Your BELLY

Certainly, living so close to my school is a benefit. It's five minutes or under on foot, and my proximity to work was a concern of mine before I moved down here after the orientation in Seoul. I had the idea that the Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education would possibly toss me and some other teachers all in an apartment building and leave us on our own to figure out how to best get to work. I imagined shitty scenarios of having to figure out a bus system and sit through 45 minute rides, or spend 20 minutes walking everyday. Fortunately the DMOE, my employer, and that of the other native speakers who got the job through EPIK, just assigns us a school and leaves the housing up to them. I say fortunately only because things worked out well for me. Whoever at my school was in charge of hooking me up with an apartment did a good job. It is close, as I have said, but it is also relatively new, as is my school and the entire neighborhood I live in and around because I am on the edge of the city where all the development is pretty recent. My apartment is also a decent size. It's would be small in America, except for maybe in New York City, but compared to the pads of some other native teachers, I really lucked out. I have a kitchen that has enough room for a nice table with four chairs that was kindly furnished for me, and my bedroom which is accessed by two large sliding doors from the kitchen has a good sized bed and enough room for a small couch if I ever come across one. The bathroom is pretty small but I also have a storage/laundry room.

My apartment is pretty nice, and like I said, certainly convenient, but I guess the proximity has a downside too. Namely that of having my students everywhere around the neighborhood, and having some trying to follow me home. These two kids, Sang-gi (left) and Sang-kyung (right)



and another friend ran into me as I was walking home the other day. Sang-kyung kept saying I needed to memorize his name, so I practiced it a couple times. When I saw him today and snapped the above photo, three days after he had me memorize it, he asked me what his name was and covered up his name tag. Fortunately I had just taked the photo and zoomed in on it and read his name off it cause I didn't remember. Ha, sucker. Sang-gi, who has serious ADD and speaks little more English than "Your BELLY, show me!" managed to ask where I was going, half in Korean, half in English. I noticed they changed the direction that they were walking in when they saw me, and after I responded I was going home and asked them where they were going, of course they said they were going to my home too. "Party" and "tour" were a couple of words they managed to spit out in English, plus "Your BELLY" one or two more times. That's actually pretty funny, every time I see Sang-gi, that's the first and usually the only thing he says; he want's to see my stomach for some reason. At least he remembered one vocab word from the English camp my school held on a Saturday about 6 weeks ago.

I just kept walking as these kids were shoveling fried ramen into their mouths and jabbering on in Korean. They asked where I lived, do I take a bus, a subway? I live this way, no I don't, and no I don't. I could have just lied and walked around until they got tired of following me but I didn't want to. I got to my apartment building and opened the door to head up to my floor, and had to physically block the pesky little bastards from squeezing into my building. "No. Go home." "AHN-i-yo." I got halfway up the stairs and they tried to sneak in behind me, thinking I wouldn't see them. I held out my arms and flapped my hands like I was shooing them away which was a mistake cause that's essentially the gesture Koreans use to say "Come here." I got them out again and finally watched them leave from the landing after a couple minutes of loitering around the outside of my building.

So now they know what building I live in, but not which apartment is mine. There's only six apartments, being a three-story building with an art studio on the bottom, so I guess it wouldn't be too hard to figure out. Only a couple students actually know which apartment is mine, and that's cause they live upstairs, but they're cool. One of them brought me some grapes as a gift one night, and their mom is friendly and wouldn't let them bother me. Plus they don't have ADD.

Jesus, That's a Spicy Marinade

Tonight is game six between the Samsung Lions and the Doosan Bears. The Lions play baseball here in Daegu, I caught a game back in the regular season and it was great. The most expensive tickets listed on the board were 6000 won, or about $4.50 at the current exchange rate. Plus you can bring in your own beer and food. The Lions are the series underdogs and are fighting to stay alive in the league semifinals, and, hold on a second, I want to go buy some ice cream.

Ok, got it.nThe guy at the Power Mart is the nicest guy ever. He always gives me some sort of discount, and is always smiling and says "have a good night" in English. I think that the Lions won the championship last year, but this year they are two runs down with three innings to go in their season, potentially. There weren't too many people at the game I went to, over a month ago when they were battling for the pennant, but understandably the games have been sold out recently, from what I've heard.

