salarymen, my version

in tokyo.

coffee shop, part 1

A group of girls in their early 20s walk in; the clack of 10 peep-toe zipper high heels across exposed concrete announce their arrival.  A parade of black leggings and bare knees, shorts, and short skirts stalk by. They are all rhythmless angles and the silence of thighs that don’t rub together, too thin or splayed too far apart by bowleggedness to touch each other. V-neck t-shirts modestly cover flat chests to make up for all those miles of leg. Like a rainbow made of uniform blocks they advance, sometimes disrupting the standard rectangle of plain shirt with a breast pocket, or the occasional tiny flower/fruit/animal print. 4 out of 5 have dyed and/or permed hair, shades of brown trending towards orange at the lightest end of the scale. 

The parade stops. Handbags are thrown on chairs, cellphones scattered across two wooden tables next to the plate glass window facing the street. Some legs beat a hasty retreat to the bathroom, others pick their way around chairs and booths to make the groups’ order at the counter. The high pitched squeal of the cashier, “뭐 드릴까요?!” is countered by a response I can’t hear. Minutes later the group reassembles, spitting out rapid 반말 gossip like watermelon seeds as they wait for their coffee.  A vibrating buzzer rattles against the table. With five identical, ice-blended, 5,500 won mocha-frappa-what-the-fuck coffees topped with five identical mounds of whip cream and chocolate sauce, two packs of cigarettes, and four fashion magazines covering the surface of their table, they finally appear ready. 

For what?

They sip. They smoke. They turn glossy pages; envious or indifferent, inspired or so utterly bored that they keep turning just to pass the time. Some take out folding mirrors big as paperback novels, set them on the table, and apply full faces of makeup. Others, made up in full before leaving home, hold their cellphones over head at just the right angle and take self portraits. Inevitably, some of these self portraits will also become the picture takers’ cell phone wallpaper.

The scene goes on for hours. Eventually the coffee runs out, or the batteries run out, or the pages have all been turned and their boredom gets the best of the them. They rise, in pursuit of something else to consume. Maybe food, maybe clothes or cheep accessories from any of the glittering costume jewelry stands that line the sidewalks in Hongdae, Sinchon, and Edae. I am left behind, attempting to consume some pages of my own, though of a decidedly less glossy variety. The cafe is quite again.

backlog 1: April 10, 2009

Sakura season... poetry growing on trees. I’m glad I observed its progression so diligently. Spring at five in the morning was how the first tight fists of blossoms seemed to me on the dwarf cherries in Kyoto. Existence was yawning, shaking off the stiffness of winter and inching out the door before dawn. The earliest moments offered only the faintest suggestion of the riot of color and rebirth to follow... a knot of pink or orange on a gnarled gray-brown branch, the first tentative shoots of green probing their way towards the blue of the brand-new sky.  Set against the slopes of shrine roofs and temple gates the metaphor expanded.

The earth is older and newer in every moment than all the monumental human constructions we erect and admire. We are small, our attempts at creating beauty amateurish. We toil, we pray, we plan and build and die, leaving behind the best of our efforts for those who are to come, for them to marvel at and praise. We labor under the illusion of linear progression.   

Cherry blossoms know the truth. Awakening, ambling gently through a few weeks of splendor and dying before the season is out... they know no anxiety, they will not be rushed if tourists mistakenly arrive at five in the morning expecting something greater. 

There's always next year, after all.

Fresh life mingled with, complemented, and mocked the centuries old wood with silent, steady growth.

I came home to the streets of Seoul just as they burst into parallel clusters of pink and white, beautiful in their own way juxtaposed against the flashing neon of the hofs and noraebongs in Sinchon. My father arrived at the perfect moment, right on time to see the flowers at their high noon.

We walked around 한강 공원 on a Saturday filled with families and couples, cameras always at the ready, hoping to capture some emblematic freeze frame of a time that that would surely pass before we’d even realized (Sakura season, but also the awfully short time we had to spend together before his return home.) 

Barely a week later individual petals started to fall like snowflakes, or autumn leaves (is there  anything that is shed or falls in summer? I guess the rain, during 장마.) More couples, more cameras. 

