I love harvest time in the country.  Red peppers and other vegetable matter are laying out everywhere, drying, and you can measure the day’s labor of one man’s scythe by the real estate that has been cut.  Even the small struggling boutiques have peppers drying on the floor of their display windows, showing how anyone with even a square meter of earth is going to use it to plant produce.  I’d have taken photos, but my camera was temporarily missing, due to imbibing a little too much last weekend.

Fortunately, my friend had it. The cheap sunglasses didn’t survive, though…It’s okay:  a small price to pay for a lovely day.  Nothing can make you love where you are more than a beautiful day, good friends, and live jazz.

So like always I’m a couple years late watching these movies.  Part of it’s because I’m just always a little late on everything, and the other part is because I’m in Korea and if it’s on cable, then it’s bound to be purposefully released late.  Anyway, these are usually pretty good movies (maybe not academy award winners) but also often under-appreciated at the box office.

Tonight’s fare is Shanghai Kiss.  And all through this movie I’m smacking my forehead saying, “yes! yes! omg…”

Watch this movie.  This is what it’s like to move to another country, developed far beyond one’s wildest imagination, looking like everyone else, being a foreigner, unable to speak the language, and grappling with questions like, “what is love?” and “what is family?” and “what am I?”

Me.  Trying to get home…

I know, I know.  It’s fluff, watching a singing talent contest, titled “SuperStarK” no less — but my life is so dull, it’s a guilty pleasure.

So today they brought back three people they shouldn’t have cut in the first place.  They did a lot of mean things throughout SuperWeek to make the competition more fierce – like ask group members, “so if all of your members got send home, whose fault would it be?” So unnecessary…they did this to this awesome little girl too…cut her and then brought her back every single time.  I guess making her cry twice isn’t enough, gotta go for the magic number.

See for yourself and see the amazing a capella version of Queen’s Somebody to love and you’ll see why I’m rooting for Chris and Christina, and not because they’re both from the U.S.

The people they’d let through initially in their place couldn’t stay on pitch.  They had to go.  Welcome back, Chris!

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with who made it in the top ten.  Except for these guys, I think they had more to prove.

While I was born after the Korean war, it is still sobering to know I was a product of its aftermath.  More sobering still, are reminders of just how bad it was for the people of The Forgotten War.

While doing image research on Korean websites today, (I love google translate) I stumbled across this amazing footage of Korean orphans during and after the war.

The Christian missionary focus of the video is unmistakable, and I couldn’t figure out if this was a memorial to the Reverend Everett Swanson mentioned or if it was someone in Korea seriously living in the past, or WHAT it could be about.

Part of me continued with trepidation, thinking it might be yet-another-attempt at canonizing and perpetuating International Adoption.

But to my pleasant surprise, these are the posts of Compassion South Korea, a branch of Compassion International (and where the organization first began), and their focus is now, and has always been, sponsorship.  Interestingly, the sponsorship today is not for Koreans, but from Koreans for children of other countries.  And, I was correct that the footage and images are there as memorial to the founder and as a reminder of how tragedy was once in Korea’s backyard and how Koreans can return the favor.  And you know what?  I bet all the 22,000 children he helped are currently productive members of Korean society, with roots here despite their losses.

Seeing these images I am so deeply moved by what happened to the country of my birth, the land where I’m currently residing.  And I truly do see how humanitarians could have been blinded by their desires to help fast and think later.  But clearly, as the late Rev. Swindon demonstrated – we can help children without forcing them to lose their country, culture, language, and each other.

God, I’m always relieved whenever I see Christians NOT wreaking havoc and doing something beneficial.  I wish Harry Holt had taken his cues from Rev. Swindon…

Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle is playing – if you haven’t seen it, go rent it right now!  It’s a great comedic portrayal of ordinary Chinese people (who happen to really be Kung Fu Masters).  You’ll see how we aren’t so different, no matter where in the world we live.

Right now, kitty spit is rolling down my sideburns as Momo is nibbling away at my earlobe, purring.  It’s getting more and more perverse and ludicrous, this ever-growing cat comforting herself like this, but I feel guilt for not being an active enough buddy, for being gone all day, and for giving her herbal sedatives to calm her only natural instincts down.  So if her manic personality needs to counter hyper-activity with dry nursing, I guess I’ll put up with it.

I spent all Saturday on-line reviewing for the umpteenth time the best theme options for the new website.  So difficult to shop when you know just what you want and there are literally thousands and thousands of designs to study.  I also spent a lot of time shopping for sheets for my Korean floor mattress.  My kids would heckle me for this, (because I’m the type that gets upset when I have to buy new clothes hangers that don’t match my old ones) because I already have mis-matching bedding enough to keep me warm – I’d just like to bring this with me to America for guests to sleep on if they come visit, and I’d like at least one thing from Korea that looks nice!

