Christmas in Seoul

I had to work extra hours in the stressful week leading up to Christmas. The boss was hurrying to make the necessary changes to our schedules before she leaves for America on Boxing Day and won’t return until February. I was dreading the weekend in a way, because the other teachers had plans to go to Seoul and we hadn’t made plans to do anything. I felt that I would probably have some kind of personal crisis if Leta and I tried to spend the holiday weekend in the same way as we’ve been spending every other weekend since we got here. With that in mind, I finished work too overwhelmed to speak and headed home with no idea what to expect of myself or of the weekend. After awhile, Leta and I came to the conclusion that we should join the other teachers in their plans to visit Seoul over the weekend. In the seven hours we would have before we were to leave, we cleaned the house, packed, put out enough food and water for the cat, and got a few hours sleep. The trip was much shorter than I expected and soon after finishing five lectures on mp3, we arrived in a large bus terminal.

We were supposed to meet up with a friend of the other teachers, but it took an hour of confusion and phone tag before that was accomplished. In that time, there were the first conflicts between us as we tried to figure out how and which and by whom the decisions were going to be made. We were hungry, but we couldn’t decide on a place to eat and so eventually, with some of us not speaking to others, we decided first to make our way to an area of Seoul that we would try to find a hotel. The subway system reminded me of experiences in Tokyo, with its many crowded levels of tunnels and escalators and the vast map of intersecting subway lines. After a couple transfers and a dozen flights of stairs, we got where we were trying to go. We chose a restaurant that didn’t look too fancy and ordered what we thought looked like a good deal. The food was reasonable, but once the bill came we realized we’d been scammed for four times what we had intended to order. They pretended not to understand our protests, so we just accepted our loss and decided to find a place to drop our bags to avoid being taken again as stupid tourists.



We hailed a few cabs and read them the name of a decently priced hotel from our guidebook before we realized that we were going to have to change our strategy. Then, out of nowhere, a stranger approached us and asked if we needed any help. We told him we were looking for a cheap place to stay and he offered to take us to one. I was skeptical, but the guy turned out to be an English grammar teacher and the place he found us was a nice, clean motel with rooms for $40/night (“Sam-O Motel”, 46-10 Susong-dong, Jongro-gu, Seoul, Korea: Tel #: 02-739-0606). I started feeling better about having been taken for our lunch money. From our motel window we had a beautiful view of a large Buddhist temple, which apparently is “one of the largest single story buildings in Korea.” We went shopping in the ‘Ilsadong’ district near our hotel, which was one of those pedestrian streets with shops selling little things that only tourists buy and stalls all selling the same cheap souvenirs. The street was pretty interesting, with tourists from all around the world, an open-air Andy Warhol exhibit, and some church kids scattered individually along the streets holding signs that offered free hugs as some sort of Christmas thing. I bought a couple of Japanese one yen coins the size of silver dollars from 1872, left over from their occupation of Korea in the early twentieth century. Leta bought some nice, cheap pashmina scarves.

The teachers had planned to go for dinner in Itaewon, an area of Seoul famous for having a lot of foreigners. We found a Mexican restaurant that served what actually tasted like Mexican food, which was a first for everyone present since arriving in Korea. One of the teachers had really wanted to go to a hip hop club, so we started looking for one. The first couple we tried, people on their way out warned us that it wasn’t worth the cover charge, but the third one was good enough that we stayed and danced until we went home. There were a lot of people there with buzz-cuts, so I’m pretty sure it was near a U.S. military base. Everyone had a pretty good time and nobody was harassed by anyone sleazy, so it felt like a successful first night in Seoul.

We had gotten home pretty late, especially after waking up before dawn the day before, but some of the other teachers still wanted to get going early the next day and so left before any of the rest of us woke up. When we did wake up, it was to the chanting of Buddhist worshipers in some kind of service that would last all day. We had planned to go to an amusement park called Everland, but Leta woke up with a stomach ache and a temperature. She insisted that I still go, since she wasn’t planning on getting out of bed much anyways. I went with the other teachers who hadn’t woken up early and took the subway to meet up with those who had, but by the time we could coordinate people were feeling like we had missed our chance for a full day at the park. There was some drama and one of the teachers parted ways at this point, but the rest of us decided we would go to Seoul Tower instead.

