Then and Now

I've been making mental notes over the past few weeks of things that have changed since I first arrived in Korea nearly 10 years ago, but I'd been wondering if some of them were actually differences between 1997 and 2007 rather than differences between small-city Mokpo and megalopolis Seoul. Well, I visited Mokpo last weekend, so now I can report on a few.

THEN: I learned quickly that "coffee" on a cafe' or restaurant menu actually meant "warm, brown, mildly caffeinated liquid." The upside was that I started to order tea instead, which is how I discovered maeshil cha, a sweet plum tea, and yooja cha, a tea made from candied citrus rinds - both delicious and, as far as I know, uniquely Korean.
NOW: Good coffee is widely available. There seems to be a Starbucks on every corner here in Seoul, and a couple of new Korean coffee shop chains also offer up good strong cups o' jo. Even independently-owned cafe's in Mokpo now have espresso machines that produce the read deal. Honestly, I'm surprised the coffee craze didn't hit Korea sooner; it seems like green tea wouldn't give people here quite the kick they need to make it through their frenetic days. Koreans never cease to amaze me by how much they work and study and how little they sleep.

THEN: public restrooms were often, well, less than pleasant, and toilet paper was almost never available.
NOW: Most of the public bathrooms I've used have been pretty clean, and only once have I been saved by my old habit of carrying a packet of tissues with me wherever I go.

THEN: the trip from Mokpo to Seoul took five hours.
NOW: Korea has a new bullet train system. Mokpo-to-Seoul, KTX time: 3 hours, 15 minutes! There's even a coffee cart on the train, so you can sip a cup as you watch the scenery whiz by at nearly 200 miles an hour. It doesn't actually feel like you're going that fast, but that's the speed Lonely Planet reports.

Fortunately, many of the things I love about Korea haven't changed: the people are just as friendly, the food is just as good, and my teaching here is just as rewarding as it was the first time around.

NOW: I have 40 article summaries and 65 quizzes to grade, so I'd better get to work.

St. Patty's in Seoul

It's no surprise that cities like Boston and Chicago, with all their Irish-Americans, throw big St. Patrick's Day celebrations. But Seoul? Yep - they celebrate here, too. I guess everybody is glad for an excuse to party and wear green!

Ok, so it's not widely celebrated, or even widely known in Korea; most of my students had never heard of St. Patrick's Day. But there were a couple of events going on around town. On Saturday afternoon I went to a free celebration sponsored by the Irish-Korean association; a good number of people - Koreans as well as expats, sporting green and wearing big smiles - were out enjoying the sunshine and spring weather. They had a parade and games and face painting, and that was all especially fun since I was there with Sun Young and her two girls. They loved the balloons and the parade and the zaniness of it all.

Saturday evening I went to another gathering; this one was put on by the Irish embassy, but it wasn't free. Crystal and I decided to splurge, because there's no better place to celebrate St. Patty's than an Irish pub - right? Wrong. The food was really, really good, and the ticket price also included all you could drink. But after dinner and one Guinness, we decided the whole affair was overpriced and overcrowded; rather than sticking around in a noisy, smoky bar packed with loud, obnoxious Americans, we headed out to the less-crowded streets (and that's really saying something in Seoul!) of the Myoung-dong shopping district and browsed the stores there. Who says you can't celebrate St. Patrick's Day by shopping?

It's the little things

I wish I had something adventurous to write about, but even life in a far-off foreign land can quickly become pretty routine. My days are filled with teaching, grading, and class prep, meeting friends, reading - not all that different from what I would be doing back in the United States. What I love about ex-pat life, though, is that my daily routine is peppered with new experiences: trying a different food, learning (or re-learning, as the case may be) a new word, or receiving an unusual gift from a student (today, a large rainbow-colored lollipop shaped like foot).

It's the little things - like the fact that when I had dinner with my friend Sun Young and her family the other night, her 4-year old was eating with chopsticks. She was a bit clumsy, holding them wrapped in the palm of her hand, but it worked!

And e-mail from students; even from non-native speakers that I taught in the States, I rarely had such complimentary or entertaining messages. I asked students in my three intermediate classes to send me e-mail messages introducing themselves. They did, and often added comments about how they "thanks God" for a beautiful English teacher, or how pleasing my lectures are. One even added a parenthetical note: this is not a joke or flattery. A couple of students, male and female, told me that they hope to be intimate with me; I'm pretty sure that's a poor choice of words rather than a suggestion of an inappropriate teacher-student relationship. (And now a parenthetical note of my own: I find their small mistakes amusing, but I should say that as a whole, my students speak good English; some of them are outstanding, and all of them are certainly more competent than the average American college student is in any foreign language.)