That ice cream was great. My mouth feels nice and cool now. I was dying earlier when I was eating dinner. I bought some dweji gogi, or thinly-sliced pork, and pan-fried it with a spicy marinade I bought and some garlic and onions and peppers. When I was at E-Mart earlier this evening, I was contemplating my Korean marinade choices since I couldn't find any Western-style barbeque sauce. By contemplating, I mean comparing the one line of English on each of the bottles. I decided to go with the Smart Choice High Fiber Hot Spicy Pork Bulgogi Marinade because if the Smart Choice brand name doesn't doesn't lend itself to an obvious choice, the rest should.

I guess I forgot that time when I was in Thailand, where all the food is spicy by default, sort of like Korea, and I saw a dish explicitly listed on the menu as spicy, and I thought "Wow, something that is described as spicy in a country where everything is spicy without even having to say so. This must be really spicy. I should try it." My lapse in reasoning occurred with the last sentence: "I should try it." My reasoning should have instead continued like this, "Damn, that must really fucking hot, I'd better stay away." Well I ordered it, a garlic chicken salad, and I couldn't eat even half of it. Easily the second hottest thing I've ever eaten.

So back to tonight. Maybe I should have gotten the regular Smart Choice High Fiber Pork Bulgogi Marinade, but I didn't. At first the food was just hot cause it was right off the frying pan, and the rice bed was right out of the rice cooker. That's the worst, when the temperature is so hot that you don't notice that the spice is way hot too. Well my nose was running and my face was red when I was about a quarter of the way in, and I only had so much beer left to chase it down with. I tried to eat a bit more and just got scorched so I let it alone for awhile. I guess it wasn't as hot as the chicken salad in Thailand, 'cause I was able to finish it after the temperature cooled down a bit. Anyway, that ice cream was real good. The Lions are still down by two and they only have one inning left. I was going to have the pork gogi with some potatoes that have been sitting around for almost a couple weeks that I have been meaning to mash up, but that seemed like too much work. Potatoes stay good for awhile too anyway, I think. Cooking is tough because you can't just look around a supermarket and buy the same stuff that you're used to cooking with back in the states. And no one cooks with ovens, they don't consider ovens a basic appliance, and I think I've only talked to one person in my whole time here that has one. So basically I've had to adapt my cooking style, what there is of one, to the food I can find and recognize. It's not so bad. It's easy enough to throw some rice in the cooker and fry up some mandu, or buy some bulgogi and eat that, or even just go down the street to E-Mart and order something at the food court. And half the time I end up eating out anyway, especially with Korean culture being so group-oriented and all. For example, last Thursday I bought a pizza on the way home from the school field trip to an amusement park cause I was so hungry I couldn't be bothered to shop for and cook food. And then Friday I had to leave school early and go downtown for a meeting some some folks that I am going to be working with to judge an English essay contest, and they brought me out to eat after that, as seems par for the course anytime you have any sort of meeting. Saturday I was at the temple and got fed there. Sunday I got brought out to dinner by the people who were filming me and the Swedish babe Fanny for the promotional video. Monday night I ate out with the other English teachers from my school to celebrate the open class, or demo class I guess you could call it, the previous Friday. Tuesday I guess I cooked a meal, or more accurately combined the dregs of what was left of food scrounged from my cupboards and fridge. Wednesday I met some other native English teachers downtown and we chowed on Western food at the Holy Grill. So I guess with my meal tonight, that makes two meals I've made in the past week.

Well shit, the Lions just lost. Season over.

