Korean Food: A Crash Course

Today at an impromptu teacher's lunch/dinner (the proceedings stretched continuously from about eleven thirty in the morning until five in the evening) I ate the following, in order.

FIRST SNACK
Kimbap.
Coffee.

SECOND SNACK
Korean lunch-box (including pork cutlet, rice, soup, and a variety of other things whose name I do not know.)
Coffee
Coffee-flavored cookies.

THIRD SNACK (speared by the P.E. teacher as he waded into the ocean in a SCUBA suit--literally killed by the P.E. teacher not more than three minutes prior to the food sliding into our mouths--did I mention that we were eating this all right on the beach?)
Fresh sea cucumber.
Assorted fish.

APPETIZER
Mussel soup.

SECOND APPETIZER
Live! Sea! Cucumber!
Live penis fish. (I do not know what this is in English, but it looks like a penis, and it's most certainly an invertebrate, because even after you kill it and chop it up it continues to writhe in agony suggesting it has no central nervous system. It looks pretty much exactly like a penis.)
Live octopus.
Some sort of crustacean that tastes like sea water that we certainly do not eat in America.

MAIN DISH
Fresh scallops (still moving) cooked on a table-mounted barbecue. (The first cooked thing we ate all day!)
Some other sort of fresh shell-fish.
Kim-chee.

AFTER-MAIN DISH SNACK
Eel. (Now, there were many things I ate which the Korean teachers suggested would give me 'stamina', basically all the phallic fish which you ate still alive fall into this category, for obvious reason, but the very most potent stamina-boosting food was the spine of the eel, served separately from the rest of the eel, and I ate about ten of them, these spines, and though you might think that the whole stamina thing is bullshit, I'm having heart palpitations right now, and I blame it squarely on my eel-induced male power.

I managed to get home somehow but some of the P.E. teachers want me to come out and drink with them. But I can barely move.

And I thought I haven't had any action for a while.

The bdelloid rotifer, a tiny transparent puddle-dwelling animal, hasn't had sex for 85 million years.

You know, if celibacy was really god's will, these little creatures are guaranteed to be the divine's chosen animal.

In South Korea, It Never Ends

The it meaning work. My humble host nation topped the list of the hardest working countries. The average South Korean works six and a half hours a day EVERY DAY OF THEIR LIVES.

Thankfully, this workaholism does not transfer to the large English-teaching population. Although if you counted my literary pursuits as 'work' I am probably pretty high up there, as far as total hours spent in work each day.

Just to emphasize something that they mentioned in the article, here you are often given a title depending on your job. Instead of Mr. Mackie I am Mackie-Teacher, or, in proper South Korean, Mackie San Sang Nim.

Back in the days before the internet...

I had a zine. I would sell this zine on the street after school. The zine was mildly successful, and having consistent and direct communication with people who would read--and enjoy!--my writing was really the biggest encouragement I ever got to take up writing as my vocation. The most frustrating thing about working on my novel is that while I am writing it nobody else sees it. Until I finally get it written and edited enough to be fit for human consumption, it's mark in the lives of the people around me comes simply through me being absent because I am working on the novel. I can't come out tonight because I have to write. I am staying in Busan these holidays because I have to write. I post on the blog irregularly because I have to write the novel. I wish that I could post every day's work here and have you all fawn over it--and there's a lot of words that I've written--but writing a novel I am consistently aware that what I am making at the moment is crap that will need the polishing of three or four intensive revisions before being at all fit for other people to read. All of this is a really long introduction to this discovery I just made. Some of my old zines are cataloged in the Australian National Library!

The Great Leap Go Straight One Block

Oh China, you've tried a bunch of crazy shit in the past seventy years. So many naively ambitious projects that end up, you know, causing mass famine. I don't reckon for a second that you're latest unrealistic goal will kill anyone, but it will certainly make life awkward.

China is trying to get 30% of all Chinese to speak English in time for the Olympics.

This means that there are a thousand flowers of EFL teachers blooming in China. But the only problem is that the Asian style of learning language, often focused on rote repetition, can be a poor way of teaching English. Check out this article from the Times about the trials of teaching English in China to see what I'm talking about. It's similar in Korea, but without the pervasive nationalism.

I am lucky. When I teach I'm able to give my students activities where they actually use English, where they talk with each other, construct sentences, and struggle to impart some sort of English-language meaning. But they also have to memorize stacks of semi-obscure vocabulary every week (one particularly improbable vocab word--for a middle school girl--was child restraining belt). English is not only a subject to study so that one may speak with foreigners and participate in the global economy, it is an activity for itself often, an abstract mark of success counted by TOFEL scores, grades, and proficiency tests. But then the kids who communicate with me the best, they're often not the kids with the best English, they're the kids who are the bravest, the most willing to make a mistake. So I want to do two things when I teach. I want to help them construct proper sentences telling me how they're feeling and how to find the post office; but I also want them to test their bravery.

