Tag Archives: south korea

Busan, Take One

Last weekend we decided to go to Busan for a couple of days and go to the beach. We found a room in a hotel, listed as a standard double but with, we could see in the pictures online, a huge bed and some kind of couch thing that probably Mom would have liked because it looked like it took up a lot of space and no one would ever want to sit on it. The maximum occupancy for the room was two people. At that point four were planning on going, and we thought a) it looked like plenty of room for everyone and b) we would be able to get sneaky. The number of attendees would eventually swell to eight.

Busan is a port city in the southeast, of five beaches and around five million people. It’s built mostly of unadorned cement in a way that has a certain utilitarian charm, but my feelings about the city weren’t established until we got to Haeundae, one of the eastern beaches. The ocean always surprises me a little, like I knew I missed it but couldn’t quite put a memory together that captured it properly. The sky was a stony grey, wind stripped spray from the crests of waves, a gull wheeled and cried and made us, like humans before us for millennia, yearn for the winds of the endless open sea. Also it found and ate half a bag of chips and pooped a little. My Korean is not great, so I’m not exactly sure how the surf was classified, but I believe a reasonable translation would be “You will die if you swim here,” and there were lifeguards all along the beach that wouldn’t let us in the water.

Haeundae beach

We came to the hotel to drop off our bags. Diana, one of the relative strangers (to me) in the group at this point, and I went to try to check in, me because my name was on the reservation and Diana because she speaks Korean. We met a woman inside behind the reception desk, and a man standing in the lobby with a small towel around his neck. I found it hard to imagine the woman leaving the room that the reception desk was actually a small window into, somewhat below eye level so that you had to bend over to look straight into it. The combination of the odd window placement with the woman’s shrinking personality gave me a strong feeling of dealing with a very large snail. Towel man was very helpful and put our bags away for us even though it was before check-out time. We noticed that there was a sideish door into the lobby that would allow a quiet person to sneak to the stairs out of visual range of reception, and especially easily if the woman were to retreat a few feet into her proto-shell, which she was in the habit of doing. We felt optimistic. It was 1:00.

We found a BBQ restaurant across the street that also featured 1,000 won bibimbap on the menu, which is preposterously cheap and I was very curious about it. I meant to get it for breakfast, but things got complicated. We went to the Emart not far away and bought supplies for the weekend, mainly soju and snack cakes. Bellies full and larders stocked, our spirits continued to rise, even as rain began to spatter on the walk back. This was our first introduction to another important character that weekend, Typhoon Nakri.

We got back to the hotel around 5:30, hoping that the day shift might be over and there would be not many people around. Towel man was still there. We told him that our (Diana’s and my) friends needed to keep their stuff in the room as they were staying at a jjimjilbang, kind of a bathhouse thing. He would, we figured, at least be gone by the time we were getting back, which would be quite late because we were going clubbing. This seemed to go over smoothly, and up we went. A lot happened after that, the main thing I remember being the construction of an elaborate blanket fort. We went to a nightclub where I got two free drinks for agreeing to be in a promotional video wherein I claimed, “I love Wurzel Peter,” Wurzel Peter being a German liquor of some sort that is really just okay if we’re being honest. We danced and sang and fanned ourselves because it was hot as all heck in there. We went to the beach for a while and saw some fireworks. We headed back to the hotel, utterly pleased with ourselves and our evening.

Towel man was still there. Our buoyant happiness had its air let out and flew around a bit with a loud farting noise before slapping onto the wet pavement. I’m not sure whether I just imagined it that way or if Erik actually farted and someone fell down. Towel man, who we named Jun at this point after the name of the hotel, had at this point been working for at least 15 hours, and likely much more. It also turned out there were cameras all over the place and inside the snail shell was an array of televisions on which our six extra people were plainly visible, “hiding” outside. He was wise to our game. We would not be sneaking eight people into this room. Jun had set the new tone for our relationship, less helpful bag handler and more Sherlock to our eightfold Moriarty. His dogged determination to see us sleep on the street or in the dirt or something, I don’t know, earned our seething rage and grudging respect.

An aside: he had also had the towel on his neck for those same 15 hours at least. We thought at first it might have been for sunburn, but he kept it on even at night. Why? What was he hiding? I believe he may have been a cyborg.

There was at this point an unforeseen benefit to my having used my credit card to make this booking, which was that we decided some two people should stay here if we were paying for it anyway, and one of them was legally required to be me. The other was Gianna, who was sick and got privileges. The peasants, aka my friends and companions, slept on the beach. Literally they slept in the dirt are you happy now Jun? I know you’re reading. Actually they mostly didn’t sleep at all. The next day, the typhoon hit.

