution? First friends!
Last week Sam and I took a jaunt to the much discussed "Dragon Bar." Dragon Bar is the so-described home away from home for English teachers in the Nowon-Gu. In fact, it's pretty much our only (expatty) watering hole within a 20-minute subway ride. So in hopes of making our first friends in Seoul, the Dragon Bar seemed like a logical conclusion.
And now you're in our mindset.
Up the stairs and around the bend, Sam and I crawl into Dragon Bar. It's, much to our delight, a bar-bar, complete with a wooden(ish) bar and a few lounge-y tables. Korean bars, as we soon discover, function more like restaurants than inebriation stations. In a Korean bar, you have to order "bar food," which basically means ordering a full meal. If you just want a drink, it's either a "Western Bar" or your bedroom (or for many people, the street corner with open container).
So back to the point. We are THRILLED to be at a bar-bar. We are not as thrilled that this so-called "expat bar" is currently only full of Koreans and us. But this doesn't deter us: Two Cass's (a cheap Korean standard) please!
We chat at the edge of the bar, quietly and self-consciously in English. There are a few Korean women to our left and two young Korean men to our right. The juke box begins playing Green Day, and then suddenly, to my right, the smiling Korean man sings the perfectly unaccented lyrics to "Basket Case." This takes Sam and I a little off-guard, so we turn wide-eyed to gawk at our neighbor, the newfound rockstar of the bar.
After a few awkward smiles and pauses, he turns to introduce himself and offer Sam and I some of his Absolute. We quickly learn two things: Koreans LOVE to be good bar hosts (as in pouring a never-ending amount of alcohol into your glass), and his non-singing English vocabulary is composed of approximately 15 words.
Here's where it gets fun. Because of our unfortunate disability at communication, my friend, the rockstar, feels desperately compelled to let me know that he likes me. A lot. From here on out, please refer to me only as your "first friend." That's me. I am now and forever always going to be cosmically connected to this man whose name I don't know because he proclaimed, no less that three dozen times (this is not an exaggeration) "YOU ARE MY FIRST FRIEND."
Please be awed by the list of kick-backs first friends receive in Korea:
A) A LOT of affection. Physical and verbal splatter included.
B) Free half-bottles of Absolute Vodka.
C) Delicious fruit plates from behind the bar.
D) Free neck massages. And because no one can explain in the other's tongue what is going on, a lot of awkward hovering before the hands finally settle on the other's neck.
E) Leg massages.
F) And of course, the security of knowing that I became this man's first friend before Sam was ever in his picture. My first friend will always remind Sam (as he did) that I am better.
Before you become alarmed by this strange ritual of first friends, let me clarify: Korean mean, ALL Korean men, perhaps even straights more than gays, love to share physical intimacy. Groups of thuggish looking boys walk down the streets holding hands. Grown men curl into each other's arms when drunk. And little schoolboys frolic down the street arm-in-arm, inseparable and impenetrable to our Western expressions of homophobia.
To make a long story short, my dear, dear first friend continued drinking with me until he eventually fell over in his chair. A girl came over and chuckled, and in broken English, mimed that this was her ex-boyfriend from many years ago. When he began to vomi dirtectly onto the floor beside me, his real first friend took him away. I said my adieus as he vomited in the toilet stall, and he smiled sadly as I walked out the bathroom door.
End of story. Sorry for all the tense switching. I'm too exhausted to talk about my first students. That will come soon. Promise.
2) to be continued
Saturday, September 29, 2007
First friends, first students
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Escape from the neon nights
At first glance, Seoul is the world of the hyper-modern. If I had described this city yesterday, I might have said "excessive." It's enormous. Twenty million plus in the metro area. That makes it the second largest metropolitan city in the world, in case you were wondering. When you go out to eat, you don't go out with a restaurant in mind. You pick an area, say two or three blocks, and then you choose from not one restaurant, but 50. You follow the trail of neon lights and the broken English, and finally, exhausted from choice, you sit down.
In Seoul, your vision may start at street level, but it quickly goes up. Up one, two, seven stories, because their is a restaurant/bar/store on every floor. And they're all busy. You at first try to take the stairs, and then realize your legs won't make it if you do this over and over again. In the end, you resign yourself to that simplest of luxuries, the elevator, and you let it take you wherever you want to go. The same applies to the sidewalk. Why stroll when the subway is clean and, dare I say cozy?
The lights are blinding, the options overwhelming, yet somehow this city presses on, buzzes with pride to the extra everything. People do smile in Seoul. And they laugh. And they pray.
Where you would expect to find a humble sanctuary, you find a neon cross. A man waits patiently on the escalator of the metro to give you a copy of "The Daily Bread" (in Hanguel and in English). There is a revival underneath a tent, right outside of Seoul Station. But there's more to Seoul than neon and Jesus, right where you'd expect to find it. Up, up, up.
