What I'm Eating, Vol. 1

It's been a few days since I've posted, mostly due to the fact that the wireless I've been freeloading off of disappeared for a couple of days, but also in part to a severe lack of energy at the end of our first week at school. So I feel like I owe you one or two. I thought I'd offer a post on what is sure to be an oft-recurring theme, and one of my favorites - what I'm eating! The food here, though often challenging for a Boulderite, grown acustumed to easy access to organic, vegetarian cuisine, is one of the highlights of the culture. Perhaps that's true everywhere, but I've talked to plenty of foreigners who have taught here and had little good to say about the place, but that they love the food.

I've started taking my camera with me whenever I go out, to catch the oddities that always catch me off guard here, and also to document what I'm eating. I've also stolen a copy of the menu from our amazing neighborhood kimbap place and started to decode it. Kimbap is like veggie sushi - rice, veggies, egg, and usually ham (none the vegetarians, thanks) - and it's all over the place here. The reason I call the restaurant a kimbap place despite the fact that they offer about 50 different dishes is that kimbap requires a special setup, a place for the rolling to happen. A roll of kimbap cost 1,000 won (about US$1) last time I was here, but seems to have gotten a little more expensive... as has, I guess, all food all over the world in the last 24 months.

As I've started going through that copy of the neighborhood restaurant's menu, trying to figure out what each thing is and if it's possible to be made vegetarian, I came upon one that was tough to decode. 원조김밥 (wonjo kimbap). Looking wonjo up in my trusty Korean-English dictionary gave me these two definitions:
1) the founder, the originator
2) help, support, assistance, aid ... economic (financial, food) aid
Looking at the price list, I noticed it is 1,000 won, making it the cheapest item on the menu. So I'm calling it "economic assistance kimbap". Nice of the restaurant to help out those of us that can't afford the real deal, isn't it!? Anyway, after that, of course, I couldn't resist ordering it, and the usual 야채김밥(yachae - vegetable) kimbap, to compare. Here are the results of that experiment:

Seems just a mushroom and a shisho leaf that are missing, though the ham that we order the other kimbap without may not have been included in the economic assistance version either.

For lunch today, we had those two rolls and my all-time favorite korean dish, 돌솥 비빔밥 (dolsot bibimbop - mixed vegetables and rice in a hot stone pot). Here's what that looks like as served:

And then as it's meant to be eaten, mixed together with 고추장 (gochujang - hot chili pepper paste), and the rest of our table.

In Korea, you might order one dish each, or at the nicer places communal dishes for as many people as are eating, and you get all these side dishes for free with them. Here, we each have a slightly spicy broth, which we get each time at this restaurant, and then on the left a plate of three side dishes which change every time we go in. This time they were, from left to right, a savory eggplant and carrot mix; a concoction that could only show up in Korea - fruit, yogurt and ham; and kimchi, which is always present in one form or another. That's what Melanie has got in her chopsticks. I couldn't stand kimchi when I was first here, but I've come to tollerate it... at a meal like this (when no Korean whose opinion of me I care about is watching), I might have two or three pieces like that. It's fermented so it's good for the belly. If a Korean I'd like to impress is watching, as at lunch at school most days, I can eat that whole portion without complaint. I imagine soon I'll come to actually enjoy it. I'm almost there.

Yesterday we went to the same place for lunch (I imagine we'll patronise them hundreds of times this year. That would barely allow us the opportunity to try everything on the menu once, and frankly, with that whole table full of food above for about US$6, why not?), and since I was feeling sick, I went for a hot bowl of noodle soup. This is 칼국수 (kalguksu - thick noodles soup), and it was perfect for my sinuses.

Melanie ordered 비빔라면 (bibim ramyeon - mixed vegetable noodle soup), and got something much too spicy for her taste.

That big red patch in the middle is gochujang, chili paste, and it's what makes Korean food so spicy. It proved tough to scoop out of that bowl. Which meant I got two lunches. ;)

More to come on food soon, I'm sure, as frankly, it's my favorite.

Korean Economy Shows Signs of Confidence

The lead story today in the Korea Herald (the leading English newspaper in South Korea) says, "Fears of a financial crisis began to subside yesterday... [and] that the government had resumed intervention to halt the won's further slide." That's good. To be honest, I didn't really know there were fears of a financial crisis, but check out what the won has done against the dollar in the last four months.

