Back By Popular Demand

Ah, spring. Spring is a lovely time in Korea. The festival season begins, the many long, tubular greenhouses in the countryside let loose their harvest of ripe, delicious strawberries, and the cherry blossoms burst forth from their winter slumber. The other day one of my co-teachers commented on the March calendar image on another teacher's desk, which showed a spring field of bright yellow yuchae flowers in full bloom near Seongsan Ilchulbong on Jeju. He told me how young engaged couples have their pictures taken in front of the peak and the fields of yellow yuchae to celebrate their love. He didn't know the English word for the yuchae flower, however, so I opened Google Translate on my computer and typed it in. Here's what came up:

Yes, "yuchae" is "rape." Why do we have the same word in English for a plant and a sexual assault? I'll never know.

Way to ruin the moment, English language. What do you do for an encore?

Nothing much has been happening this semester so far other than the usual detritus of working, staying alive and other typical human behaviors. But  people have been asking why I haven't updated the blog lately, so I figured I ought to scrape together whatever came to mind and make it into something cogent and somewhat entertaining. For a few weeks the most exciting thing going on (besides, you know, the deadly tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, but I'd prefer not to dwell on that) was that I was waiting for a calculator to show up in the mail. Mind you, this was no ordinary calculator. This calculator has a USB cable that plugs into your computer, so that you can do 10-key data entry on a computer that doesn't have a 10-key keypad. Plus it has a trackball so you don't have to save space on your desk for a mouse or use the stupid touch pad mouse. (If this does not excite you intensely, perhaps even sexually, then you have clearly never used Excel on a laptop on a cramped desk.) The calculator was pretty much all I had ever dreamed of in my most feverish, intense, spreadsheet-manipulating dreams (it even has a scroll wheel that wasn't described in the online listing!) but after it finally showed up about a week after I expected it to I discovered that I no longer had anything to look forward to every day. So the moral of this story is that I really, really need to start dating again.

The scroll wheel totally upgrades this puppy from boss to ultra-boss.

When I've been traveling lately--solo, for the most part, coincidentally--I've often started composing narratives in my head for the blog as events unfold, recounting to myself exactly how I'll detail arriving at the boardwalk in Danshui and discovering that it's now cold, dark and packed with far too many people to enjoy any of the area's offerings, or how a cabbie in Jinhae refused to let me out of the cab until he reached the exact dot on his navigation system listed as "Dream Park," and then declined to accept the full fare out of embarrassment when I finally convinced him to let me out so I could explore the park on foot. But invariably by the time I've had a night's rest to consider the day's events I realize that no one really wants to read every minute detail of my personal mental narrative of trekking around a foreign locale, eating congealed duck's blood and developing blisters the size of a $50 TWD coin, no matter how cleverly worded it is. (The congealed duck's blood and tofu I sampled in Kaohsiung, by the way, was actually quite delicious, although I would recommend to anyone trying it not to accompany the dish with plum tea if you want to avoid severe bowel discomfort the next morning.) So I'll give you the condensed version, and if you want additional details (and if you know who I am, mwah hah hah) then I recommend that you check out my Picasa and YouTube pages for the photos and videos. There should be links on my Facebook page somewhere, which is probably where you're reading this if you know me.

I took a trip to Taiwan at the end of February. I have an ex-roommate whom I hadn't seen in years that lives in Kaohsiung, so I wanted to say hello while I'm in the right hemisphere and see everything Kaohsiung and Taipei had to offer. My overall impression of Taiwan is that it's a very cosmopolitan country, more so than Korea. The Taiwanese seem more individual in their tastes and more welcoming to foreign influence. And the first cafe I went to was playing Blonde Redhead so that was some straight indie cred right there. Also, it's totally cool to put a neon sign of a giant penis or a dog fucking a pig on your bar or cafe, as shown in these photos. I love the Taiwanese sense of humor, it's much more subversive than what I've seen of Korean humor.

Billy Lawless, eat your heart out.

Nothing a dog and pig can do together cannot be art.