The trees were casting off their morning-forged crown of blossoms in preparation for the summer afternoon to come. 

on the edge

I've been awfully sick for the last two or three days. Around 8 I finally got dressed and left the house, when Min rescued me from my homebody loneliness with medicine and Red Mango frozen yogurt. Hannah and Eunhi called earlier too, and one of the girls who lives in my house made me some special Korean tea that's supposedly good for throat aches. After crying to my mother early this morning over Skype about how much I miss my friends and family at home, I really felt like a tool. I do have good friends here, friends who will take care of me and go out of their way to make me feel better, friends who worry about me and love me and whom I love as well.

After Red Mango, Min drove us up a mountain. The streets narrowed rapidly to one lane, and we often had to slow down or pull over to squeeze past oncoming traffic. I felt light and relieved during the vertical climb, reveling in the chill of the night air as I opened my window to clear out the smell of his cigarette smoke. I had been indoors for far too many hours in a row.

We parked and walked a short way up a dark road, reenacting a scene from the terrible horror movie we saw together last week. Gasping and coughing with laughter, we stopped to gaze at the city spread out below us.

"Look out there. So many people. Some people are sleeping already, some people are eating. Some people are sick like you. Some people are having sex."

"A lot of people are having sex, probably." (I'm sure there's some other way of saying it but the way a lot of young people say 'have sex' in Korean is literally to do 'sex', as in, sex-hagoissuhyo.)

"Oh really?"

"Probably."

"And some people are dying. Other babies are being born.  All of these lives, everybody moving around and living together, living separately. Everybody living, living, living and then dying. Look there is Namsan. That way, way way way over there is Gangnam. I think that building there, the pretty one, it's Yongsan. I can't see Dongdaemun."

He sighed. I sighed, too. We walked back to the car. 

I'm home now, listening to Johnny Cash's "Hurt" and it's making me cry. I don't know why I've been so depressed lately, it might just be being sick. Usually I'm so good at spending time alone, but suddenly yesterday and today I feel awful and heavy, 답답해 for the Korean speakers in the house. There's never enough time, but I spend hours and hours sleeping and reading the news and staring at the Bible, unable to even open it. 

Truly, this is a record of the last two days, and in no way representative of how I've been feeling. Saturday I got out early and saw the changing of the guards outside of a palace, went to an art museum, went to a huge open air market for some eye shopping, did my homework in the sun on the roof terrace of a shopping mall, went out of town and met some friends for dinner, drank some tea, slept early. It was wonderful and enlivening and indulgent and productive and fascinating and I scribbled notes in my journal and I loved the strangers and the families I saw along the way. 

Terribly fickle, awfully moody. 

Strangers in a Less-than-strange Land

Un-zippering my winter coat and turning up the volume on my MP3 player, I am squeezed snugly into a subway car in Sinchon. The people on either side of me are equitably absent from the moment; watching television on tiny personal screens, text messaging friends, vacantly staring straight ahead to avoid eye contact. We touch elbows and hips, bump shoulder bags and smell each other’s dinner-and-soju-breath, but still we make deliberate efforts to maintain the illusions of isolated experience and personal space.

When I first arrived I thought of myself as a traveler in Seoul, rather than as someone who lived here. Every tiny moment shone with the allure of newness, and putting on headphones seemed like forfeiting the opportunity to have an important experience. 

Now that I’ve adjusted, the novelty of public transportation in a “foreign” place has worn off and I’ve started to think of my travel routines as mundane. I, too, have fallen comfortably into the Korean habit of ignoring the people just centimeters to my left and right, in favor of rocking out to my own personal soundtrack. It’s only natural that my relationships with the city and its inhabitants have matured and stabilized with time. In some ways, however, I look upon this latest “maturity” with a mournful longing for the feelings of wonder that have passed. 

I sometimes feel this way when I look at street signs or advertisements in Korean, too. Less that two years ago, hangeul was little more to me than a strange smattering of circles and squares. Incomprehensible, yes, but romantic and beautiful in a decorative way, as a constant reminder of the distance between my current location and my hometown. I love communicating in Korean now, love knowing more about the culture and the people than I ever did before because of being able to speak this language. That being said, there is still some tiny part of me that misses the feeling of being amazed and intrigued by a place that was once tantalizingly beyond my comprehension.