Quotes From The Times

“Either he’s absolutely demonic or stupid or crazy,” Mr. Neal concluded.

About R. Kelly. But is Mr. Neal talking about Mr. Kelly's new album or about his penchant for pubescent urolagnia?

The Internet Times Four

I was looking through Slate's procrastination packet [via Fimoculous] which includes a cool round-up of how different professions waste time. The whole list is great, but one stood out for me: the CIA-agent talking about how he wastes time surfing the CIA's databases. Here's a snip:

It was always pretty shocking to me just how deep the abyss of information actually was. It’s like the Internet times four.

Just think of that. Four internets worth of information. I wonder what they've got on us!

Blog-Hiatus

As is probably painfully obvious to my readers, I haven't really been posting for the last month or so. My writing energies have been focused elsewhere: I'm cranking out a novel, so all the words stored up in my head are going towards that novel for the moment. But let's see if I can't post a little more regularly from here on out.

For your pleasure, here's a quick game. We'll play: Guess which thing about Korea is a blatant lie. Put your answers in the comments.

1) While Western cultures have Valentines day, Korea goes one step better-it has a Valentines day on the 14th of every single month. The 14th of February is Red Valentine's day, where women give candy to the men they like. The 14th of March is White Valentine's Day, where it's the guy's turn to stimulate the greeting card industry. The 14th of April is called Black Valentine's Day, where singles eat a black Chinese noodle called Jaja Myun which mirrors the blackness of their hearts. There are other color-coded Valentines for the other months, but nobody really remembers what the rest of them are.

2) In Korean restaurants you will often be served a dish of hot peppers. You are meant to take these hot peppers and then dip them into hot pepper sauce.

3) There are no less than two Korean TV channels devoted to the 1998 video-game Starcraft.

4) A popular after-work activity is going to a Noraebang, or singing room, where you and your workmates can go get drunk and sing karaoke. Often, these singing rooms will come with an added feature: you can rent companion women! Whether these women are actively prostitutes or not is an open question, but men will pay them to sit with them and drown them in compliments.

5) Around half of South Korean women get plastic surgery, usually to make their appearance more 'western'. The subways are festooned with signs reading "Big eyes, lovely breasts" which pretty much sums up the South Korean aesthetic ideal.

I'll post the answer in a week.

Things That I Probably Should Do, But Don't, Because I Live Alone

Living as a single man with almost no prospects of having any women up in his apartment ever is great. Just check out this list of things I no longer need to do:

1) Clean the dishes.

2) Sweep.

3) Clean anything in the bathroom. (Toilets and showers are self-cleaning, duh!)

4) Fold / sort / iron clothes.

5) Wear clothes.

Wow. Ain't life great? Of course, now there will come a time when I have to readjust to living with other human beings. That won't be easy. Oh no.

Check out the swag!

I got this T-shirt. The tag says you can find more at hellogas.com/worldtypographers. I couldn't find the shirt there, though. Curious?

The Passing Moment

A small thing: walking to school this morning, I was practicing reading Korean, and I couldn't remember whether ㄱ meant N or G--and I used to know this, and know it rather confidently, as recently as last night even. This shocked me. This small forgetting seemed a prelude for a a much larger forgetting. I will, I realized, someday forget how to read Korean. One day, the things that make up the cloth against which the my days are woven will be--nothing. I will be left with scraps, pieces of torn up and tattered text: what did my room look like? I will wonder. How did I feel when I woke up? Who were my friends?

I cast my memory back to high school and middle school, to elementary school and preschool, and the longer in time my memory reaches, my more blurry the shape that it grabs, the fewer details can I sift from the muddy wreckage of my thought. I am still shocked when I try to remember the names of my friends from Middle school--even though I am friends with all of them on Facebook--and I can't. One day, will I forget them all? Will I forget myself?

But even the best memories will be baffled by death.

And then, walking up the hill to my school, I tried to think of what was happening right then in front of me, because surly I couldn't forget that. It was raining, I was seeing the rain, the gathering of rainclouds against the hills, the school looming in front of me, the tired parade of students walking up the hill in the rain--the play of light against my eyes: and then I thought to my self, what I was feeling; and I thought, well, I can forget this, too. even this is not the moment itself. I take these sensations and process them, so that when they are cast against the screen of my memory, they are already old, they are already past. So I turned my attention to something more basic, the sensation of being alive. But I could not even find that, and hold it, and know that it was now, that it would nto slip away! There I thought I would have hit bedrock, have found a stable place that I could not forget, that I could not lose. But even there, I thought, dizzily, even there you can forget yourself, even there you can lose the sense of being alive. Even there, when you pay attention, the present is constantly slipping away from you: you cannot see it passing, this moment, you can only watch the wake that it leaves behind it.

