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It’s hard to believe we’ve already been out in Korea for almost five months. Sometimes it feels like just the other day our Director was picking us up at the airport after a 12 hour flight out of San Francisco, then other days it feels like we’ve been out here for years already. It’s fair to say by now Korea has become ‘home’, and while it’s not without its faults, what home ever is?

One of the nice things about living in Bundang-gu, as opposed to say, Seoul city is that it’s actually clean. Sure, the pollution in Korea still makes a bad day in L.A. seem about as clear as a mountain sky, but asthma aside, it’s quite a charming place, especially when you consider that this entire district was farmland just a decade ago.

We’ve spent the last month or so on a bit of a health kick. No, we haven’t traded in beef for veggie burgers and chicken for bean sprouts; we’re still meat loving carnivores who’d strap two skinned baby seals to our feet if they were more comfortable than our ASICS. Our health kick has been walking. Not running, or jogging, just walking.

A lot of freakin’ walking.

Every day after work we head from Jukjeon back to Ori via the Tancheon River. It’s a pleasant enough walk despite the stifling humidity and absurd amount of mosquitos and it only takes some thirty-odd minutes so it’s great for walking off the beer belly. We still get the occasional stares of confusion from little Korean kids as they go: “Waygook saram!” and point like Donald Sutherland from Body Snatchers. Other times we get the giddy high-schoolers who go: “HELL-OH!” to which I’ll sometimes reply with an overly exaggerated: “ANN-YEONG-HA-SE-YO!” (”Hello!”)

The Tancheon River even has these great little rock crossings that let you cross from one side to the other and occasionally fall in. It’s amusing watching some prissed up ajumma in Gucci and high heels navigate the stones from one bank to the other with all the agility of an Olympic gymnast. It’s amazing to see these perm-haired visor wearing ladies in their late fifties power-walking four deep and twice as fast as me.

Weekends are usually spent relaxing, going outside for walks and embarking on the occasional bender courtesy of some of the funniest and wildest expats I’ve ever met. There’s a GS25 outside our apartment in Ori, and it’s served as a great rallying point to meet others or get into trouble. Think of a 7/11 with a few tables outside it and that pretty much sums it up. Almost every weeknight the blue plastic seats and tables are packed with people both local and foreign and some of the funniest memories, or lack of, have happened out here.

Of course the best part of Korea remains the job, and while it’s far from perfect, it has its perks, such as seeing kids show up to school with effeminate Konglish T-shirts…

…or rocking the famous “LOVING COUGARS IS NOT A CRIME” shirt…

…or having one of the other teachers plaster a kid in Canada stickers for Canada Day.

Cheers!

-D-

Some of the best cultural tips on how to adjust to living in Korea as a westerner come from GEPIK’s own website. For those that don’t know, GEPIK employees thousands of English Teachers and is sort of like the Los Angeles Unified School District, a New England prep school, and pre-school rolled into one. From what I’ve read, it’s basically a massive cluster-fuck. Some schools are good, some aren’t.

None-the-less, their Culture Tips are amazing. Here are some of my favorite:

• People are usually kind, but not to African-Americans and South-East Asians.
• You may be disgusted by some types of food, such as dog meat or dog soup if you keep dog as a pet but they do not eat every kind of dog.
• Individualism is not preferable. Community spirit comes first.
• Schedules and plans are often subject to change. (Understatement of the century)
• You may be insisted to drink alcohol beyond your capacity.
• Koreans are against America politically, not socially.
• You can walk at night more safely than western countries because guns are not allowed to possess according to law.
• Girls and ladies walk sometimes hand in hand but they are not lesbians.

(source: GEPIK)

My first genuine “Fuck Korea” moment happened the other week.

That’s right, my first moment where I, for lack of any better description, got so frustrated with some practice, ritual, custom, and illogical cultural behavior here that I blew up like Bill O’Rielly after an hour with Al Gore and George Clooney. I got mad. Not just mad, very VERY mad. Atomic mad. Destroyer of Worlds style mad.