The cure to this boredom is to shirk thoughts of daily monotony and instead focus upon experiencing every new moment with the same wonder and humble excitement of a newcomer. This isn’t advice for travelers -- it’s advice for life. To fall into habits and feel bored with the routine is natural. It’s easy to succumb to our own restlessness and isolate ourselves from each other, even as we press against one another, elbow to hip, in a city so crowded as Seoul. A better way, though, is to take each habit-worn moment and reframe it as a precious, fleeting opportunity to interact with the people around us. 

We may never cross paths again, so what’s the harm in smiling? What’s the harm in laughing when the sway of the subway car sends us crashing into each other? Being familiar with a place or a pattern of life shouldn’t necessarily drain us of all awe. Instead, let us take off our headphones, turn off our personal televisions and engage each other joyfully and gratefully, even as we move about the most routine and uneventful moments in our lives.

(first article for the English-language newspaper at Ewha Women's University)

academia

wanderings:

insadong, around seollal. making tradition snacks.

hongdae hottdeuk guy. freeeee hottdeuk<33

french girl asking, "eulma yayo?" ("how much?")

buddhist temple in jongno. crazy ceremony i found in the middle of the night.

i started writing a long "what if" blog about the possibility of me becoming a professor, and then erased it. im not particularly interested in entertaining the what ifs, and im even less interested in airing publicly the extent to which my over-analytical mind runs me in circles right into the ground. certainly there are a plethora of other opportunities out there, but one possibility that keeps coming up is:

-graduating, still not knowing what the hell i want to do, defaulting into coming back to korea to finish learning korean

-graduate school in korea for what? history? literature?

-translation work/ becoming a professor here or in the US.

i'm not scared, it just seems like a cop out.

i have a lot of wandering still to do, more of asia, africa. europe. latin america.  in some ways roots are barely fathomable. the years in which i will drift from temporary life to temporary life stretch out before me like a carpet, or an ocean. or a great, gaping gulf. or a fantasy.

in other ways i'm perpetually preoccupied with the notion of my future family, where we'll live, the kind of schools my children will go to, raising them in my faith. 

it's the babies. babies and families about around here. they're everywhere, and they're so adorable and incredibly small and beautiful and full of promise, they make me imagine my own stomach swelled to accommodate someone half-me and half-my husband, about to live in the world.

anyway. academia. i really just want to effect more people than that, in a direct way. how can academia be the route to the most good? i love history but studying it like that, being the one writing the source material... it just appears to me as a very self indulgent work (valuable though that work may be.)

why korean class is excellent.

1. speaking class...

chinese kid i dont know: "i've gained, what... 2 kilograms? no. 20 kilograms since I came to Korea. "

teacher: "what? no no, you want to say 2 kilograms."

chinese kid: "no. no. 20? is it 20? (something in chinese to another chinese kid)" 

other kid: "yeah. yeah 20."

teacher: "what? why? why did you get so fat?"

(pause)

"that's really a lot! 20? how did you get SO FAT?" 

(entire class bursts out laughing, besides the teacher. really, why DID YOU GET SO FAT, YOUNG MAN? she was upset about it.)

2. grammar practice...

(the pattern was "first, a person does something. next, in sequential order, because the first thing was completed, the person did [or was able to do] the second thing." we had to use a famous person we all knew, so we chose Obama. totally wasn't my suggestion, fyi.)

teacher: "First, he puts on a suit."

kirk: "Then, he recieves a briefing."

yugi: "Then, he eats breakfast."

ruyu: "Then, he gets on an airplane."

ruyhun: "Then... he...taxis down the runway?" (laughter)

tara: "He takes a car from the runway." (laughter. "Where? Where is he?" teacher: "amazing! he's flying his own plane and driving his own car!"  laughter.)

oo soo: "Suddenly he has to go to the bathroom. Stop! Stop! he said! I ate breakfast and rode an airplane and I haven't been the the bathroom all day! stop! suddenly. suddenly. stomache. very sick. bathroom now. Suddenly." (explosive laughter. the teacher is crying its so funny. oo soo [우수] is a thirty-something jazz dance instructor from japan, mind you.)

olivier:  "then he meets with..." ("no no!" "why, come on?!" "olivier! he hasn't washed his hands!" "stop!" laughter.) "then he meets with the president of the UN." (lame. laughter stops.)

soong ji: "Then he takes a nap."

dema (in a thick russian accent) : "after the nap he meets a pretty girl and gives her his phone number." ("DEMA!" "he's married." teacher: "you're a bad person! he's the president of the united states.")

rawhenpon: "they decide to go on a date."

me: "he calls his wife and they all go out together. Dema. He's married!" (laughter.)

teacher: "and finally he washes his hands. you guys are dirty."