Golgusa Temple Stay

I went on a temple stay this weekend. I had always thought a temple stay would be a super relaxing time of sitting around meditating and doing yoga and philosophical insights and whatnot, and I'm sure many are, but this was more of large tourist destination. Meaning, of course, a bunch of foreigners taking pictures and doing things wrong. Now I don't mean to make the weekend sound like it was bad, because it was not, it just didn't meet my expectations, based on almost nothing more than stereotypes marinated in imagination, of what I wanted a retreat at a Buddhist temple to be.
Plus, we, the group, all 100 of us, were only there for about 24 hours. The schedule was tight even before we got to the temple. We left Daegu, had X amount of time to eat lunch at a restaurant on the way, X amount of time to visit the Gyeongju Museum we stopped at, and X amount of time at the ancient observatory we saw after that. I think that, even though the stay was not an easy, laid-back time, the experience would have been better if I had stayed a week or more, and really gotten into the routine.
Lunch on Saturday was good cause I got to sit with some friends I hadn't talked to for awhile, and also meet a Swedish exchange student who was model-caliber hot. When we got to the temple, we sat around in a large group and had a sort of introduction to the area. There is a Grand Master at the temple a dozen or so monks, and some people who seemed to be in training, or on an extended visit, or something. There were even a couple foreign monks there, French I believe, who did a fair amount of the translation and explaining to us tourists.
The main attraction of Golgulsa (Bone Cave Temple, I think?) is not the temple itself. The original burned down a few hundred years ago, and the new one is small and unimpressive. More of a shrine. The main attraction is a 20-foot Buddha carved out of a blotchy, pockmarked stone face. It's over 1500 years old, and exists thanks to an Indian monk who wandered on over here back in the day.
We had a list of activities that included Zen yoga, Sunmudo, a Zen martial art unique to Korea and similar to Taekwando, but with meditation involved, a tea drinking ceremony, a ritualized breakfast ceremony, and a few worship ceremonies, including a predawn worship that we had to get up at four AM for.
Basically, we sat cross-legged a lot, which causes my hips and knees to ache when I attempt to stand up. I am familiar with this discomfort from eating out at Korean restaurants where you sit on the floor. I thought that after two months I would start getting used to it, but no such luck so far. Maybe this temple stay helped out a bit since I was aching so much. After the last event Saturday evening, a Sunmudo demonstration, I heard my name called out as I was getting ready to head to bed. I had forgotten I agreed to do some filming for a promotional video or something when one of the Korean chaperons approached me earlier. I was supposed to do a tea ceremony with Fanny, the super hot Swedish girl I mentioned early. They wanted us to act as a couple, which I had no qualms with. Oh, and it turns out that she actually had done some modeling in Sweden, nice! Anyway, I didn't do the tea ceremony with her, they had Chris, a British guy I sat next to on the bus, do that. Instead, they put me in the monk clothes and asked what I remembered from the martial arts practice earlier. I had to rack my exhausted brain but remembered most of a side-kick they had us practice. So while everyone else got to go to bed, I tried to do this side-kick for a camera, underneath only a spotlight in the dark Sunmudo academy, with the French monk trying to get me to do the motions properly. He was clearly not too impressed with my skills, and I felt that reminding him I had spent five minutes learning this earlier in the evening as opposed to practicing for years would have been futile, so I just did my botched side-kick for the camera, and then a meditation routine with no complaints.

One totally sweet thing about Golgulsa is that upon the knobby, blotchy rock face that the Main Attraction Buddha is carved out of, is that there are many small shelves and nooks with more Buddha statues of various sizes. Pictured here is one such Buddha, the Buddha of hard rock. Please reference "Metal Health (Bang Your Head)" by Quiet Riot.