Today Sam and I took a stroll. First to the Filipino flea market, which happens every Sunday. The Filipinos line the street chatting and jibing, and every bad bootleg DVD you could ever want waits for you next to scrumptious rice cakes and tropical rice. But that was just a stroll, a precursor to our big adventure, the hike to Inwangsan.
Inwangsan is a peak, 338 meters to be exact, and it towers over Seoul just like the 60 other peaks that make the city sort of resemble a cereal bowl. To get to the trail to Inwangsan, you go where you always go in Seoul, right onto the subway. You find yourself dropped off in a neighborhood, which is nearly every neighborhood in Seoul, busy and crammed with high-rises. You walk down a most discrete path, the first alley you see on your left (That is what the directions told us, and they worked just fine) right past corner stores and apartments, and you finally end up at a staircase that steeply climbs to an ugly dirt road that looks strangely out of place for a city as paved as Seoul. The dirt road shoots up the side of a hill, and voíla, you are now at the temple gates to a Buddhist village.
My last description could be wrong, it may be a Shamanist village. I know that many Koreans practice a blended form of the two, and perhaps any other number of religions/traditions. I do know that the entrance, and what's to follow is stunning. Absolutely stunning. Carved into the hillside is the antithesis to what lies below. You turn around, and the city lies before you, pricking at the smoggy sky. Turn around again, and you suddenly are afraid to utter anything for fear of disrupting the energy.
The homes of this village are small, and if I remember correctly, wooden. I could also be making up the following, but I swear there were wind chimes. And birds. And streams running. You crawl through the village unsure if this land is artificial or just so deeply removed from the land below. I walked with Sam, and we didn't have to say anything to choose our direction. We just went.
At the top of the village, you see stone trails that begin to ascend the mountain. Suddenly there are carvings of Buddha, statuettes, and burning incense everywhere. There is ritual, of course, and then there is the spiritual. A woman rocks on her knees in front of bowls of water and burning votives chanting to the breathtaking misshapen rock face in front of her. A man next to her rocks silently, following her command. At this point you are afraid to progress until you see that others dare to walk past. The others walk past and the woman continues chanting.
This scene is played out in a nook and cranny every 50 feet as you walk. Each time you feel like you should cry and begin rocking on your own knees. Every time you reach an opening, you look below to the city and lament the modern world. You climb and climb, not even nodding at those you pass, because perhaps that would be too much, too cruel to remove someone from their own private state. We continued up and up until the path narrowed from stone to grass and dirt, and we tucked our heads lower and lower under the trees. And then we found an exit, a different path. This one was paved with white lines and filled with hiking Koreans. And that was fine. We hiked to the top, saw all of Seoul, and eventually meandered down, following the white lines all the way to the bottom so as to leave the spiritual parts of the hill alone.
We came down and eventually found Insadong, a neighborhood that preserves a little more of the old Seoul and a little less of the skyscrapers. And just as I was feeling bad about not finding any vegetarian food, we wandered through a charming alley and in bright neon lights I saw "Vegetarian Restaurant." I'm feeling refreshed and excited, having learned a little more about the "heart" of "Seoul."
Friday, September 21, 2007
First night on the (international) town; back to base at midnight
So on our first Friday night in Seoul, Sam and I decided that Korean food is driving us bonkers (we like it, really, but it gets old kind of fast) and we'd like to go out for a night of Thai food and gay bars. Right in the heart of Seoul, flanked on either side by the U.S. military base and Hooker Hill lies the international enclave of Itaewon (ee-tay-won, sort of).
Itaewon is great for many reasons. First, in our neighborhood we probably only see a half dozen non-Korean folk on any given day. That's not a problem really, except we don't have any friends yet and no one really speaks any English where we live. Itaewon, on the other hand, is TRULY international. Not just American-Euro International, but African, Middle Eastern, non-Korean Asians, etc. There is a lot of flare in the neighborhood, it's crawling with English speakers, and you can get any piece of clothing custom made, tailored, or embroidered for reasonable prices. Second, because it's so international, the Koreans have allowed Itaewon to become the land of vices. You know, there are strip clubs and gay bars. Naturally Sam and I feel right at home. The only problem is that Itaewon is a 45 minute subway ride, and the subway stops running at midnight here. So you have to decide early whether the night is going to be worth a $20 taxi ride (which is actually quite cheap for the distance).
So Sam and I find a cute little Thai restaurant and I get to eat an entirely vegetarian meal that I got to pick from an ENGLISH menu. I've been working on the Korean alphabet, "Hanguel," but I've only just finished learning how to pronounce the letters. Basically, I still only know like five words of Korean.
After Thai, Sam and I decide it's time to enter the land of strange and go to a Korean gay bar. Our first choice, which we selected from a gay guidebook to Korea (they have one of those?) was a tiny wine bar tucked in behind a Reggae bar. Cute, friendly, and slow. So we enjoy our happy hour drinks, buy one get one free cocktails, and move on to the real center of gay life, "Homo Hill."
