Armed with my satellite photos as a guide, Jane and I walked around a neighborhood yesterday.  A REAL neighborhood.  The interstitial arterial  only wide enough for one car, if that, yet lined with small storefronts supplying the immediate area with all the residents need.  I thought it unlikely, but we found two real estate agencies even on this off-the-main-drag place.

Jane wanted me to learn how to engage the real estate agent and give me a sense of what is available by looking inside an apartment or two.  Only we couldn’t stop and looked at about five.  It’s not like in the U.S. where the housing on the market must all be listed and shared amongst the agents via computer.  Here, the listing is at as many offices as you go to and list, so if you want to find hidden gems, then you’ve got to visit many real estate offices.

We began to feel guilty, but as the possibilities were being presented to us, I think both Jane and I were starting to calculate whether or not, if we saw one today, if we could pull it off.  All a nice fantasy for me, since I’m really not in any position to come up with the key money right now.  But then we found the perfect place, and it was painful, and I wish we’d quit looking before I saw it!  Sigh, so I have to call the nice men back tomorrow and give them the bad news…(guilt, guilt, guilt, though I think it was more me leading myself on than leading them on)

Anyway –

The streets of Seoul are where I have to be.  I was just SO HAPPY being there, it’s hard to describe.  There were PEOPLE in the streets, and mo-peds parked everywhere, and children and dogs, and halmoni’s squatting on floors shooting the breeze with each other.  And everywhere you looked was a visual feast of sights and sounds, undulating roof-tops, the clash of patterns, vistas out towards rooftops below or impossible steps going up, few things at right angles to one another.

The perfect apartment was in some halaboji’s house, behind a gate, past a lovely little Asian garden.  You walked into a big room with a kitchen to one end, and to the left through beautiful wood and paper sliding screen doors was another room and then a bathroom at the end.  All for 400,000 won.  Character, charm, a garden outside, in a real neighborhood, affordable.  Can I move there right now?  Today?  Ha ha!  If anyone wants to contribute a loan to a key money fund, just let me know and I’ll give you my bank account number!

Damn Jane and her master plan of getting me hooked on Korea and Seoul and TRACK!  She means for me to retire here, I just know it.  And, she knows my weak points…diabolical.  Truly diabolical.  I’m not sure I can resist…

No…Oh well.  At least we know these places exist and that they can be within my budget.  Unfortunately, this entire area will be demolished in 2012.  I want to live there, but it will be sad that if I do it will soon be only a memory – like my adoptee friends who have gone back to visit their homes, only to find the streets don’t even exist, the entire neighborhoods gone, replaced by deadly uniform new and “improved” blocks of anonymous generic housing.

I knew I was in a hurry to find a place – I didn’t realize until yesterday how dire the situation is.  Korean culture will soon only exist in the country.  Hopefully the hills will preserve some of it.  I’ve identified about six areas similar to the one we saw yesterday that I’d like to explore, which hopefully aren’t on somebody’s gentrification plan.

I was really energized just being there.  There’s about four more months of teaching to go, and then I can move. (in the dead of winter) Please, please let me find a place as cool as the one we saw today!

crowded subways

being jostled without apology

repeating everything I say to cabbies and counter people twice

kids saying, “HI TEACHER!” and then giggling

doing the head nod bow to acknowledge people in the hallways

not having a clue what people are talking about and being silent during their conversations – it’s kind of nice, actually, because it frees me of so many social obligations.

eating rice with every meal

At 7 pm two Korean girls wait for a taxi outside my building. It’s 50 degrees outside and they are wearing hotpants and fetish shoes.

It’s 1 a.m. on a Friday night, and two SEET English Town hagwon buses just went by.  One was empty, the other was not.

I keep longing to hear of someone in Korea who is happily married, but I guess the jury is out until I gather a larger sampling.  So far, it is about 12:2. (the two both being men)  Several of the women think they are lucky they are not wanting for anything and their husbands are responsible.  But love?  It’s not sounding so great.  Hopefully, the current young couples walking around openly physically affectionate will buck this trend.  Hmm…what else?