Sunday, after a quick nap following the ritual breakfast, Paru-Gongyang, which was supposed to be silent despite a number of people dropping bowls as they tried to transfer the cleaning water to and fro, and people talking and so on, I was called out to do some more filming. I wasn't too upset about missing the tea ceremony I was scheduled to do, and it turns out that this time I was supposed to be the fake boyfriend of Fanny. Sorry Chris, but all is fair in love and war. They had us sitting on top of a hill looking like we were meditating, and then walking a lot, pretending to laugh and point at stuff and smile, always smiling, always smiling MORE. We did a whole lot of this before we went to catch the last half of some more Sunmudo (we got to skip the entire hour of the tea ceremony, yesss). We were going to do some more filming after that, but some shit wasn't set up, so we went back to the 108 bows and missed only the first five. Apparently Buddhism's bible-equivalent says there are 108 different human agonies and so we bowed for each one. And not just standing and leaning over bowing, that would be easy. Standing up, hands in front, down on your knees, hands still in front, lean over, part your hands, head on the ground, hands on the ground, and up, 108 times. It wasn't so bad after you lost count and said fuck it and just went through the motions and got lost in your thoughts, which is probably roughly the point. I didn't have too much of a problem with it since I try to keep myself in a respectable state of health, but some people couldn't cut it, though most people did it well enough. I gotta admit that afterward, walking down the hill, my legs were a bit weak though. Then came lunch, some news that the filmmakers wanted me and Fanny to do some filming on a campus back in Daegu later in the day, and some free time to further explore the tiny area. One of my roommates and I went on a little hike up a small trail I spotted above the Buddha. I was hoping it would lead to a vista, but no such luck, or at least, we didn't go far enough if it did. Just some nice forest and a few (burial?) mounds here and there on the trail.
No surprise that most people slept on the bus ride back to Daegu, after waking up at four AM and all. Back at the city hall, Fanny and I got whisked away to be filmed some more, laughing and smiling, and smiling more! the whole time. She mentioned someone told her we looked like ABBA together. I was just proud I could fit a stereotype of a foreigner. I've always felt that stereotypes have to come from somewhere, bad or good, though probably bad, mostly. This last shoot went on about an hour, and we spent a fair amount of time staring up at a pinecone beyond the camera and being jolly before the crew took us out to dinner and we chowed down on some dweji galbi, and that's two weekends in a row for me with that dish. The meat and beer was welcome after a miserable 24-hour stretch with neither. It definitely felt longer though, just knowing that you couldn't have meat or booze. Or kill things. I really missed killing things during those 24-hours even though I did kill a mosquito during lunch or dinner on Saturday. Oops.