And I didn't know what else to do, so I kept on walking.

The Grey Lady has been tagged in an album.

On the status line at the top of his Facebook.com page, Mr. Zeschuk employed the modern vernacular as he said recently, “Greg thinks Professor Layton is pretty rad.”

What Do 400 Sleep-Deprived School Girls Look Like?

Check out the new photos if you're curious. And be sure to read the descriptions, I've told a lot of the story there.

Things Taste Strange, Things Are Strange

Image from Shorpy.

You would easily expect food to be different in Korea. And you're right. You will notice of course the very obvious differences--but those differences you expect, you expect the Koreans to eat live octopus and kim chee But it are those more subtle, less superficial differences in taste that end up shocking you. I have two examples of this. Both of them come from the workplace casual of the staff-room.

A couple hours ago I was offered what the Koreans call a japjari tomato. This is a green tomato that you eat raw and whole, like an apple. Now, we're all used to tomatoes in our sauces and on our salads and on our sandwiches or over our pasta or on our pizza, but I think this was one of the first times when I just had a tomato--just a lone tomato. And the taste was a tart explosion of a vinegary pulp with a ringing bite of brine, with a slight fog of unami hanging as an aftertaste, with a mouthfeel like a squishy apple. Sure, it tasted like a tomato. But here, out of context, even the taste of a tomato can taste utterly foreign, a revelation.

And then I was just chatting to a fellow teacher when she handed me a stub of a microwaved sweet potato. "Here," she said. And I ate it. Just like you'd eat some chips.

Sweet potatoes as a snack? Tomatoes eaten like an apple? Strange food isn't just a matter of mixing strange ingredients, but a matter of thinking about ingredients differently. Indeed, so much of our cooking--like so much of our culture--is simply contingent, arbitrary, and meaningless, the epiphenomena of history, and yet we tie food so tightly around our sense of self, it sometimes still baffles me how meaningful it all seems.

Photos are up!

See a pictorial representation of my first week or so in Korea. Need to pick up one of those adapter-things to begin to chronicle the next leg of my journey, but at least for now there are a handful of piccies for you all to gander at!

I'm Looking Over A Four-Leafed Clover

From Slate, via Bookforum - a story about the Clover. The best coffee machine in the universe. Or at least the most expensive.

The Problem With Political Blogs

Now I'm a blog junkie, a blog convert, a blog evangelizer, a blog fanatic, I've joined the club, drunk the kool-aid and jumped the shark. I especially like political blogs. I reckon I get a livelier and more honestly informed take on politics from blogs than from newspapers. (I nearly wrote "better informed" but I think the crucial difference between a blogger and a reporter is that a blogger is allowed to write to a better informed audience, the reporter himself may actually be better informed but just can't get that information on the page.) But I thought of a problem with political blogs that hadn't touched my mind before.

There's a certain balkanization of subject matter on blogs. You come to trust particular bloggers, some of whom you return to day after day, but those particular bloggers are only good at a handful of subjects. But let's say something incredibly important happens in the world--say, some obscure crisis in the financial markets, or a some small state that nobody's ever heard of causing a large-scale diplomatic blow-up. Well then the bloggers that I rely on might not be able to deliver the goods on those weird weird subjects. So what am I to do.\?

Now, what I think happens in those situations is this: bloggers read more blogs than anybody else. If they don't know what's up, they're likely to know somebody who knows something, and thus will put up a nice snip and a nice link. But as a reader, this is the moment when I turn my eyes back to the newspapers and news magazines. They're more likely to have a broader range of good material than blogs. Sorry, bloggers!

Coffees I Have Known And Loved

I have had a half a dozen utterly unimpeachable, perfect cups of coffee--maybe fewer. These cups have become my measure of coffee, the ideals that all other coffees are held to. The best cup of my recent memory I had at Kopplin's Coffee in the Twin Cities. Kopplins, using some ridiculously expensive coffee machine called a Clover and employing baristas with upper-level research degrees in coffee preparation, makes a perfectly smooth and welcome cup of coffee that presents the taste of coffee beans with the same deceptively easy grace with which a great chef presents the taste of a cut of steak: the art is not in disguising, mixing, or melding the taste of the thing at hand, but in drawing the taste out, forcing you to taste the essential flavors. The next best cup of coffee I remember came from a neighborhood cafe in Seinna. The cafe was a loud, sweaty, congenial place, and I was a bit of a regular. I remember one lunch rush I tried to pay with a large bill and the barista yelled at me and waved me away, giving me the coffee on the house because he had no time to make me change. It was a cappuccino. I must've been about fifteen. And I remember that first sip as the taste that I am always looking for when I get coffee, the perfect coffee moment, tinged with equal parts embarrassment and joy.