A lot more things happened then and I don’t have the energy to write about all of them, so maybe this will be a story about a single day. Overall I would rate Busan quite highly.

Yes, I Will Get to the Part About the Bear

I was thinking about telling the story of what I did last night, which included an encounter with a very large bear, but I realized no one would have any idea what’s going on because it mostly involves other people no one knows. I’ve always said that it doesn’t really matter where you are so much as who’s there with you, and there is an assortment of characters out here that you’ll maybe follow the blog a little better if you know them. So before the story, a dramatis personae, laid out maybe approximately? in order of appearance on this blog:

Nathan: my roommate in Jukjeon, where the Academic Program (latter half of this Dankook thing) is. A fellow UPEI student and dedicated military man. We were here for a couple of days before being in Cheonan with different roommates for the English Village. When we got back, I had forgotten the code for our door. He fixed me with a stare and asked, “What kind of Canadian are you?”, keying in 1812. He doesn’t blink very much.

Taylor: another Cheonan EV teacher (actually you can pretty much assume everyone is from Cheonan unless otherwise specified). Taylor is from Medicine Hat, and the first time he told me that he improvised a little bluesy song about it, mostly based on rhyming things with hat, I think. Taylor is the type to speak, or sing, his mind pretty freely.

Erik: also a speaker of his mind. He was one of my roommates in Cheonan. His uncle is a capitano in the Mexican police, I think in Durango or Sinaloa, so if I’m ever in jail in Mexico I just need to make a call. Erik has near-encyclopedic knowledge of World Star Hip Hop’s collection of Vines.

James 2: my other roommate in Cheonan. James bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue at the duty-free store on his way to Korea, and we shared it out of paper cups over the course of many late nights (important note: no one in the room ever brought alcohol onto campus, which is strictly forbidden and, in my opinion, just plain wrong. Also the administration of Dankook University is exemplary in every respect). One night we got haircuts together and went to Gangnam.

James 1: my EV teaching partner. James is a creative writing major and, I think we decided, will one day direct Transformers 7. One night, we were walking around the lake in Cheonan with a small group. He turned to me and asked, “Do you feel like running? I feel like running.” He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and ran down a side path that none of us knew the end of. I stared after him, my mouth still open in readiness for my brain to send an answer to the question, for about five seconds before I started to laugh.

Kristen: also present the night of James 1’s run. Went to Tokyo with Erik this weekend, after her family insisted she not go alone as she had planned. She had to go to Seoul one weekend to take a GRE, and Erik, James and I came along for the night and were out for quite a while. Someone thought of a funny situation then that I still laugh at, Kristen in a future grad school interview: “Well, your GRE scores are impressive.” “Yeah, and I was drunk at the time too!”

Hyeok Jeon: a student with truly atrocious smuggling skills. Like, unreasonably bad.

Jiye: another student. Our last night in Cheonan, we asked how many demerits everyone had (you get two for being late, and bad things start happening at eight). Everyone around the circle said zero. Jiye had six. We asked her, “Do you mind missing the curfew, then?” “No,” she said, with a look of unveiled contempt, waving her hand as if at a fly.

Seong Hwan: a more even-keeled student. Most commonly seen expression is one of surprise or shock, usually at the actions of EV teachers.

Gianna: an instructor from the Cheonan German Village. Her birthday was last night, and she told me she liked me but thought I didn’t really like her, but felt better at that point because I’m much friendlier after a few beers. People think I don’t like them a lot of the time. I mean a lot of the time it’s true, but also a lot of the time it’s just that I’m pretty reserved around strangers. Crap, I made this a profile of the wrong person.

Rae: I don’t think Rae and I spoke for quite some time after first meeting, and the first conversation we ever had was about how people are so scramblingly friendly here, in a university orientation week kind of way, and how tiring it can be to keep up with. One day we had dinner and happily exchanged about three sentences.

Edward Chung: the professor for my comparative religion class. Ask me about Pierre Bujold sometime if you want to hear about a teacher that regularly fell asleep during his own class in junior high, but it hadn’t ever happened at university until today, when Dr. Chung was seen to doze off during a short film about Confucianism. To be fair, I fell asleep myself during that class so I really oughtn’t throw any stones.