등등등

some thoughts:

korean pop music is bizarrely popular for how really terrible it is. The lyrics are often shockingly trite and simple, the beats are usually the opposite of innovative, and the singers are nothing to speak of as far as their actualy singing abilities are concerned. So why is it so popular?

The answer is noraebang. (maybe.)

If everyone likes the same songs (or at least knows all the words to the same songs) then noraebang is more easily facilitated and everyone can feel like part of one big tae-han-min-gook (대한민국, the Korean Peninsula, used as a synonym for the great big family of the Korean people) rather than a bunch of individuals with differentiated tastes.

in and out, in and out. in korea you are in, you are accepted, you are part of the family... or you're out and you're so far out there's no need to even identify who you are, you're simply out.

drinking is like this, eating is like this, jobs, friends, family... if i want to be in at noraebang (or, expanding this, in all of korea) i better know the words to this handful of songs (i better learn this crazy language, eat these intensely spicy foods, drink too much alcohol with new friends/co workers, follow these customs... etc.)

possibly this is completely wrong. i'm in a generalizing mindset because of MiSuda. 

It's amazing the degree to which most people seem to have sort of signed this social contract and agreed that yeah, the music might be bad, but it's korean music and dang it we're going to like it all together. (kimchi might be insane but we're all going to eat it three times a day, and so on.)

TV shows are like this too. (I don't really know that much about dramas yet, I'm talking about reality TV, talkshow/gameshow/ variety review type shows.)

There are (at most) 30 celebrities who basically comprise the entire face of Korean media. I don't know their names yet but they're everywhere all the time. You can switch from station to station and see the same people hosting a talk show, appearing on a game show, going on a trip with other celebrities and comedians, and interviewing some backwater haraboji about the jjigae he's been making for the last 50 years in Busan. They're one big media family and their antics are funny because the audience is automatically invested in and familiar with the regular cast of characters.

This isn't to say I don't have 60 terrible Korean pop songs on my iPod. I do. 

I also just ate some incredibly spicy fish head stew. with kimchi.

I, too, have become invested in whether or not a piggie-back riding Lee Hyori will be able to eat the dried apricot dangling from a tree on Sollal.

 I enjoy (love, am fascinated by) the customs and cultures and images that mark the edges of this place. I know they're media produced edges that don't naturally define anything but I still think they're indicitive of something about this place, even if it's an artificial sort of something foisted upon the Korean people by the people who produce what they're consuming.

Even that is something, right? That the broadcasting companies have so much control? 

I'm thinking a lot about my own involvement in the circus, too. of course. I had this moment when I felt like a zoo animal as I was signing an autograph last night, and it wasn't fun at all. what makes me special? what makes me worthwhile, what would inspire any korean person to think twice about asking for my signature? Mostly it's because in some small way, even if I'm the cousin by marriage who no one likes or something, I've joined the "family" and I am now "in" in a way I wasn't before. 

Or i'm lying to myself. Who knows. I'm praying a lot. We'll see.

우리 가족

(우리 가족 = "Our Family")

Hongye looked at the sky, pointed up, and said “딸!” (“Moon!”) I bent down to her level, pointed my camera upwards, and took this picture.

Hongye is the youngest member of the Seo family. She’s about 5 years old, and her sister Hongbi is almost 14. I refer to them as my sisters, and their parents as my 엄마 and 아빠, or Mom and Dad. When I was living in Jeonju teaching English two summers ago, I spent a few weekends with them. I was clumsy and foreign, trying to navigate speaking no Korean, but Hongbi loved Avril Lavigne and spoke really excellent English for a 12 year old, so we got along fine. Somehow we all fell in love with each other, even then, and I’ve been keeping in touch with their family ever since.