People skedaddling across the street – running when there’s no reason to run.  It’s called bali bali and means quickly! My kids used to poke fun at me if I did this (which is a lot less than their selective memory will recall) but it was usually because we started as the light was halfway to changing.  But here, it’s almost always run for some reason.  Rung across the street. Run to the bus.  Run to the subway.  Everyone’s always in a hurry, and it looks comical.

Adjummas cutting your foot at restaurants with big kitchen scissors.  Kind of reminds me of the first time in America when a waiter came to grind fresh pepper on my salad.  That grinder was about a foot long and kind of, well, intimidating…Same with the scissors, they kind of freak me out (but not in such a phallic way) and I also worry how sanitary they are, as people sometimes call them over to cut food I’m thinking they’ve already dipped their chopsticks in.  Similarly, if you get skewered street food, the stall owners will come and nip off your skewer so the meat or fishcake or whatever it happens to be is closer to the end.

The sound of hawking phlem as Koreans shower.  First time, I wondered why they would do that and figured it was an anomaly.  Second time, I still wondered why they did that and began to think it was cultural.  Now, third or fourth time I’m beginning to think all Koreans do this.

Seeing people walking and brushing wherever they happen to be.  Toothpaste foaming around their mouths and everything.  Dentists must be hard up for customers here, as everyone is OBSESSED with brushing.  Young-a took me to task for not brushing all the time, to the point I have PTSD about it.  I think I brush even less than before as a result.  I did manage to explain to someone that westerners think brushing is unattractive and a thing to do in private, but those that watch me (and I am always watched) must think I’m a heathen…

Teachers massaging the students.  To an excessive degree.  Some say it is to wake the children up.  Some say if done hard it is a gentle admonition.  Some say it is an apology for all the hours the students must spend at school studying.  But secretly, I think Mr. Lee just likes touching the boys too much.  In addition to the massaging is also patting the hands and arms, and to my discomfort it lingers far too long.

Students holding hands and rubbing and patting each other.  OK.  So I lived in Seattle.  I am NOT homophobic.  But I do get squeemish over excessive public displays of affection in inappropriate places.  There’s sometimes just an intimacy about it that makes me want to tell them to get a room…something about it beyond innocent friendship…like co-dependency manifest in young children…

(added) I know it’s probably just a cultural thing and harmless, but it’s always new and disturbing to this westerner every time I see it.

Here’s a funny video made by a gyopo, about adjusting to Korea.  Those of us here will appreciate it.  Except for the bowl cut thing, which might instead be a baby parma (half perm), it really hits close to home!

(added) The last scene where DK is back in America never letting go of his friend’s arm is really, really, how it is here…

Yesterday, Chusamma came to school in a smashingly tasteful charcoal silk suit.  I asked him what the special occassion was, and he said he had some private matter to take care of in the afternoon.

Today, he stopped by my desk and told me he passed the TEPS English test!  Yayy!  So that means he’ll not only get a pay raise, but can move on towards getting his phd.

So I wrote a little card for him on the stationary I bought to write Kim Sook Ja a letter, asking him to do the honor of allowing me to take him out to dinner.  For some reason, he kept saying he owes it all to me – and I didn’t help him AT ALL.  Maybe just forcing himself to speak to me in English helped his listening skills or something, I’m not sure.  He and Young-a are tight and she’s excellent at English, so I don’t think he really needed me that much…funny, I looked his name up in the school directory and it’s really Chil Sang, so I don’t know how that becomes Chusamma, but that’s how it sounds.

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Went to another open classroom demonstration, this time at a nearby public high school.  Omg – their facilities are sooo much better than ours!  I think every school on the planet is nicer than ours:  it reminds me of military buildings back when my husband was in the Navy, but they were cleaner.  Can you say drab?