Why?

Let’s back up a little. For the last three months, my girlfriend and I have been going to the same galbi restaurant on an almost weekly pilgrimage for their mouth watering marinated meat. It’s the kind of hole in the wall place where the tables are packed with locals and any white face is a rarity and is often stared at with bemused, shocked, intrigued and excited looks. It’s run by a husband and wife team with a few old grandmothers pitching in. The cast of characters would make Hemingway happy.

Husband mans the oven outside and carries the red-hot coals with tongs, deftly lifting them over your head and dropping them into the grill in the center of your table. Wife scuttles back and forth from table to table, quick enough to slop some marinated ribs on your grill and pass out eight dishes of vegetables and top off the beer. The place is a kind of lively hive where locals feed, laugh, drink themselves silly, and occasionally probably fight. It’s a soup kitchen for kimchi; the last place you’d want to take a first date. A guaranteed place NOT to score, but get a good meal and an earful of conversation from the Korean shoulder to shoulder with you at the next table. It’s a noxious den of coal fumes, burning meat, soju, cigarette smoke and garlic that almost seems so downright dirty it would probably fail any health inspection if such an agency even existed over here.

Basically, it’s my favorite kind of place, and the best place to eat, period. Screw the chains. For my money, if it’s where the locals go to grub, it’s four stars in my Zagat.

So after three months of eating there, we swung by after a particularly long day, my heart set on feasting on flesh of pig slow roasted over a bed of coals then curled up in a lettuce wrap and packed full of onion and garlic like a protein bomb to the belly. It’s the kind of meat that could solve world conflicts, if only we could set those damn vegans straight. The girlfriend wasn’t hungry, but I was ravenous, so I got us a table while she went to use the restroom.

Five minutes later, she comes back to a nasty scene. Me, yelling in English at the husband and wife while some drunk businessman acts like the U.N. and translates my frustrations into his native tongue, and the husband and wife’s words back into mine, often taking great liberties to tone down the obvious profanities, and trust me, there were quite a few on my end.

What set it off?

They wanted to charge a fee for having my girlfriend sit at the table, even though she wasn’t eating. That’s right, they wanted to charge us for two sets of ribs, even though she didn’t want to eat and was content on simply ordering a beer. A ’service charge’ was the word they used, but all I heard was: “rip off the whitey“, especially when the service charge was the same price as a second set of ribs.

This wasn’t a buffet, it was a blue collar joint kept open by spit, booze, good meat and better memories. For three months we’d been dining there, bringing our other waegook friends and raving about the food like a pair of pentecostals in the throes of the Spirit. And suddenly dinner for one and drinks for two turned into a full blown stand off that went something like this:

Me: “She doesn’t want kalbi, she just wants to drink a beer and hang out.”
Them: “You, kalbi. Her, no kalbi. Service fee, same price kabi”
Me: “No, her beer. One beer. Me, kalbi and beer.”
Them: “Yes, service fee, her. You kalbi. Her, no kalbi. Service fee, same price kalbi.”
Me: “That’s bullshit.”

I was pissed. On principal alone the practice was silly, but I’d hyped this place up and dragged in a few friends over the course of our three months and practically eaten a few pigs worth of pork rib alone! We were regulars, dammit! White faced monkeys the locals laughed at and and drank with. It was like Woody from Cheers cutting Norm off because he was worried about his liver.

I’m not proud of my outburst, and I still maintain that their policy is bollocks, but it happened, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve had my share of moments in my life where I’ve been a total prick, and this was certainly one of them.

“Fuck Korea,” I remember saying, before storming off, the husband and wife bowing and saying “Sowwee” as I passed, swearing to badmouth and boycott their place worse than Rosa Parks on a bus to the Republican National Convention. All the little stresses of living abroad had built up, and this silly little custom that’s hardly practiced anymore (that of charging a fee for someone who doesn’t eat) was the spark that set off the powder keg beneath my ass.