They’re some of the most un-stereotypical Korean people that I know. Hongbi is interested in fashion and music, and while her parents encourage her to do well in school, they also want her to follow her dreams and go to a college like FIT in NYC.  She goes to English hagwon, but only because she really likes it and wants to speak English well. Same with guitar lessons -- she begged for a guitar for a year and now she takes lessons because SHE wants to, not because her parents are forcing her to do anything.

Hongbi, over looking the mountains during my first visit this year.

I hear a million horror stories about Korean dads who drink themselves half to death with their coworkers and then hire prostitutes instead of coming home to their wives, but my 아빠 isn’t like that at all. I’ve been out with Mr. Seo and his friends a few times (weirdly, as the only woman... mostly because I’m foreign eye-candy, I’m sure, but men’s culture is fascinating and I don’t often get to see it so I don’t argue) and he doesn’t drink a drop. He’s the only non drinker almost every time, but still... his friends are all family men too and it doesn’t seem like any of them would get that out of control either. Of course it’s possible that they were on their best behavior because I was there but I just don’t think they are those kind of men.

Also, the relationship Mr. Seo has with his wife is strong -- albeit she’s ridiculously hot for a forty year old woman (she used to be a jazz dance instructor) but still. I don’t see that many happy, openly loving adult couples around. 

Or that many happy, openly loving families in general. It seems to me that Korean families are often distant and under pressure. The girls never fight, and Hongeye never seems to really get on Hongbi’s nerves, despite the age difference. Mr. Seo says “I love you,” to the girls at least once a day, even though Hongbi’s at an age when verbal expressions of love and real hugs are too embarrassing for her to reciprocate. They laugh a lot. They’re always always laughing, making jokes and ripping on each other and themselves. They’re always eating, and always at one table at the same time. If one person is peeling an orange, they always offer a piece or a half to someone else before they eat themselves... and not as a rule, just as a natural courtesy. I end up doing it too without even trying. It’s an easy, truly warm and welcoming environment to be ingratiated into.

The real reason I started learning Korean is because I wanted to be able to communicate with my 엄마. She was so warm to me, so interested, concerned, and wonderful from our first meeting -- even though we couldn’t speak to each other at all. It’s hard for me to imagine my own mother taking in a stranger like that, someone who didn’t speak a word of English, and treating them the way this woman treated me. 

Last summer I only managed to get down to Jeonju twice, and I really regretted it. I was so caught up in my little life in Sinchon that I didn’t time to spend with my “family.” This time I’ve resolved to get down there once a month if at all possible, and so far I’m ahead of schedule. I went down before school even started, and I was just there this past weekend for 설날, the Lunar New Year. 

I was amped for a traditional New Year with a Korean family, but in keeping with their general character, my family was anything but traditional. Instead of dressing up in hanbok and going to a grand gathering of extended family members, we went to a ski resort with just the five of us. 

There was a moment there before I left when I thought about not going. At the last minute, a Korean friend invited me to come back to her hometown for the holiday, and I really wanted to see a traditional 설날 celebration. There was no graceful way out, though, and I really didn’t want to disappoint my family, so I went to Jeonju as planned. 

5 hours on a bus to Jeonju because of holiday traffic, then another three up to Muju Ski Resort from their house the next day. We stayed in an adorable little room outside the resort, where they gave us free spa access because the lady recognized me from MiSuda. (“Spa” is stretching it... it was a hot tub just big enough for all of us, but still...) 

It snowed awesomely and beautifully for the whole three days. We played a lot, having snowball fights and making little igloos. We cooked samgyupsal outside on a grill, and sweet potatoes and regular potatoes, under a tent with a space heater in the backyard of the pension. In general, we ate an incredible amount of food for five people, all weekend long. Honestly, they always eat more than any group of people I have ever encountered, I don’t know why all four of them aren’t obese.

Snowboarding at the resort was brutal but fun, though must admit it was less fun than sledding. (and SO WHAT if sledding is baby stuff?!) 

I spent a lot of time playing with Hongeye, trying to tell her the names of every animal and dinosaur in English, even though she didn’t really care and she was just asking to ask. We also weirdly talked about Halloween parties several times, every day. Apparently they had a Halloween party in her English class  and this was extremely fascinating. (At the end of October. Yes. It’s still that important to her.) 