On the way there, In-Kyung informed me that our school got the highest English test scores in Anyang, a city twice the size of Seattle, (something like 87 high schools) and she had to take that opportunity to remind me we have some of the highest caliber students, and that it could be much, much worse.   I let her know I was enjoying teaching lately, and that I was going to sign for another year had it not been for that incident with the student where I got no support from the school.  I also told her that maybe if the school would pay for my trip home, allow me to move, and guarantee me grading privileges and more support, that I might reconsider.  So we’ll see how that goes.  In the meantime, I will continue to explore neighborhoods in Seoul and get a feel for the job market.  I asked her to broach the Vice Principal about this, since my formal letter of about four months asking for changes came across as too direct…

At the school, I was surprised to see Mr. Mullet there.  He did a pretty good job – kept his lesson focused, had an easy-going style, and utilized multi-media in a creative way.  BUT like ALL THE OTHER open classrooms I have sat in on, he kept tossing candy to the children who answered questions.  In-Kyung and I had a hard time suppressing our comments about this, as she too feels this isn’t something teachers should resort to – I mean, it’s just uncomfortable to watch and really looks like training dogs for stupid pet tricks.  I kept oohing and aahing that he actually had large art paper and markers for the kids to draw with, which cracked In-Kyung up, because I couldn’t even get pencils for the soon-to-open English Zone for my students when I asked for it.  But I’m really excited I got narrow, movable desks and stools vs. comfy chairs with arms on them.

She did ask him later about the candy thing, and he said that he’d only recently started to use it since he was leaving soon and really wanted to get some cooperation and progress before he left.  He said he was spending a fortune on candy, but that it was necessary because the students were so low level and because he only saw them twice a month. I think In-Kyung was the only Korean teacher there who did not preface her comments with a long formal preamble thanking them for the time and effort and welcoming them and providing the snacks and…Asian culture.  It’s a wonder any business gets done!

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So if I stay here, I think I’d choose to live at Anyang Station, which is more vibrant than here.  Where I’m staying reminds me of Bellevue.  Like living in downtown Bellevue – only much worse, because there’s no single family housing as far as the eye can see.  And you know how much I hated Bellevue…how much most people that live in Seattle hate Bellevue.   How all history has been erased, most of the buildings are the same age, operable windows are rare, details to facades are lacking, how corporate and anonymous it all looks, how even the street trees are lacking in character.

I might also consider commuting hell.  It might be worth it, not having to adjust to a new school but to live in a real neighborhood with regular characters and a sense of place.

THREE TIMES the past few days I have written, and the internet cut out and I lost the posts.  Not fun to re-create…

I have to get my discipline back on, as I’ve also not done any TRACK work this week.  But I did write this post on my Adoption Survivor blog, and it’s been getting some attention.

So I was talking with Willie this weekend and he was mentioning how he takes care of his food scraps and the topic went from garbage to junk and then to decks/patios/balconies, and how in Korea there is no such thing as patio chairs and cafe tables because everybody uses that space to hold boxes and piles of crap – basically all the overflow from the apartments, because there isn’t sufficient storage space.  And I laughed and told him how I thought that decks were the equivalent of the American garage.

So many little things like that I mean to talk about that would enlighten you back home, but I forget.

Speaking of garbage, we were in Gyeongju and I was eating an instant ramyeon noodle and as I never drink the salt, red pepper and msg-laden broth, so I went outside to dump the liquid down the drain.  And the family marte shop keeper got all alarmed and Clara said something like, “they have a food waste container inside…”

Oh!

Did I tell you that I just got off the plane?  I’d seen them before, but just never used them and so forgot about them.  Basically, there is so much emphasis on recycling that very little actually goes in the trash (and who really knows where THAT goes…?  The urban myth is it goes to slop pigs in the country) and any food that does go in the trash is solid.  How do they accomplish this?  The answer is that every place has a food waste can.  Basically, it’s a trash can with a collander/sieve straddling the top of it – or a special can with a perfectly fitting sieve resting inside, so that the solids can be removed to reduce the trash and because the fermented liquid would become a disposal problem.