So no live octopus for dinner (oh - I did try cow stomach the other night!) or bungee jumping or anything like that to tell you about this week. But I'm happy to report that though I've settled into a routine, I'm taking pleasure in the little things that make everyday life here a bit of an adventure.

Squeaky Clean

I went to a Korean bathhouse on Saturday with Crystal, a friend of a friend who also just moved to Seoul (small world, ESL!). We talked about the bathhouse the first time we met, and agreed that while it took some convincing the first time we'd each gone (in the Korean cities we'd previously lived in), it was a relaxing cultural experience worth repeating. Originally we'd thought that since people point and stare at us when we're out and about and fully clothed, the scrutiny would certainly be worse in the bathhouse. It's not, though, and fortunately we each had expat friends who finally got us to try it.

Even if you're not stared at, it's still nice to go with a buddy - especially when trying out a new place. The routine seems to be a bit different in each bathhouse, and though the Korean ajumas (literally "married woman," but used among expats to refer to grandmotherly Koreans) are quick to show you how they do things (hot bath, cold bath, really hot bath, cold bath, really, really hot bath . . . you get the idea), it's good not to be the only one looking lost until they start pointing you in the right direction.

On Saturday we started by donning the baggy shorts and T-shirt that were provided, then headed to the four saunas, each made of a different material and with temperatures ranging from hot to unbearably hot. There are straw mats and wooden pillows in all of them (trust me, that's more comfortable than it sounds); after lying on the floor for a while, chatting and working up a good sweat, we headed back to the gender-segregated bath part of the place. The only rule there is that you shower first; after that we did our own series of hot-cold-hot-cold, plus another sauna, and ended with a scrub session using these really scratchy Korean bath mitts.

I was amused at the benefits promised in the brochures we picked up at the front desk. Among them: the amethyst "furnace" (sauna) is supposed to emit "life-friendly energy oscillation wave and far-infrared rays so that it urinates the waste material in body," and the charcoal furnace to "detoxify harmful order or toxic material for human body by absorbing and sucking in them." I shouldn't laugh at the English; I'm sure those aren't easy concepts to translate, and it's nice that they make the effort. I rather doubt that I had any toxic materials sucked out (or sucked in), but I did leave feeling relaxed and very, very clean.

Back in the Land of Morning Calm

I have often wondered who came up with that phrase to describe Korea, and I've come to two possible conclusions. Either it was someone who spent all their time here in the mountains, or someone who lived here years and years ago. "Calm" is certainly not a word I'd readily associate with this country - not in the morning or at any other time of day or night. I don't mean that to be derogatory; it's simply that with so many millions of people living in such a small place, there always seems to be some sort of frenzied activity going on.

Happily, though, my new home here is relatively calm. The university is a nice escape from the city; while technically in Seoul, it's on the outskirts, sitting at the foot of a picturesque mountain. My on-campus studio apartment is quiet; unlike my previous apartments in Korea, there's not too much traffic going by, and (so far, anyway) no loudspeakers from trucks in the parking lot announcing the sale of fresh seafood or turnips or strawberries or mandarins or whatever fruit or vegetable might be in season. I did hear a car alarm this morning, and also a screaming child in an apartment down the hall. I repeat: my home here is relatively calm.

As I said, though, I'm technically in Seoul, and a 15-minute walk brings me to a hub of activity. There are literally hundreds (maybe even thousands) of shops and restaurants in walking distance - including a McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, Outback Steakhouse, Subway, Dominoes, Dunkin' Donuts, and Starbucks. I LOVE Korean food, and so far Starbucks has been the only Western chain to tempt me (twice!). But I bought a coffee maker the other day, so now I can get my fix at home for a fraction of the price. There's also a subway station in the midst of that retail area; I can head underground there and be whisked away to virtually any corner of this vast city via its ten metro lines.

My Lonely Planet says that they're now promoting the country as "dynamic Korea" rather than "the land of morning calm." That really is a more fitting description, I think, but either way - frenzied or peaceful, dynamic or calm - I'm glad to be back.