Hongeye's little butt in the car. Approximately the cutest pants on earth.

Hongbi and I talked and laughed, took pictures of each other, and constantly helped each other with language questions. We make a great team. 

For the whole weekend there was this easy comfort between us all that made me really felt like home. As my Korean gets better, the atmosphere just gets easier and more relaxed. Nothing is withheld in fear of leaving me out because I won’t understand. Of course there’s still an awful lot I don’t understand, but it’s good practice listening to their lilting Jeonju accents and their rapid, familiar speech, and when I do get on of their jokes, it’s doubly funny because my sudden laughter is surprising and unexpected.

On Monday night, I watched MiSuda with the girls and 엄마. I’m always worried that it will be embarrassing, but the editors must really like me because they always cut my awkward moments and grammar mistakes, leaving me with a few anecdotal gems and an inordinate number of funny laughter shots. This episode though, I was a little tense and my 엄마 could tell. We talked for a long time afterwards and her advice about how to deal with the show and how to think of my own involvement in it was perfect and edifying and so essentially motherly at a time and in a place where my own mother isn’t really present. 

I love her so much. It’s weird to think about how there was a time when we couldn’t speak at all, and even then we loved each other a little bit. Wordlessly, for no discernible reason and still, she had this motherly affection for me.

Obviously I made the right choice by going to Jeonju instead of ditching them for a 설날 extravaganza. 

There will be plenty of new years to celebrate in Korea, I realized, but the time I’ll have with this family is short. Not short because the duration of our relationship is temporary, but short because the girls will grow and change and I won’t always have the chance to be along for the ride to witness their youth. 

I imagine them graduating from college, or getting married someday, and me having this treasured position as an adopted sister by their side. I will have known them all along the way; will have seen their faces and bodies grow and change, their personalities evolve and eventually solidify into the women they will become. 

There was this one bad moment, when I was horribly embarrassed and I let myself forget who this family is to me. I responded using casual speech to 아빠 (응 instead of 네 when he asked me if the food was delicious) and everyone laughed at me -- 엄마 especially.  She gently reminded me that 응 (응 is like a grunt, a “yes” noise that doesn’t even sound like a word in English at all) is only for people younger than me, or my friends at school, not for my parents. I apologized and they went on laughing and eating without another thought, but I sat there stewing in negative thoughts. 

I had excuses galore spinning in my mind -- in English there is no speech level change! I’ve been using 반말 non-stop with my friends! We’re familiar enough, aren’t we?! I’m a foreigner! 

But none of those are right. The answer is that I was speaking carelessly and I simply forgot to say the right word. This may seem irrelevant, but respect mistakes bother me a lot (because they bother Koreans a lot) and even though I’m usually quite careful, it’s a hard thing to know at all times just the right level I should be speaking to. It’s one of the things that worries me when I’m wildly anxious about the future of my Korean. 

What if, no matter how long I study this language and how much time I spend here, I never internalize the formalities of these relationships and I’m never able to switch forms automatically the way Korean people do all the time? Even if I become fluent, this culture is so different from the one I’m from that I worry I’ll never get it quite right. And even then, even if I never make another mistake... I’ll never be Korean (not that I want to be, I love who I am.) I’ll never seem entirely right no matter what I do, because I’ll never have a Korean face or body and there’s no way I’ll ever be considered anything but a foreigner.

But isn’t that one of the things I relish? The being a foreigner bit? A pause. The spiral collapses in a circle of contradictions, to be revived at the next awkward moment and forgotten just as easily when I order something the right way, or I understand a simple question and answer successfully, or some equally trivial triumph occurs.

The next day it occurred to me -- Half of this is getting it wrong. Seungja Choi (my Korean professor last semester) always told us to “make a hypothesis and try it out” with a native speaker. Weird way of putting it, but she was right. The only way to learn is to make mistakes. I’m lucky I have such a warm, loving group of people to make my mistakes on, rather than really hurting or angering some stranger with my inadvertent disrespect. 

여기오! part 1

녹차떡

"nok cha dduk"

("nok cha" = green tea. "dduk" = the kind of donut it is. Thus, this is a green tea donut-ish deliciousness filled with melty sugary yum.)