It was a little bit of a shock coming to another foreign country and speaking even less of the language, something that I had also noticed when I was briefly in Shanghai on my way to and from the States. I don't speak very much Korean, despite living here for a year, but I've picked up enough to barely survive, and I can read the alphabet, which helps immensely for all the "Kanglish" words that are transliterations of English words. Before I landed in Taipei I managed to get down "xie xie" (thank you) and "ni hao" (hello) and learn how to count to four, but that was about it, and Chinese characters are still a complete mystery to me. I'm sure once you get used to reading them they're a lot easier to read, but for me, trying to remember "okay, this jumble of lines means 'beer' and the jumble of lines that looks like a lantern and a little sign post is 'station,' and box plus spikey tree thing means 'exit'" was a little beyond my comprehension. (Luckily just about everything in Taiwan is listed in English and Chinese characters. Places other than the United States are considerate like that.) I'd love to learn Chinese some day--it's a wonderfully musical language once you learn to appreciate the tones, I could seriously listen to airport announcements in Mandarin all day just to hear all the different sounds and inflections--but considering how little Korean I know I should probably stick to one new language at a time. Anyway, Taiwan gets a big thumbs-up from me. Go for the duck's blood, stay for the hot springs and electronics shopping.

The new school year has been relatively free of surprises. My former partner-in-crime Mo departed for the United States to be with his bride so I've been spending a little more time by myself while readjusting my social life to include new people. All the new folks in town are very nice and friendly--especially the TaLK teachers after a few beverages--but they've all arrived with  intact social and/or family relationships in the area, so it's not quite as easy to form friendships based purely on proximity and desperation to speak English. Clearly the lesson here is that I should have made more than one close friend my age in the last year, but that's not so easy when you're a foreigner living in a small town and not the type who readily establishes close friendships. (And to be fair, I did make at least one Korean friend who moved away to Seoul.) As many of my dearest friends back home have pointed out, good friends are hard to come by. However I'd prefer not to dwell on that point since all the aforementioned individuals can read this blog and I don't want this to turn into a whiny spooky-kid Livejournal post. (Ha ha ha BURN Livejournal.) I've been thinking about trying to get hooked up with one of these "language exchange" opportunities I've heard about from other EPIK teachers, where you meet a Korean who's interested in learning English and that person helps you learn Korean, and this is probably a good opportunity to make an effort to get to know the people in my town better and reconnect with some of the folks I know in other areas. I believe some folks are coming to town for the bullfighting festival next weekend so that should be a good opportunity to get reacquainted with people. (The bullfighting festival, by the way, was supposed to happen in March but was rescheduled and shortened due to a national outbreak of foot and mouth disease. A lot of non-cow related festivals were also cancelled outright in March to try to discourage people from traveling and possibly spreading the foot and mouth virus, so it's kind of funny that the one directly cow-related festival in the country is still happening. Mess with the bulls, you get the horns, baby.)

Oh, by the way, the coda to the mug story... No one ever came forward and gave it back to me, but one day I found it on a window sill in my school on the way to the English classroom. So I got my mug back, and no hard feelings. It's a happy ending!

One of the distinctions between the Korean school year and the American school year is that the Korean school year runs February to December instead of September to May (although it's impossible to keep the kids out of the school during breaks, so it's really a year-round schedule) so that means as teachers we get a classroom full of teenagers in rut that are impossible to teach at the beginning of the year instead of the end of the year. Personally I think that makes a lot more sense because it means that they'll be mellowed out and hunkering down for winter when they have to prepare for all the big exams at the end of the year, but it doesn't make the teaching this time of year any easier. Hell, I would rather be outside too, but we don't have a big six foot touch screen for my PowerPoint presentations outside. The time passes quickly, though--we'll be into midterm examinations in another three weeks or so, even though it seems like the year just started. As they say here, time flies like an arrow...