Several years ago I spent the spring semester of my junior year in college circling the globe on a ship with a thousand other Americans. We saw a dozen different countries in just over a hundred days, and somewhere between the beers in Brazil and Beijing, I remember one of our professors explaining something he called the ‘Bell Curve of Travel’. Tourists rarely feel it because they only stay long enough to fall IN love with a place, yet not long enough to fall OUT of love. They go through the honeymoon without going through the divorce and the messy trial over child custody and who gets the house in Hamptons and what’s left over after legal fees.

Travelers feel it.

It’s that slow simmer of frustration that builds up and blows over at something so silly a tourist would think you were crazy. I’d seen others feel it; witnessed friends at school flip out over nothing and watched good nights go bad on a dime because the bartender can’t mix a decent margarita, or the taxi driver over charges you a tiny bit. I’d sworn it would never happen to me and in my hubris, for a moment I’d become what I hated.

So here I was, over three months in, and the honeymoon was starting to wear off. I was on the downward slope, the double black diamond of my bitterness towards my host country. Sure, there’s enough to get mad about anywhere, but nothing was more revealing, and even personally disappointing, than my own over reaction to a nine dollar fee for a meal. I simply could not get past the idea that Korea was not like back home, and this was the issue that brought it to a boil…or a flame broil, in this case.

Every traveller has at least one “Fuck fill-in-the-country” moment, and I had mine over a nine dollar side of pork ribs. Like I said, not my proudest moment. In all of the lists of things one could hate about Korea, this was about as silly as getting mad over the quality of Soap Operas on daytime TV.

Over the last few weeks I thought about that inverted bell curve; that valley of vitriol that travelers often slip into when the very quirks about a country that make them fall in love with it are the things that slowly drive them mad. Was it the Purveyors of Pork’s fault? Sure it was. In their constant quest to turn a dollar they’d pissed off an otherwise evangelical customer who’d take a bullet to save their marinated meat.

But it was also my my fault. It was MOSTLY my fault.

I couldn’t get passed the idea that something as illogical and selfish was ritual and custom to them, and that I was the one being rude as well, and this was before I told them to go die in a fire.

Cut to: yesterday. After a long day at the English Factory teaching kids phonics and plate tectonics, we stopped by the bar on our way home for an evening martini, happy to people watch and have people watch us. Our friend from Philly, let’s call him M, spotted us and stopped by to share a drink with us and swap tales from the trenches of teaching. M’s been here over a month, and he’s already able to read Hanguel (Korean) so well it puts us to shame. None the less, he’s the kind of upbeat guy who gets along with us well and rarely has a bad thing to say. The cynic in me always says: “Give it another month,” but the truth is, he’s just a good fellow and he gets along well with my usually upbeat-and-twisted sense of humor.

One martini became two, and the bar nibblies soon revealed themselves to be a poor substitute for dinner. The conversation went something like this:

M: “You guys hungry?“
Me: “Absolutely. What are you thinking?“
M: “I’ve lost ten pounds since I’ve been here, I need to eat something heavy.”
Me: “I’ve lost twenty, but I’m up five, so it’s only fifteen.”
Marissa: “I hate you both.”
Me: “Feel like sushi? Udon? Katsu? There’s a good bibimbap place around the corner.”
M: “I could really go for some BBQ“
Me: “Me too.“
M: “We could walk to that other galbi place, or…we could go to those shiesters around the corner.”
Me: “Those assholes…?“
Marissa: “They DO do really good galbi.”
Me: “I know…it’s just….well...“

Five minutes later, we strolled up to that little meat market on the corner, the facade lit with the flames of an outdoor oven; the marinated meat smell wafting through the air like a sirens call at sea. Husband was out there, hands clad in gloves that no doubt covered blisters the size of quarters from the years of manning the oven. He saw us, waved, raised his shoulders as if to say: “Hungry? We have room!” I nodded, he bowed, and gave me a smile as if to say: “Welcome back.“

And in we went. Wife was there, busy as always, shouting phrases in Korean that I’ve only begun to start understanding. She gave Marissa a pat on the back, a friendly gesture of affection in a country where affection is rarely shown, then ushered us over to a table set up outside.