This basically the period between when we decided to move to Korea and when we started getting paid. That's like a 15% hit on our salaries! Thankfully, it doesn't really matter what the exchage rate is until we transfer money back to the US, which we're still several months away from. And what really matters is the rate a year from now. Here's a five year graph of the exchange rate, showing the point at which I arrived and departed last time I was here.

Will I be so lucky again this time around? Only time will tell. Then again, if you happen to be a currency speculator, feel free to leave your speculations ;).

Day 4 - The Longest Day

This ought to be a quick one, because really, nothing happened today. Left at eight, got to school at 8:40, sat around for 3.5 hours, ate lunch, went for a ten minute walk (thank you God), sat around for four hours, came home. Had new cabinets delivered. Recuperating now. Start again in 12 hours.

Day 3 - Volleyball

What I remember most about day 3 is that I'm getting sick. My nose is running like mad, which is tough in a society that views sneezing, blowing and rubbing one's nose as impolite. So all morning I sat in the teachers' office for 90 seconds, walked down the hall to the bathroom, blew my nose and walked back to the office. Wait 90 seconds and repeat.

On the up-side, I'm getting a good amount of Korean study in with all this empty time in the teachers office. The more I learn about this language, the more learning it becomes an overwhelming task. I learned today 23 ways to ask "Do you know?" 23 different conjugations of "know", for 23 different situations, ranging from the "formal, honorific (common)" to the "formal (never used)" to the "casual (common, especially with children)". There aren't just formal and informal conjugations of verbs but an entire spectrum of formality one can use in conjugating verbs. Phrases can also be conjugated for formality. There are also subject markers that differ based on formality. In addition, some verbs have two forms, two different words, depending on the level of formality. Instead of subjects and objects, there are subjects and topics, and subjects are usually omitted, so just sort of have to intuit who or what the speaker is talking about. In the sentence "I feel great today," the feeling is the subject! I, which would be the subject in English, is probably omitted, and today is the topic. Since the subject (or what would be the subject in English) is omitted, special characters can be used, in formal language, to indicate whether one is speaking the second or third person. For some verbs the subject and objects are switched, which actually brings the word order closer to English, since the normal Korean order is subject, object, verb; for example, I you love. But, for example, with the verb "to have", the subject and object are switched, so to form the Korean equivalent of "I have a computer," you would say "Computer I have." Kind of sounds like Yoda-speak. Kind of makes my want to stick to learning vocabulary and names of foods.

We went to the bank and set up accounts (with check cards - sweet!), which of course was a huge ordeal, despite having two Korean teachers with us, because nobody can communicate in English. We did, however, get served orange juice in paper cups, so that's cool.

*Breaking news alert!*

We just got a message from our (foreign) county coordinator that we'll be receiving a travel allowance on the order of $20 a day each for our commute. That'll add up over the year. I'm not sure it makes up for making our work days effectively 10 hours, but it sure is better than riding the bus on our own dime.

Yesterday we were told to bring "sport clothes" to school today. At 3:30 we were brought into the gymnasium where every teacher and administrator in the school was practicing their volleyball serves. We played two fairly competitive and quite fun volleyball games. Though I have to say, on the list of sports for which communication is essential, volleyball has got to be up there. Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

I would be stunned to find that level of extra-curricular involvement, sans students, in a school in the states. On the one hand, it's fantastic... it's a real community we've been brought into, and it gives us a pretty special opportunity to engage with the culture. On the other hand, this is our second after-school activity in three days. On the other other hand, it started at 3:30 and was almost finished by 4:30 (our go home time). Actually, at 4:30 everyone was eating thin sliced pork and chewing on pig bones. We were brought grapes, which is becoming habitual and is really sweet. We left at 5 and got home by 6, giving us our first evening to relax this week. If that sounds whiny for a Wednesday, sure, but it was desperately needed. I took a hot bath, Melanie made chili with noodles (we brought so much cumin and chili powder, and I'm so happy for that) and we had a lovely relaxing evening of chili and massages. If only we didn't have to go back to Korea World tomorrow. I don't mean that. Well, there's some level within me that doesn't mean it anyway. ;)

Day 2 - Hospital

Day 2 at Dogye Elementary School was notable mostly for being entirely uneventful. We got picked up at 8, got there at 9, sat around for 3.5 hours, ate lunch - grilled tofu from home with kimchi and rice with millet from school, without chicken and beef stew from school, sat around for another hour, and then "Samcheok Education Office go." Okay. We were driven the 45 minutes back to Samcheok, the town we're living in, and introduced to the county Superintendent and many "School Inspectors" -- again, they're huge on titles here. I swear, people that seem unable to say anything more than "thank you" and "okay" in English can rattle off their titles and the titles of everyone else in their office without batting an eyelash.