I guess the only other thing I'll talk about in this post is how I've been thinking about the future, although I'm reluctant to say too much about my thoughts since my co-workers can read this blog. When I came here I was planning to only stay for a year, maybe two, but once I started crunching numbers I realized that I might have to stick around for three years in order to pay off all the bills I came here to pay off and put together enough savings to come back and resettle in the States comfortably. (I'm sure this proposed extension was an especially pleasant surprise to the friend of mine who agreed to take care of my pet fish for a period of one to two years.) Plus I landed at a good school and I had a very enjoyable year, especially compared to the previous year in LA. For a while I was thinking that maybe I should consider looking for work in another country after two years here, but at this point I'm feeling like the expense and hassle of moving again would outweigh the benefits, especially since it would be difficult or impossible to find a job that pays as much with my qualifications. So for now my choices seem to be staying here at my current school for another year, moving to a school in a larger city in Korea at the end of my current contract (probably one in the same province so I don't lose all my retention bonuses) or heading home at the end of this year with less money and more bills than I would like. I've been feeling a little homesick lately but the idea of returning to the States is also really daunting. I've pretty much given up on my former line of work so I'll be returning as a 34- or 35-year-old with little experience related to the job training I'm currently doing, two or three years of unrelated experience teaching in a foreign country, and a resume that represents a lot of hard work and sacrifice but will probably look like a vagabond's CV to anyone who's never worked in entertainment. Disappearing into Thailand, Rambo-style, sometimes seems like an attractive, if irresponsible, option. Well, at this point at least I can say I love the school I'm at, I've got straight A's in my courses and the balance of my debts is decreasing at a satisfactory rate. So I should probably count my blessings and worry about my future when the time comes. And besides, it's spring, and the strawberries here are too damn good. Also it's 1:30 AM and I need to finish more work for my accounting classes tomorrow, and I wasted half of today going to Daegu to see "Sucker Punch" which was so awful I left halfway through. (There are very few other movies I've ever seen where I've been struck by the thought, "This would be much better if it were a Russ Meyers film.") But at least I have a new hat. I'm rambling. Good night.

Scenery and Fish

First things first: Hey, New York Mets – whatever happens this season, I want you to promise me it will happen without Oliver Perez in the starting rotation. Let’s face it, the guy’s a bum. Deal? Deal.

Second thing: you know what I love about Korea? Customer service. People really go the extra mile. Yesterday I left my Dunkin' Donuts coffee mug sitting on top of the cash machine at the bank. This morning I went back to see if they had it. A clerk asks me which one of the two side-by-side terminals I left it on. I wonder why it matters, but I tell him. He goes into the back. I sit and wait. Minutes go by. I wonder how long it takes to check the lost and found for a coffee mug. He comes back out. "I check CCTV," he says. (His English wasn't very good but I applaud him for giving it a go.) "Person take mug." These guys actually checked the security tape of the ATM, just to see what happened to my mug. I don't think anyone would bother making that sort of effort to find a lost item in the US unless somebody issued them a court order, and even then it would probably take a month to get it done. So the guy takes my number and says he'll call if he finds anything out. I find it strange that somebody here would pick up something that doesn't belong to them and walk off with it, but hey... Dunkin' Donuts, good brand. This evening I get a call from the bank. Turns out one of my students saw it and picked it up for me, and he's going to bring it to me tomorrow. I love this place! Can I stay forever?

I’ve been back in Korea for close to three weeks now, and as of today I’ve officially been here teaching for a year. Today one of my Korean co-teachers asked me if it’s stressful living and working in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language. I guess it’s hard for her to imagine being comfortable in a situation like this. Honestly it’s not that bad. I’m not very chatty at work since most people don’t understand what I’m saying, but I can talk to my friends via instant message and Facebook and I get the chance to talk to someone in English whenever I get together with the other foreign teachers. I’ve pretty much learned how to avoid most situations that can’t be communicated non-verbally or with my very limited Korean skills at this point. (Except for wrong numbers and spam callers. I really need to learn the Korean phrase for “Wrong number.”) The trip from the US and back again to Korea wasn’t even that shocking, although I kind of assumed it would be. But to properly illustrate that point, first I need to tell you about a fish.