전주 반찬

"Jeonju banchan"

(banchan = side dishes. Jeonju = the city where my host family lives, totally famous for food. This is a quarter of the number of plates there were at a meal for four adults. They cleared the table three times before this.)

김밥

"kim bap"

("kim" = salty, dried seaweed. "bap" = rice. There's some other stuff in there too, veggies and crab meat and egg, etc. The yellow stuff on the side is 단무지 ["danmooji," or pickled radish.] This is the best kimbap I ever had, in a street booth across the street from the Nanta theater.)

This post is called "yo-gi-o!" ~ the word you are completely allowed to yell in a restaurant to get a waiter's attention. At the top of your lungs, if the place is crowded. For all things; water, adding more food to your order, to ask for the check.... I'm just getting the hang of this, it seems completely rude by American standards but hey, when in Rome.

Food culture is huge everywhere, right, but it seems particularly important in Korea, and it's one of the things I like the best about this place. Coming home, the first thing I miss is the food and upon arrival, the first thing I always want to do is eat.

I. Hasukjip eats.

So... my rent is about $400 a month and I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner included. The food is made fresh every meal,  by a really sweet ajumma who's worried I'm going to starve if I don't eat two helpings of everything. Possibly she thinks foreigners need to eat more than Koreans because I don't hear her pushing my housemates the way she pushes me, but either way she's very concerned about my nutrition, and it's nice.

The food's a little bit monotonous, but always good - rice, kim, kimchee, a rotating assortment of veggie side dishes, some kind of soup (usually sundubu jjigae, or tofu stew with kimchee and beef. a big fave.) Eggs in the morning, some kind of entree like curry rice or fried something or other to go with dinner. 

For the most part, it's overwhelmingly nutritious and wholesome, besides the fried stuff. I've already lost about five pounds, just from eating habit changes. I like eating in the house because a) it's essentially free and b) I feel like I can actually eat a ton of food, be full, and not feel bad about it.

This is really important to me, because I've struggled with eating issues and disordered eating thought for a long time. To feel full and not guilty is so refreshing and different than the way I usually feel at home. I'll say more about this later.

II. Street food.

Street food is pretty much the greatest thing ever. Forget your shitty NY hotdogs that cost two dollars and taste like poop, forget the stale ass pretzels that never have enough salt. Korean street food is ubiquitous, mad delicious, and super cheep. 

Mostly I am obsessed with 떡볶이. ("ddukboki" - big fat rice noodles with a spicy red sauce, accompanied sometimes by fish cakeish things soaking in broth, or pig intestine, or some other weird grey meat I ate once, and have no interest in ever tasting again. Though, covered in ddukboki sauce, pretty much anything is a lot more delicious than it was before.)

If I can make up an excuse to have ddukboki for dinner, I do. I've been better about it this time because the hasuk food is so good, but over the summer I became a regular at a few tents by the 24 hour coffee shop I lived in.

III. Sweets, etc.

I have a love-hate relationship with this category. Love because it's my favorite, hate because it undoes all the healthy stuff I was talking about before. There are an incredibly diverse number of options here for mad delicious sweets that I really, really like. At home, I enjoy chocolate, but I don't like... fantasize about buying candy bars. I definitely zone out it class thinking about sweet breads, or dduk, or waffles. Another sneaky thing about this is that it overlaps with street food - meaning its everywhere, in front of me as I walk down the street, and so cheep its practically being given away.

밭, or "pat" is a Korean specialty that I often get down with. It's going to sound weird, but pat is sweet red bean paste, used for loads of delicious things like patbingsoo (icrecream, fruit, cornflakes, and pat...zomg summer means patbingsoo in my mind.) pastries, and breads. Apparently it's an acquired taste (I have a western friend who hates the stuff) but I think it's the bomb. Anything with pat in it I'm probably going to buy, and eat.

There are a million delicious snacks too, available at the jillion convenience stores studding every street for less than a dollar each. choco-nut pretzel sticks, tiny cookies, chocopie!, snack bars, little mushroom shaped crackers dipped in chocolate... I don't even know, tons of stuff. I'm more into the hot sweets from the street vendors, but yeah. I can get down with these too.