Climbing with Shaun and Marissa

I guess it's about time I start writing something. I've been in Korea for a month and a half at this point, and I have been a combination of busy and lazy as far as writing a blog is concerned. It's a Sunday night and I've already cooked dinner and cleaned the dishes, bought some food for the week, showered, watched a movie, surfed the Internet for awhile, and put my laundry away, so I guess I don't have many other distractions. Today and yesterday I spent climbing at crag called Yeongyeong, somewhere shortly north of Daegu. Both today and yesterday I met Shaun and Marissa at the rock, and both today and yesterday I made a mess of getting there via public transportation. Today wasn't as bad of course, since I had about three hours practice of fucking up yesterday. After I got out of my language class yesterday at one, I had lunch and wandered aimlessly around downtown looking for a bus up to Palgongsan, thinking it would be easy to spot one since Palgonsan is supposed to be such a popular park for hiking and checking out Buddha statues and temples and so on. I didn't have to wander around too long before I realized it would be futile. I asked a woman at the YMCA where I take my courses if she could help me, and she looked up a bunch of info but couldn't find the stop Marissa told me to get off at. Turns out Marissa was telling me the bus number, not the stop, and that was my first mistake. After walking to the bus stop, and waiting ten minutes for what would eventually turn out to be the wrong bus, I started to get on only to ask if it was going the right way and be told that no, I had to go to the other side of the road, which is where I waited fifteen minutes for one going the correct direction. As I got toward the end of the line, in Palgonsan Natural Park, my suspicion of being very much in the wrong place grew stronger and stronger. I finally asked the bus driver, which I should have done in the first place, and he spit out a bunch of Korean at me which I understood none of, save the fact that the general idea was that I was in fact way off. He put me on another bus and explained what this retarded foreigner was looking for. I went back down the mountain and was dropped off at a small stop with the vague hint I was supposed to change buses here. I didn't get which way I was supposed to be going, or which of the four buses that stopped here I was supposed to be on, so after asking the drivers of the first three routes that came by, and crossing and recrossing the road at least three times, I finally got, by process of elimination, correctly on the fourth bus that came, which I was on about ten minutes before I had to get off and wait for another bus, which finally brought me to the crag, visible from the road, nearly three hours after I had set off.
Marissa and Shaun had already been climbing since about 11 and it was about 430. I met them both about two weeks ago in Busan at the Tre-X games. We were all competitors in the sport climbing category, mainly as token foreigners in this international sports competition since we all did quite miserable in the competition itself - but everyone got a free weekend out of it, and officially became international extreme athletes, so we were winners in our own way. Shaun is tall lanky Australian with persistent dark stubble to match his shaved head, and is quite humorously vulgar. Marissa is a North American - Canadian, American? I don't remember, like there is even a difference, sorry to offend any Canadians - and has lived in a tent in Alaska, a shack in Washington, east Africa, and has been in Korea now for a few years. The Tre-X games was a great opportunity to meet a bunch of other English-speaking climbers, some of whom I already knew, some I did not, like Marissa and Shaun. There is a great website called koreaontherocks.com that is a pretty extensive English language resource for climbing in Korea, and it's forums and message boards provide plenty of opportunities to meet other climbers.
I only got a few climbs in each day since I got there later than them both days, thanks to my reliance on public transportation. Which is fine, since I most of my climbing experience is in bouldering, and although its starting to change now that I am sport climbing more, my strength and endurance are pretty low for long routes. Saturday I made a bee line for the top of a 5.10c for my first climb, unleashing a nest of centipedes on the way up as I grabbed an undercling. I was only aware of this as Marissa yelled up, "Way to unleash the centipedes," which I at first took for some sort of metaphorical compliment, but it turns out that she was being quite literal. We had a laugh about that once I got down, and unleashing the centipedes instantly became the euphemism of the weekend, much like doing anything in an Xtreme fashion became en vogue for Shaun and myself during our weekend stint as international extreme, sorry, Xtreme, athletes.
On Sunday, my first climb was leading a 5.10b which gave me a considerably harder time than the 10c, or even an 11a that I climbed the day before. I was struggling when I was at the top, but managed to get withing clipping distance of the anchor at top and was putting the rope in...nope, I fell.
Some falls, you can feel your grip slipping and you are aware that you are about to go right before you do and appropriately prepare yourself, but this fall gave me no indication I was about to fall and I was probably down about three feet before I could even curse myself. It wound up being about a twenty five-foot fall, at least half of the entire climb, since I was so far above the last bolt, and I had a lot of slack out. That was my first lead fall, and I must say I couldnt've asked for a better one. Marissa and Shaun down below seemed more excited about it than I was, and apparently I nearly hit my head on a rock outcrop, but I didn't notice it. Good thing I didn't since life is nice, and especially since last weekend when Shaun and Marissa were climbing with Greg, another climber I met at the Tre-x games and Marissa's roommate, he got dropped almost ten feet and broke a vertebrae. Ouch. If I split my skull open they have foolishly thought they were cursed or something. Greg seems to be doing alright though. He can walk around and has a brace to wear should he have to do more than walk around the apartment. Greg is a super strong climber, and I didn't realized this until we were watching a climbing video at his and Marissa's place and he was in it, and filmed many of the parts he wasn't in. No Permanent Address, maybe you climbers out there have seen it - check out Greg Foot's bouldering part in the Hueco Tank's. Apparently I am associating with some real skill. Anyway, Saturday night was good, I drove back with Shaun and Marissa and the four of us went out for dinner to eat some dweji galbi (not sure on that spelling), which is a delicious variety of pig that you throw on the grill at your table and eat up with the galaxy of side-dishes that Korean food is all about. Next on the agenda was a DVD room - these are places you can go to watch a DVD in a private screening room. Private screening/dark sex den, I suppose I should say. If the idea of getting a dark private room for cheap to "watch a movie" isn't suggestive enough, our room with its massive futon covered in off-colored stains and supplied with Kleenex and even a full bathroom with shower may give you a hint...although I think the bathroom was more for the employees since there were toothbrushes and toothpaste, and a full selection of toiletries living in there. Pretty sketchy, but what the hell. We watched Hot Fuzz. Greg and I had seen it before, but Shaun and Marissa hadn't, and they loved it as they should have, since it is hilarious and great.




Here we see Shaun belaying Marissa on the right side of the photo. On the left we see a Korean climbing the 10b I fell off. For an idea of how far I fell, my feet were above the top of this photo, and I fell to about the third bolt up, about five feet above and slightly right of the Korean guy. Sweet! Maybe twenty-five feet was an exaggeration. Maybe it wasn't. Whatever.