I have NO IDEA where the garbage in Korea goes.  While the trash collection bins look like big plastic dumpsters, I haven’t seen any dumpster trucks come to pick anything up.  I have seen the recycling trucks: they are these archaic-looking little trucks that come by in the middle of the night and everything is hand-thrown into them by one lone guy.  This is a very low-tech process, and I’m not sure if the entire thing is done through independent contracts and/or if it is just done for re-sale, or if these little truck operators work for the city.  Then, around dawn is the sidewalk crew of adjummas.  They wear little yellow uniforms, garden gloves, and push special carts, which hold brooms and dustpans, and many different bags for them to sort what they pick up.  It doesn’t matter how littered the street is by evening’s end:  in the morning, the street will look brand new clean and spotless.  Everyone knows they’ll be by, so it’s common for people to leave their drinks, cans, bottles, cigarette butts, etc. wherever they are.  So people litter here – but it’s typically not just random throwing and tossing, but purposefully set some place where they know it will be picked up.  And most people I know who are smokers are very careful to carry around their butts until they find a trash can or chattori. (ashtray)  Of course, there are those that use the street as an ashtray – but again, considering how many smokers there are here – the streets are actually pretty free of cigarettes, and the butts you do see laying about are again in places where everyone knows either the shop worker, doorman, or cleaning adjumma will come along eventually.  So in a weird way it kind of supports jobs.

Straining things has ingeniously been thought of all over the Korean house.  In the kitchen sink, the drain has a sieve with a handle in it as well.  The sink drains here are huge:  instead of the drains that they have in the U.S. which are the same size as the 1.5 inch pipes, the drains here are about 4″ wide and about 5″deep and function in much the same way as the food waste garbage cans.  Also, in the bathrooms is a similar large sieve beneath a flat drain cover at floor height, which very effectively collects all hair after a shower.   This system wouldn’t work so well on a bathroom sink, however.  But no worries:  you can purchase from adjoshis on the subway, or at trucks selling  household items, these barbed coils of plastic with a handle on the end of it.  They’re like pipe snakes, but the barbs snag any hairs or things clogging the sink elbow.  Mr. S. didn’t like how slow my drain was and brought me one.  It works fantastic.  Everyone in America needs one of these things.

During our stay in Busan a week ago, it came as somewhat of a shock to be in a western hotel room once again.  Not only was there no foyer to take off your shoes, but the floor was not raised and heated, and the floor was carpeted.  Jane and I were both totally creeped out about the carpet and the impossibility of cleaning it properly after so many barefoot visitors had stayed there.  And then there was the western bathroom, with it’s bathtub, curtained shower, and fixed shower head.  The problem with the western fixed shower head is there is no control over the water.  What I’ve come to appreciate about the hand-held Asian shower head is how you can localize its use:  Want to only wash your feet?  no problem.  Just dyed your hair and you want that dye to stay over the drain?  No problem.  AND the water pressure close to the scalp when you are shampooing gets you rinsed out faster and more thoroughly as well.  Want to clean up only our naughty bits?  No problem.  Want to shower but feel like giving your hair a break for a day/or don’t feel like having wet hair to style?  No problem.  With the hand-held shower, you can take a thorough shower and not need a shower cap.  In fact, it’s hard to find a plastic shower cap in Korea.  Want to clean the bathroom?  With the hand-held shower head, you can hose down the walls and floors and clean up the bathroom thoroughly in minutes.  The thing I don’t like about Korean bathrooms is that you have to ALWAYS put the toilet lid down or your seat will be wet, you have to keep your toilet paper out of the way of any spray spillover, and if you share a bathroom, then there’s the slipper thing if you need to go to the toilet after someone’s showered, because the entire bathroom will be wet afterward.  But I’m lucky and my shower is enclosed, so I don’t have that problem.

Most Korean toilet paper dispensers have a stainless steel blade that hangs down in front of the roll, to make tearing off the paper easier.  Joyce was mentioning how the public squat toilets are so much better for the environment, in terms of water consumption.  They use about half as much water, yet the flushing is really powerful somehow, with no visible tank.  People say euww about the used toilet paper cans which are always next to the squat toilets, but it probably is much better for the sewer system.  And the people who empty the bathroom trash do so with very long tongs, like the ones they use to move people’s shoes around.  What sucks is when there isn’t toilet paper in a public restroom, so you always should have a travel package of tissue with you or remember to take some paper dinner napkins from any table you leave.  What’s great about Korea is that there are clean public restrooms everywhere, meaning you never have to be inconvenienced and every citizen, from those wearing fur to those living on the streets, can stay clean.  There isn’t any of this nimby discriminatory attitude here about who can or can’t use a bathroom, which is really refreshing.