What I have realized over the past week or so, though, is that even the mediocre, daily coffee that I have been used to is really actually very good, on the grand world-wide continuum of good and bad coffee. For all America's venality and shittiness, it sure can make a good cup of coffee. Here in Korea, when you ask for coffee you get, not some concoction brewed from ground coffee beans, but instant coffee, with lots of sugar and fake cream. This is everywhere you go, from fancy restaurants to places that are presumably cafes to the local gas station. And it is not some nation-wide monoculture of bad coffee, either: there is a lot of variation into the kind of bad coffee, I imagine whole industries devoted to the perversion and desecration of my favorite drink. The most common offense comes in the form of little plastic sachets, individually portioned with a mixture of sugar instant coffee and fake cream, that you empty into a cup of hot water, leading to a thin, joyless caffeine and fat delivery system. But I have also, in this brief week, sampled coffee partitioned out into tea bags and left to steep for five minutes, making a bitter, joyless coffee tea, and I have encountered brewed coffee left to heat for half an hour or more, resulting in a thick, joyless, coffee-like sludge, which is the closest to real coffee I have come; I have also swallowed my pride and bought--from the local supermarket--a joyless and unholy cup of Starbucks-branded 'espresso' that tastes closer to a cocktails of bitterness and capitalism than it tastes to the fare of my local and beloved cafes back in America.

But addiction is addiction, and still I buy coffee. And still, that inaugural sip first thing in the morning, that sip that coalesces reality around me, that ushers in every subsequent productive and un-productive moment, the sip that tells me that I am indeed alive--even when it's bad coffee, it's still the single most lovely part of my day.

Jason Kotke is the quintessential web denizen - the unimpeachable everyman of the web and his blog, more than any other site, sums up the learned culture of the internet. Why do I lavish this praise on the already much-read, much-beloved, and much-written-about Mr. Kottke? Because, in addition to the posts he did on birds eating toxic waste to get dates, in addition to competitive crossword puzzle mavens, he turned me on to Kitty Wigs. Which has to be the most internetty thing in the whole universe. (All in the past 24 hours!)

First day at school!

A morning mist settled over Busan, grey and crisp, but as the day wore on the mist refused to lift, cuddling its langorous tails around mountains and buildings until late in the evening, leaving a dusty, acrid stink. What had looked like a pleasant meterological phenomena was nothing of the sort. The mist was almost as much of politics as of percipitation: a wholly un-benign Chinese import: smog. When the wind blows right, Busan fills its lungs full of Chinese air. Elementary school children are given the day off school. It's too dangerous for them to go outside.

It was my first day at school - and I could think of it as one of the more awkward moments of my life, if I wanted to. Everything I do here, I do for the first time. Everything I do, I'm baffled. One of the only ways I have of drawing a line of sense through all the sensations that come my way is through complaining. Because when I complain--that the food is strange, that I cannot get anywhere by myself, that I feel overwhelmed--my life becomes arranged around the concept of some idealized life in which all the food was familiar, in which I could communicate easily with everyone around me, and in which I lived a life of ease. Instead, letting go of complaints, I have to admit my life for what it is: essentially meaningless; or rather, a life whose meaning has been closed off for me, obscured, rubbed out, confused. I get to school, I stand in the right places, I smile and I nod and I try to be helpful, but at this point I think I am more a symbol. I am a symbol that has not yet been reckoned, added, subtracted, divided, multiplied, or plumbed.

The taxi driver who took me to the school this morning didn't know where the school actually was so we drove around aimlessly for a little while before, a couple cel phone calls later, after asking random school-girls on the street, we made it to the big red-brick building that is the reason why I flew across an ocean to teach. The big bulk of my day was spent overcomign odd technical difficulties that I would at this point rather forget. But in the remainder of my day I was intorduced to the whole school through the school's CCTV, Iand to the other teachers, and I had a bunch of students come up to me to pracise their english and tell me I looked handsome. Aw shucks! If only the actual teaching part was that easy. But even though I didn't do too much, there was so much newness that I made it back to my apartment exausted, and, after a bit of a dining adventure I'll write about once I can get my photos up on Flickr, I settled into a thick, dreamless, half-day sleep.