Homo Hill is really a little alley parallel to the main drag "Itaewonno." There are about 8 bars within a single block, so you definitely know you are in the right place. We walk up and down the alley a few times, debating which bar would be the best to meet friends, and settle into a small one right in the center of the street. It's a mostly expat crowd inside, a few Korean guys, and a ton of twenty-something lesbians in catholic schoolgirl outfits. We figure this is our ideal place, so we enjoy happy hour here (a little too much perhaps), and eventually throw ourselves at a group of friendly looking lesbians. Two of the three ignore us, but one adopts us and gives us the low down on being gay in Seoul. "Gays here, especially gay men, are evil. I've had gay men try to break me and my girlfriend up. Gays will tell lies to come between you two. Gays have AIDS here. If you trust each other, you will survive Seoul. If you don't, say goodbye to your relationship." That was basically me paraphrasing, but to be fair, she really did say all of that.
But what's more, and unbeknownst to us until this point, this is a MILITARY gay bar, as in everyone here is gay and in the U.S. military. Our new mentor explains to us that it's not uncommon for the patrons of this bar to quiz any newcomers at the door about their identities. We tell her that we are English teachers, and she tells us that if she didn't believe us, she would make us show our passports with the teaching visa stamped inside it. Suddenly this strange bar, where the prefer hair style is the buzz cut, suddenly makes sense. We now realize why all of these 50-60 plus patrons know each other and why they are going crazy on the dancefloor. Everyone is in the military, or, as we soon figure out, they have been axed by "Don't ask, don't tell." Lovely.
By the end of the night we are toasting with a male soldier who was celebrating his birthday and planning on getting married to the female soldier across the table. That's right. They are both gay. As the female soldier said to her fiancé, "Hey, consider yourself lucky. Who else would marry you and let you sleep with as many men as you wanted to?" Brilliant, yet bizarre. We finally found the only English teacher in the bar, a nice Canadian from Vancouver who was clearly the most well-adjusted person there. We took down her number, and she very well may be our first friend in Seoul. We'll see.
So the moral of the story is, if you don't think there are gay people in the military, you fly on over to Seoul and we'll show you a nice little spot where the boys and girls like to throw their shirts off and play doctor. More to come! We have a three day holiday Monday through Wednesday, and then we actually begin teaching! Woohoo!
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Hello from Korea!
Hi dear friends back in the US of A and elsewhere. I have arrived safely in Seoul, and I'm becoming nice and cozy in my strange little apartment in Junggye-dong. It has a bunch of sliding doors, a shower sans curtain, and a washing machine with only Korean controls (fortunately the deputy principal of my school instructed me on how to operate it). Things are going quite smoothly here, even for a vegetarian!
How do I begin to describe this crazy world of neon crosses (yes, those are for churches)? Well, hardly anyone speaks English, and most of the menus have only Korean characters. Observe:
웹문서
I actually don't know what that means. I just copied and pasted it from Google's homepage. Every time I go to a Web site here, EVEN Google, these characters magically appear where I used to find English. I think 웹문서 might mean "search."
We're living on the third floor of a GINORMOUS apartment complex. I'll post pictures soon enough. My refrigerator smells like kimchi, the omnipresent Korean staple of spicy pickled cabbage.
People are exceedingly friendly here, even though no one can understand anything I say. Miming, my friends, is the new black.
I visited my school today, and the teachers and directors are all very kind. Apparently my Brown degree gives me serious street cred, and they believe that I can do anything. For real. I was talking with the deputy principal about what I will be doing at work, and she was explaining that we will be teaching and prepping for the TOEFL exam. She was like, "We'll train you, but I'm sure you know how to teach it better than me." This is a 30 something teacher with a master's degree FROM THE US. Here's to a crash course in TOEFL prep!
Anywho, jet lag is catching up to me, and I promised Sam a game of cribbage. So until my next post, I leave you with the Google Korea homepage.
Friday, September 14, 2007
The sexy celebrity version of me!
Ahem, not that I'm into the CW or anything, but I found myself. Sort of. Really. Doesn't he sort of look like me back when I had better hair? Well, his name is Bret Harrison and he's the star of the new CW show "The Reaper." You can see his IMBD profile here. Sadly, I have to admit that our shared alikeness depends on the angle. But hey, maybe somebody will ask me for an autograph?
P.S. I'm leaving for Seoul on Sunday morning due to a slight scheduling problem with our flight. So until then, toodles!
Monday, September 10, 2007
The word on the street...
...is that I'm leaving on Friday. Call me or email if I owe you any money or if we have unfinished business. Otherwise, I'm outtie. Love you. Miss you. Wish you were here.
Last post until Seoul? I think so.
UPDATE:
We're now leaving on Saturday.