The great thing was, we were introduced to the administrators with every other foreign public school teacher in the county. After 5 days in this very foreign land that was desperately needed. Melanie visibly relaxed upon seeing our friends from orientation. I didn't realize how much I needed to talk with someone in actual sentences until we went out for dinner and drinks later. As we were being herded (we've all taken to calling the people that guide us around schools and serve as our translators our "handlers". It's a surprisingly accurate label.) out of the meeting hall in the county office, we strained our necks to yell back to each other "6:30 at Dunkin Donuts - dinner!" "Okay, see you there!" That's actually not an exaggeration. It was like a scene from a bad movie with family that had been held separately by captors and then were pushed past each other in a hallway of a dank cave. But before we would have our dinner, Melanie and I were herded to the hospital.

At the beginning of 2008, Korea implemented new immigration policies for foreign teachers. Something about a pedophile teaching in Thailand. Anyway, we had to jump through a bunch of hoops in the US to secure our visas, and a few remain for us here. One is a medical test, supposedly for HIV and drug use. Which is why I was surprised when I was herded (there's no other word that describes it) to a chest x-ray machine. But somehow being in a world where I don't know what's going on 99% of the time puts me into an acquiescent state. So chest x-ray I had. And a blood test, pee test, vision test, height, weight, blood pressure and pulse, and colorblindness test. Because we can only imagine what would happen if Korea started letting in colorblind teachers. All that for the discount price of 35,000 won (about US$30). Seriously, it was a cheap physical, and I can't remember my last, so it was probably a good thing (no visible tumors in my chest... that's positive!), but when we found out that our friends Kate and Chad had been herded to the same thing and had said only blood and pee and gotten just those for about US$10, we were a little frustrated. But it's all part of the experience. Just gotta role with it. Roll with the hour commute, roll with sitting around in the teachers' office with nothing to do all day, roll with them wanting to charge us $35 a month for lunches we can't eat. Actually, we're not rolling with that one. But this whole experience is a fantastic exercises in releasing control.

After the hospital we met 11 foreigners downtown at the Dunkin Donuts. Dunkin Donuts and Baskin Robins are the two foreign chains we've seen in town so far. No McDonalds or KFC... it's refreshing to know there is a limit to the penetration they've achieved, retreating though it is. Six of us went to dinner at a neighborhood place -- sitting on the ground, served by the owner, big Korean menu on the wall. We ate huge communal dishes - one "tang", a very peppery soup with mushrooms and greens - and one "galbi", a very spicy beef rib soup/stew. I like spicy food. I had one sip of the galbi broth and it made me hiccup three times! We drank two bottles (very moderate by Korean standards) of soju and talked for hours about our first five days outside of orientation. It was absolutely blissful to chat it up with people sharing our experiences. After a few hours of alternating hysteric laughter and sighs of consolation, we agreed to form a Tuesday night eating group. That will be awesome. I'll bring my camera in the future to share what I can of the food with you.

Journalists Arrested

I have only a few minutes before I need to get ready for work, and I had wanted to write about our visit to the hospital yesterday and dinner with friends last night, but I feel compelled to say something about the arrest of Amy Goodman and two producers of Democracy Now!

The three journalists were violently arrested yesterday in St. Paul while covering protests at the Republican National Convention. You can watch Nicole Salazar being arrested at 0:29 here.

If you find that abhorant (and if you don't, please ask yourself why not), what are you going to do? What did we, myself included, do when the Supreme Court overrode the will of the people and elected George Bush in 2000? What did we do, after saying we'd move to Canada if he were reelected, in 2004? The government of the United States monitors 90% of the communications in the country. It tortures and detains without trial those who it pleases without any oversight. Journalists are being violently arrested. Wealth is being transfered from the poor to the rich and our youth are being killed, dismembered and psychologically tortured in Iraq and Afghanistan in illegal wars.