Back around 2002 or so when I was living in New York I bought some fish. It was the first time I had ever owned any sort of pet. My parents always refused to let my sister and I have pets because they didn’t want them messing up the house and they didn’t want to take care of them. Secretly I’ve always wanted a cat, but I’ve never really been in a stable enough living situation to be able to properly and responsibly take care of a cat. So instead I shelled out for a 5 1/2 gallon fish tank and a few tropical freshwater fish at a local pet store. Now fish ownership and fish tank management is much different from the ownership of other types of pets. First and foremost, fish die. This is a fact of life when you own fish. If you have a dog or a cat or a rabbit or guinea pig or whatever, you expect it to live and thrive whatever the conditions might be. If your pet gets sick, you take it to the vet and pay the vet a shit-ton of money and then hopefully your pet gets better until the next time you have to take it to the vet and pay the vet a shit-ton of money to treat your pet. Fish are pretty much either healthy and they live, or they get sick and they die, and then you flush them down the toilet Cosby Show style. (Before I flush one of mine I like to say, “His name is Robert Paulsen.”) You can buy drugs for things like ick and mold but, unless you’re raising some sort of rare Deuce Bigalow fish, you’re never going to take a pet fish to the vet when it starts swimming a little bit sideways. The other difference between fish and most pets is that most pets live in roughly the same environment you do. Sure, most of the small ones have cages or terrariums or hutches or Habitrails or something, but they can generally survive outside of those things and, for example, breathe the same air that you do. Not so fish. For fish, you have to buy and maintain a tank. To a fish, the tank is their world. The pleasures of raising fish mostly come from choosing your fish, decorating your tank, and then maintaining your fish’s tiny biosphere. It's more like raising a plant than owning a pet in a lot of ways. Properly establishing and maintaining a balanced fish tank requires a fair amount of patience, especially for beginners. In my case, it didn’t help that I had selected a 5 1/2 gallon tank. 5 1/2 gallons is not an ideal size for more than one or two fish – one gallon of water will support roughly one inch of fish, so once you get two or three fish into a 5 1/2 gallon tank and they start to grow the tank gets overcrowded very quickly. I overloaded my talk almost immediately. I got a few small fish, I got excited, I got too many fish, the fish I got grew, and then fish started to get sick and die. Fish get stressed and die very easily if they don’t have enough space and shelter. The second trick of maintaining a fish tank is to get the right balance of creatures, plants and tank accouterments. You also need to be careful when mixing breeds of fish and other aquatic sea life because some breeds are passive and some breeds are more aggressive. The more aggressive fish are often more interesting because they’re more active, but they also shouldn’t be mixed with passive breeds for obvious reasons. When I first put together my tank I got a snail to eat the algae. The first snail I got was fine for a few weeks, but then it mysteriously disappeared from its shell. So, I got another snail. The second snail I didn’t like so much because it ate my plants. But, one day I came by to check the tank and that snail was gone without a trace as well. So I go on the internet and did some research. Turns out one of my fish at the time, a yo-yo loach (great fish, by the way, I highly recommend them), was of a type known for eating snails. This is kind of funny since I’m pretty sure Petco sold me the snail and the loach on the same goddamn day. (A word of advice: never trust Petco. Wait, is that trademark libel? I take it back. Always trust Petco.)

The point is, when you start raising fish, you really have to focus on creating and maintaining a balanced environment that will keep your fish happy and healthy. When you buy a new fish, for example, you have to float the fish’s plastic bag in your tank for at least 15 minutes before opening it and letting the fish out, in order to let the water temperatures even out, because otherwise the temperature shock can kill the fish. Likewise, when you change out your water to clean your tank, you can only change out about half or a third of your water in one cleaning, or the fresh water can actually kill your fish. The fish need the chemical balance and the various bacteria that live in the tank water to survive. Just about any kind of shock, like introducing a new fish to the tank, can kill fish from the stress.