“Three kalbi?” she asked.
“Three kalbi,” I said, then added: “and beer.“

She took our order, smiled, then said: “Korea. America. Different.” Mark helped translate, but in truth it wasn’t needed. Gestures and smiles and deeps bows crossed language barriers better than words. She was sorry she offended me. And I was sorry I flipped out over so little. Very sorry. We both laughed, smiled, and just like that, we crossed back over our own cultural DMZ’s and shrugged off the conflict as if it happened in another life and maybe…it just had.

Maybe I was a little better for learning that not everything has to make sense, at least not ALL of the time. After all, this is Korea, and sometimes logic goes out the window to old custom, and if you cling too much to what you makes sense where you are from, you find yourself mad at where you ARE.

All the past drama seemed to dissipate amongst the smell of marinated pork, the excellently spiced kimchi and the Cass that was brought to the table as if it were a bottle of 1945 Cabarnet saved from the basement of some French monastery. It was like coming home and we’d only been away a few weeks. The prodigal waegook had returned. We ate, we drank, we put their meat in our mouths in a non-gay way. We were happy waegooks.

Will there be another ‘Fuck Korea’ moment? Maybe. Hopefully not, but maybe…
But will it be over meat?

Not this meat. It’s too damn good.

Ahhh, life abroad. One of our teachers who’s leaving this sunday flew into an emo temper tantrum today in the teachers lounge after he discovered we weren’t going to be moving into his apartment, and as a result, the stuff he’d acquired (as one easily does) over here would have to find proper homes, and not pawned off to the new tenants. The stuff that flew out of his mouth was amusingly shocking considering it came from someone much older than a 12 year old Linkin’ Park lipstick wearer, but mostly, it was depressing and downright nasty.

While his soon-to-be empty place is, by all descriptions, larger than ours, we’re happy to hang out at our little hovel known as Starus. And plus, who could argue with a roof top patio that plays movies on a projector every weekend and has a putting green?

That’s the thing about being abroad that’s often funny. People’s personality can change on a dime, often over misunderstanding, or sheer acts of outright asshole-ness. There are a lot of great, nice, kind foreigners out here teaching; people who we’ve only known for a few weeks or months whom we’d consider friends. And there’s also a lot of maladjusted jerks; and sometimes all it takes is a bottle of the green meanie (aka Soju) or a misunderstanding to bring it out.

I guess Korea’s just like the rest of the world after all.

At the end of the day, it’s the people that make living abroad so much fun. The good, the bad, the crazy, and the kids. Teaching’s like trench warfare, and you can spot the good ones, the ones who take their job seriously and, despite the shortcomings of living the life of a second-class citizen at times, it’s a blast sharing a brew with a guy from Philly next to gal from Phuket and a couple from Sydney, with little in common other than the here and now and the joy of seeing new things.

So after the aforementioned teachers cockery, the impending worry that our school is having trouble finding new teachers after two pulled runners (aka, leaving the country on a friday night without notice), and a stressful week of open classes in front of Korean parents, I found myself in a minor funk about the now, and the future. But like all funks, it was quickly cured by dancing.

That’s right, dancing…

Around the world dancing!

And in my opinion, the guy’s pretty good too!

Cheers!

-D-

Glad to see the next city over from my home town is making the news all the way over here.

Here’s the late, great, Heath Ledger as The Joker in the upcoming Dark Knight movie…

…And here’s one of my students in the act of consuming his Frozen Banana Popsicle during Cooking Class. I see nothing but utter evil and madness in both their eyes.

And speaking of mad geniuses, here’s another random of Your Future Overlord and/or James Bond Villain. I call it, “Genius in Gym Class.” Note the bouncy ball being swung towards the back of his head. I may or may not have laughed.

And finally, to round it out, here’s Apop in the ER last week with Pneumonia…because hey, what’s more endearing than snapping a shot of your girlfriend while she’s host to the most fatal infection in the U.S.?

~cheers!

-D-