 IV. Restaurants

Eating out is super easy here, and everyone seems to do it quite often. If Seoul is an expensive city, the one thing that's cheep is the food. I'm going to write about restaurants more in part 2, but I just want to talk about 고기집's for a second. 

A gogijip is a meat restaurant. There is a grill set in the middle of the table. You order a type of meat and a number of servings, and the waiter brings a plate full of raw meat the the table, along with a bunch of random banchan, as well as lettuce, sesame oil and salt, a red paste called gochujang, big chunks of garlic, and some onions soaking in marinade, etc.  

He lights the grill, and then (depending on the place) you're on your own. One person (I'm not sure who it's supposed to be age- or gender-wise, culturally, but every group of friends seems to have it's own grill master/mistress who really likes to be the one who tends the meat.) You flip it over until its done, and then, using tongs, you hold the strip of grilled meat up and cut it into manageable squares that can be picked up using chopsticks.

Tyler, demonstrating tong-technique over the summer ㅋㅋㅋ

Now it's time to make lettuce packets. Put a leaf of lettuce in one hand, then using the chopsticks make a little pile on the lettuce of meat (possibly dipped in the sesame salt, I don't get down like that but everyone else seems to) gochujang, garlic, etc... fold up the pile using the lettuce as a little envelope and pop that in your mouth, whole. 

Chew for a long time. Repeat. Yes. This is how meat was meant to be eaten. I don't even like meat but I love this. More than the food I like the process, I like the procedure and the friendship and the sharing out of banchan dishes and not caring about double dipping or anything of the short.

I'll get more into this, and my feelings in general about eating culture in Korea, in part 2.

V. Gross things.

번데기

"beondegi"

("beondegi" - boiled silkworm larvae. Never eat this. Not that you were thinking about it... I'm just saying. Grossest thing I've eaten in Korea.)

개

"kae"

("kae" - dog. Don't eat it, mannnn. I haven't (yet?!) and I would really like to try not to. It's not very popular at all so it's not like it's hard to avoid... I don't know I don't know. Dog?! I can eat raw, wriggling squid, still sort of alive... but I can't get down like that.)

things

i'm going to do this before i forget.

Things i want to write about include:

-the veiled women in a royal procession, depicted in a ceramic painting i saw along the cheonggyecheon river.
-Korean food, potentially as an analogy for Korean people/ relationships in Korea. Also about how my relationship with food is so different here than at home.
-Korean television and its complete lack of subtlety.
-a dance off I witnessed outside of the Doota shopping center in dongdaemun, between a hot shot Korean boy, a shy mushroom-haircut sporting middle school girl who turned out to be Beyonce in disguise, and a Korean version of Little Miss Sunshine
-my host family in Jeonju
-the way that duty appeals to me, and how thats part of the appeal of Korea
-digital records as a replacement for actual experience
-masculinity, about my friends Zac and Tyler, an old man I met on the subway, two brothers i met on new years eve, and a night in Itaewon.
-an entry to go with the masculinity entry, about femininity specifically regarding myself, high heels, fabric in the 이대 clothing stalls, and Misdua.
-trepidation and preliminary justifications for my involvement in Misuda

Unfortunately I've been preposterously busy and I haven't had time to write anything but diary-esque journal entries in my paper journal. hopefully i can get through a few of those this week, before a million more ideas arise and i have even less time to write them.

Korea is like that, 빨리빨리... blink twice and everything changes.

I guess the best I have to offer is an anecdote from today. I was getting home from Youido around 7, with Vickie (another Misuda girl.) We stopped in 이대역 to watch some random zongo clown performing an act with balloons. He wasn't begging, just performing. He said "hello" to us in English when we walked up - we were the only foreigners in the crowd and it made everyone laugh. He embarrassed the crap out of these middle school girls, making them hats and swords and forcing them to dance, before he turned his attention to me.

he was making this double helix balloon with two little balloon balls in it and i had a feeling i would end up with it if i waited around for a minute. Sure enough, within 30 seconds of that thought he asks me to come over and be part of the act.

Eventually, I ended up in a gorilla mask, doing a sexy dance and confirming that yes, i actually already appear on Misuda, thank you for suggesting that I do that, you advice-giving clown.

And Vickie said, "That's Korea."

She's pretty right.