me atop a bear statue

Ha ha! It was a bear statue, see? So anyway last night was Gianna’s birthday, right, that’s the story I was going to tell but then the character sketch thing got fun. Let a few brief impressions suffice: a tall can of beer bought at the CU and walked downtown; bumping into some friends with a head start on the evening and swelling to a group of about 20; a game of Loyalty that needed to be quieted down by some bar staff; a trip to the roof, looking for a bathroom, and finding a surreal little golf training facility; another bar, with excellent flavoured soju and terrible, terrible french fries; an unfortunately closed karaoke room; waiting out the curfew with a bowl of instant cheese bokki, all the while listening to some interesting strategies for dealing with North Korea and also, some decades too late, winning the Vietnam War. Background: if you enter the dorm between midnight and 0500, you get demerits. This leaves the intrepid explorer of Korean culture still out at 0200 two options: take the hit, or stay out until 0500. Sometimes people really don’t want demerits. So anyway I’m pretty tired. I almost feel like I might just fall asleep right n

Personal Mental Health Days, and Other Kinds of Days

After sitting motionless, close your eyes. Our mind is analogous to a cup of muddy water. The longer you keep a cup of muddy water still, the more mud settles down and the water will be seen clearly.
Bhante Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English

If you’re not taking shots, get the [expletive deleted by paternal decree] out the club.
Li’l Jon, “Shots”

I’ve gotten in the habit of taking breaks from human contact because it tends to exhaust me. My friend here Taylor sent me something to read about teaching, and one of the things it said was that what students really need their teacher to do is believe that they are brilliant, wonderful people. I tried that out and wow! It’s not just students, that attitude is pretty universally awesome to have. The problem is that it produces an awful lot of cognitive dissonance and therefore mental fatigue. So, I’ve decided that in order to be really genuinely nice to people I need to not be around them all the time.

Another thing I’ve gotten in the habit of over the past couple of months is mindfulness-based cognitive self-therapy, also known as meditation and honestly my practice is influenced a lot more by the traditional Buddhist stuff than the new, more scientific stuff so it maybe is better to use the word meditation but people make fun of me when I do that. Really though it’s great stuff and I recommend it.

I also am trying to keep up the habits of drawing and programming on a close to daily basis, which is hard to do but I find both to be oddly therapeutic activities. All of this stuff combined has led me to introduce the Personal Mental Health Day into my week, usually on the sabbath. On these days I see and talk to no one I can avoid, and do all the things that help my tired, battered mind recuperate. People tend to think this is weird and possibly a polite way to say I don’t like them, but the PMHD is a godsend.

I hear you, dear reader, asking, “Tired, battered mind? I thought you were having a good time!” Yes, I am, and it takes a toll. Life on the road has a way of getting out of hand. For example, one time I started a house party in the chamber of D.O.O.M., Ithaca, wearing a tie and ended up without even a shirt. I miss Ithaca.

Anyway, this past weekend was interesting and at the same time reasonably representative of what I’ve been up to around here. I got along quite well with my advanced students, who really needed nothing more than conversation practice, their vocabulary and formal grammar being quite good. To that end we mostly just hung out a lot in and out of class, and on Friday we went out for one last round. We started with beer pong, which they had never played before, at a bar that, impossibly, had bottles of Moosehead.

standing around a beer pong table

Beer pong is only fun for so long when everyone present is terrible at it. We went to a Korean bar next, of the sort that I’m not sure what to call it in English. Basically the tables are all in their own little rooms and you are pretty much left alone with your party. We had a great idea at that point: Let’s go buy some soju at the CU (convenience store) across the street and sneak it in! I should point out that this was actually a pretty terrible idea because soju was already less than a dollar per shot in the bar, but whatever, it happened. One of our students, Park Hyeok Jeon, eventually came down to “help” and put a couple of bottles of Sprite in his backpack. It became apparent as we tried to go back into the bar that Hyeok Jeon had never in his life tried to sneak anything into a bar, as he walked in with his backpack hanging open and at his side for some reason unknowable to any outside of him. And so we had our Sprite confiscated, as well as a bag of chips he turned out to be openly carrying. I really should have glanced back at him to make sure he was alright. The burdens teachers bear. Koreans really have a tremendous number of drinking games, and we had a pretty good time at the bar anyway. When we left, we decided to go to the CU again for some ice cream. As we approached, I heard, “Hey, that looks like a white guy!” I was pretty sure I was the only white guy on the street, so I looked around and spotted other white people staring at me. They turned out to be English teachers and turned out to also have friends at a club in the area, where we got in for free and also a lot of free drinks. Being white is pretty great after all. Erik and I stayed up all night, waiting out the last half hour of curfew at a smoking shelter outside the dormitory, the sky starting to brighten with dawn.

The next day we went to Seoul, and had an equally preposterous night. Seoul is really really cool, and I’ll try to do some more posts sometime capturing bits of it.

I have been forced to read this post while writing it, and have decided that the rest of today will be allocated to personal mental health maintenance. I hope everyone’s well!