Over the years my fish and my fish tank have been through a hell of a lot of crazy shit. When I moved from New York to Florida for graduate school I brought the tank with me in my van. I kept it half-full and ran the air pump off an inverter plugged into my car cigarette lighter. Likewise, when I moved to LA after grad school I had to take the fish on a three day journey across the continent. Well, it was supposed to be a three day journey – on my way from Phoenix to Las Vegas my van’s transmission blew out in the mountains in Arizona. I had to take a cab to get the four or five blocks from the garage to my hotel because I didn’t want to carry a fish tank for five blocks. When I got to LA, the first time I tried to add a new fish to the tank every fish in the tank died. The guy at the pet store guessed it must have been some sort of bacteria that got into the tank that the fish weren’t used to. (Either that or my roommates did something to the fish – the fish all died while I was out of town on a job.) After all the fish died I cleaned out all the old water and started re-conditioning the tank, but then I managed to knock one of my roommate’s room-dividing screens into the tank while I was cleaning, which broke the tank and spilled most of the water into the living room carpet. (Don’t tell my old landlord that story.) It’s been a rough ride, altogether.

As of today, the tank has one fish, Mr. Blue. He’s a blue cichlid. Cichlids are known as fairly aggressive fish, but they’re colorful and a lot more interesting than a lot of other breeds. With such a small tank, I thought maybe two cichlids and a bottom-feeder might be a good mix. (A lot of fish don’t thrive in groups of less than three fish of the same species, which is another difficulty in maintaining such a small fish tank.) Unfortunately, no other fish has ever lasted more than a month or two in the tank with Mr. Blue. Plus, after the other fish dies and Mr. Blue invariably cannibalizes part of the corpse before I find it and fish it out, Mr. Blue always seems to be a little larger and more aggressive. He’s pretty much the Hannibal Lecter of fish at this point. My friends in LA who are taking care of Mr. Blue have cats. The cats like to sit on the fish tank and watch Mr. Blue. At first Mr. Blue stayed away from them but now he’s allegedly completely fearless. As far as we know the cats have never tried to get into the tank. I think the cats know better than to fuck with Mr. Blue.

"Come in here and I'll eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."

So what’s been the point of this long fish story? (Sorry about the pun, couldn’t resist.) Well, I think people are a lot like fish. They need to manage their environments. Some people are like goldfish or bettas; they thrive anywhere. Other people need to be with a specific group of people, or need a particular amount of space, or just need a rock to hide under now and again to survive and thrive. As humans I think we like to think of ourselves as an extremely adaptable species, and I think we’re definitely a lot heartier than fish. But still, there aren’t a lot of people out there who can survive getting ripped out of their tank on a regular basis. I guess at this point I would put myself more into the betta or goldfish category of people, as opposed to the gourami or tin foil barb category. Being back in the United States was a lot like getting dumped back into the ocean (or maybe a large public aquarium) for a few weeks. Now that I’m back in Korea, I’m swimming in the 5 1/2 gallon tank again. But, I’ve had the time to dig around in the rocks and make myself comfortable here, and I like the other fish who are here with me in the tank, so things are pretty okay. I just hope that when they throw a new fish in the tank in a couple weeks (Mo left for the US today – more on that in a later post) it’ll be a fish I get along with. I don’t think people would be too happy with me if I ate the new guy.

(I'm imagining the new teacher happening upon this blog post and getting to that paragraph now. Reminds me of a story about me and my roommate from orientation. I’ll tell you about it some other time.)

One last story about my fish – for one of the courses I’m taking online this year, my professor decided to spice up the “introduce yourself on the message board” part of the first week by asking us to describe ourselves from the perspective of our pet. Which meant I had to think and write about what my one pet fish, who’s half a world away and living alone in a bathroom with two cats, would think of me. I kind of had a Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood moment or two thinking about it – “I’ve abandoned my fish!” But I’m getting over it now. He’s a tough fish. He’ll survive.

Not too much else going on these days, besides welcoming new teachers and saying “so long for now” to some others. There’s a couple new Talk teachers in town, they seem like they’ll fit in with our group. Well, I’m off to prepare for another year of school, look for international spices, rent some Korean DVDs now that I can finally hook my netbook up to the TV, and work ahead on my courses in anticipation of visiting Taiwan at the end of next week. Should be a fun trip, I’m really looking forward to this one.

Hmm. Maybe I should get a new fish when I get back. A betta, maybe. Is that a good idea?