Today I went out searching for lunch, but I always forget that Sundays in the country half the restaurants are closed.  I went to the restaurant I ate at with my school once that served that jae yuk kimchi bokkeum stuff I love so much, only was refused because you have to order for two, minimum.  Then I went and found a place that had sorry can’t remember and the restaurant owner was serving three men, only she shooed me out and told me they were closed.  Then I went to two other restaurants where I had no idea what anything on their menu was, and then I just gave up and ended going to a place I always go to, the Solleuntang place where I get my fix of sweet & shiny radish and cabbage kimchi and Trot music on KBS.  Anyway, in the spirit of yet further adventure I ordered the only other thing on the menu that was available to a single person, and it turned out to be….cow head.   You’d think once burned I’d know better, but with my aging memory cells, I’m not that capable.  I picked out all the jelly-like head – whatever that stuff is- meat and made a meal out of rice and banchan.  The owners chuckled and gave me lots more banchan to make up for my stomach turning.  At least the tang was good.

btw, I always thought that since tang was so thin and watery that it would be the quickest Korean soup to make, yet I learned from my students that tang actually takes the longest to make.  It’s milky color is a result of cooking soup bones for many hours, until all the marrow and every nutrient has been extracted.

*****

Speaking of soups, I actually made some yesterday.

Soup is something we don’t have often in America, and it’s usually only during chilly weather, and it’s often from a can.  But here in Korea, it’s with every meal, and often for breakfast too, and probably why Koreans don’t drink much water.  It’s a marvelous way to squeeze some more mileage out of the food scraps you have, and I’ve always been impressed how nothing goes to waste here.  In a less industrialized time, to not do so would have been criminal, and even today the scraps not fit for soup are collected from all our households and fed to livestock.

So every day at school we have a soup.  Most of the soups are recognizable:  the seaweed birthday soup, the haejangguk, the kim chi chiggae, etc., only a little more watery since they aren’t the main course.  But a lot of the soups are literally just thrown together from whatever’s left over.  Some of these left-over soups have become famous in their own right.  Like the ones with hot dogs and spam floating in them.  (the lunch ladies know I won’t eat these due to the chemicals, so they often will give me extra banchan or sometimes even bring me something special as a substitute!)  So that’s what I made, only because I don’t cook much I bought vegetables especially to made a copy of a left-over soup.

So my experiment was made with vegetable bouillon,  cabbage, radish, green onions, and ground perilla (like sesame) seeds. (which makes the soup an unattractive oatmeal color, but tastes really rich and nutty)  And since I was making it my whole meal, I added some diced chicken breast.  Amazingly, it tasted just like the school soup I was copying!  Only mine wasn’t overly salty like theirs always is, (yayy!) but I added too many perilla seeds so it was too thick.

After Christmas when school is over for the year, I’m on my own as far as meals go, so I think I’m going to spend some time teaching myself to cook Korean.  There’s always http://Mangchi.com and there’s also http://www.koreanhomecooking.com/  But I’m more interested in replicating some things I haven’t seen on either of those two resources for westerners.  It’s too bad I’m single and therefore miss a huge portion of what is to be had in Korea.  I really wish they would do something about that…

It’s jacket weather in Korea as of this week, and apples appeared in the market about the same time.  Those and rice cakes are distributed to the teachers the week prior to mid-terms.  The week prior to exams is a week of total boredom for me, as my classes are usurped for test review.  Because it might be another 3 weeks before I have to teach again, I look at adoption stuff and website stuff and window-shop on-line.  My only role during this time, besides eating rich school lunches, is the morning broadcast.  The other day, I did a segment on English commands for your dog.  I heard one of the student’s nick-name is dog, so the kids in his class practiced a lot of English that day…The one nice thing about all this time off is the students really appreciate me when my classes resume.  It’s a relief for them not to have grammar and vocabulary crammed down their throat, so even the bad students are like, “thank God for the foreign teacher.”

Tonight I’m watching an epic Mongolian movie about a little boy.  It’s very much in the same vein as the Lapp movie, Pathfinder, that I had the privilege of watching in college.  The boy is subject to so many trials, I’m wondering if he’s going to end up becoming Kubli-Khan or something.  One great thing I love about Korean t.v. is it’s really pan-Asian, and I’ve gotten to watch a lot of amazing movies from China and Japan and a lot of travel documentaries on places in Asiaa I’d never heard or or seen before.  It also makes me feel like I’m a part of something really large.

Coming to Korea, I still felt like a minority in the world, because Korea seems like a small copy of the west at times, but after seeing all these many iterations of Asian culture, I feel a part of something huge:  something much larger and more illustrious than America.  And at the same time, also so much more insignificant, just another poor and struggling speck in a huge swarm of flies living in a bottle with not enough resources to support the population.  And all these struggles makes my own story seem par for the course as well.  The lives of men are brutish and short.

Other than that, Momo and I continue our manic relationship, though the herbal sedatives do take the edge off.  She’s tripled in size and quintupled in weight, and I feel like I’m copying her.  I swear her vet is inventing vaccinations to give her for the business – she’s the most protected cat on the planet.  He didn’t seem too happy when I mentioned she would need to be spayed soon.

I do hope to leave and hope the plans work out.  The big challenge will be dropping out of this adoption stuff.  I really want to.  I don’t like when high-level activists look at me and tell me they’re waiting for my leadership on birth family search…partly because I feel I’ve buried my family this year, and partly because being an activist on top of moving to a foreign country sight unseen at middle age was really traumatic.  I’ve shared what I learned.  I really hope someone younger with more energy can continue to fill in the holes I see.

Back to being a couch potato, with my epic movie and my momentarily docile and warm cat.