At what point will we step out of our comfortable lives and rise up to bring about change?

Well, I gotta go to work. Then I'll be tired and probably want to go to bed, maybe after an episode of the Daily Show. Then I'll do the same tomorrow. My bank account will grow by a few dollars, and I'll continue to live in the absolute comfort that modern civilization produces, that we've all come to expect and that satiates us all.

Day 1

We just got home from our first day at Dogye Elementary School. Two teachers picked us up at 8:00 - a 24 year old who is our "translator" (the only one at the school who speaks much of any English, highly broken though it is) and a woman who seems to be the matriarch of the school and has been teaching there longer than our translator has been alive.

After the (beautiful) 40 minute (sigh) drive to school, we were introduced to "Head Master", whom we met (very briefly) our first night here, drunk in the streets (him, not us, yet). After some chit-chat (really, gesticulation is more accurate) with him, #2 - the Vice Principal, and #3 - who we're calling "Head Teacher", but are not sure exactly what title to bestow upon him (they're very big on titles here, and very curious about the corresponding English) we were steered toward a gymnasium containing 400 Korean munchkins. "Introduce." Really? In gesture? Lots of ooh-ing and ah-ing, some words from Head Master, what appeared to be the national anthem (I don't need to cover my heart, right? Because that would be weird, right?), and several songs sung by the students and conducted by our translator, we were brought up to a microphone on stage. "Anyeong hasaeo. Hello. Good morning. My name is Michael. It's nice to meet you." I had them through good morning. The rest went right in one ear and out the other. A couple more songs, lots of talking from #3, and it's back to the teachers' room.

"Sit." Okay. Comfy couch. Ten minutes... twenty minutes... an hour... two... lunch time! "Come." Up two flights of stairs and into line, quickly: Rice, yes. Kimchi, ok. Green vegetable, yes. Fried fish, no. Corn, yes. Soup... maybe... huge chunk of pork shank, no! Whew, that was close. We were told not to leave any food on our plates at school lunches. I cleaned my plate. My coworkers did not. Thank God. That would be a lot of pressure on some crazy food day-in and day-out. We were told to eat quickly, that Koreans do and they don't like to wait around once they were done. I do eat fast. Really fast. I'm always the first done. I ate extra fast at this meal and came in second to last at the table (with Melanie last). I'll have to work on that. My stomach hurt after lunch, maybe because of the food, maybe because of the speed eating, maybe because all I did today was sit on a leather couch.

After lunch, back to the teachers' room. All morning, and all afternoon, we were with a new Korean teacher, Park Gong Ju. She had an electronic Korean-English dictionary and we had a Korean phrasebook. So we studied Korean and she English and we got to know each other surprisingly well. We made plans to go mountain climbing with her and her husband. Sweet. In retrospect, my biggest mistake last time I was in Korea (I taught for a year in an after school academy in Busan, a large city on the southern coast) was not making Korean friends. I did, but not until late in the year, which meant I didn't learn much about the culture or the area. Which was lame. I'm determined to right that this time around. So we're going mountain climbing with Park Gong Ju. That was the accomplishment of the day, and really almost all we did. We introduced ourselves to the student body, sat around for 3 hours, ate lunch (for 4 minutes), sat around for 2 hours, walked around the school with Park Gong Ju (who is also new), sat through a teachers' meeting (a real test to my ability to stay awake), and then went out to dinner with the school.

It seems that the first of each month they have a teachers' meeting and then go out for "bowling, eating, or hehehehe". It was baked fish the first night we got here, fried fish tonight. Good fish. And good fried pumpkin. And good lettuce wraps. Head Master tricked me into eating a very spicy chili, and we had many soju "gombae" - cheers. The matriarch drove us home, and it turns out she's pretty good with English. Not that she can complete a sentence or understand more than the most basic phrases spoken very slowly, but she can communicate, which makes her the second we've met at the school. We agreed that she would teach us Korean and we would teach her English at her apartment. Score.

We got home at 7:30, eleven and a half hours after we had left... a very long day for having done very little.