We taxied there and spent hours waiting in line after line for what ended up being a view mostly obscured by smog, but it was a lot of fun anyways. I felt guilty that I’d left Leta to spend Christmas Eve alone, but didn’t think she’d be too disappointed to have missed it. We taxied back to where we thought was the subway, but we ended up walking in and out of underground shopping malls for half an hour before we finally saw sign of the line we were looking for. We must have hit the ‘rush hour’ of some kind of Christmas Eve boom because the tunnels were packed from wall to wall with crowds. I stood about a foot taller than most people, so I could see across the sea of black hair so thick that at many points nobody could move in either direction. Two hours after leaving Seoul Tower, we got back to our motel. Leta was still sick with the flu and said she was glad not to have gone.

The experience was enough that even after a few hours of recuperation, nobody was interested in any idea that would require taking the subway. A couple teachers took a cab back to the club that we’d gone to the night before, but the rest of us (still minus sick Leta) decided to eat some place close to the motel. We didn’t want to risk getting ripped off for weird food again, so we had Christmas Eve dinner at Burger King. We all commiserated about how inadequate it was to spend Christmas Eve like this, how it didn’t feel like Christmas, how we missed our family or loved ones, how it was strange not to see decorations or have people wish you Merry Christmas, etc. Back at the hotel, I talked with one of the other teachers about the shortcomings of our democratic systems of government and the necessity for a greater shift towards more active citizenship until late at night. I only remembered it was Christmas hours after midnight as I was falling asleep.

Leta and I had arranged to leave Seoul earlier than the other teachers, so that we could get home and relax and eat some kind of a Christmas dinner before another week of work. The other teachers decided they were going to go to Everland. They had left before we’d woken up, but we somehow still managed to meet up with them in the subway. We were given one last strange experience before we were to leave Seoul, as some guy with cucumber and potato slices on his face got on our subway car pushing a cart. He gave an convincing demonstration in Korean about the ease of using cucumbers and potatoes for this purpose and afterward went around selling people the grater-slicer he’d used to do it for a dollar. I couldn’t believe how many older ladies bought them.

We ate Christmas breakfast at McDonalds in the bus terminal, which regrettably didn’t have the breakfast menu. We had trouble finding our gate at first, but some random stranger and his wife went ten minutes out of their way to help bring us to the right bus. The trip home was unbelievably quick, even having to arrange and catch a second bus from Gwangju to Naju, and four hours after stepping onto our bus in Seoul we stepped off at home. We arrived at our apartment to found that our cat had knocked everything possible down onto the ground off of our shelves and tables and dressers. I had tried to leave my entire playlist of music running for her on the computer, but our stupid alarm clock had gone off when it shouldn’t have and the same short Ween song had been looping the whole time. She wouldn’t stop meowing at us for the first few hours, but after some chicken and squid and attention she’s finally back to normal. I am glad to have spent Christmas doing something memorable, but the bizarre experiences and warm weather have made it hard to recognize it as the same holiday.

life is settling down

I haven't posted an entry in awhile, mostly because there isn't much new to post about. I've gone into Gwangju several more times and have realized that the chaotic circus is always the same and far from being a vast expanse of lights and streets full of people, it's only half a dozen blocks. The teaching side of my job has become a lot easier and routine, leaving only the challenges of a work environment where disorienting personal relations and management problems are a daily occurrence. There are a few new things to talk about, though.

Apparently the anti-FTA rallies have continued under heavy repression from the government, which declared the strikes illegal and suppressed them with road blocks and the mobilization of twice as many riot police as protestors, etc. The news, of course, says nothing about these rallies and I rely on internet sources and blogs to get an idea of what's going on. The government's rationale for this censorship probably has to do with maintaining the illusion of democracy when they are making top-heavy decisions that disregard the apparent will of the people. As far as I can tell, this FTA has more to do with 'national security concerns' than with the general health of the Korean economy. I try to bring up the topic in my last class of the day, where the middle school students are able to produce some basic commentary on the whole situation. What they have expressed to me is that they don't feel the farmers have much choice but to protest the situation, because it threatens to destroy their way of life and that the police can "do no wrong" in their suppression of the protests.

I bought an mp3 player last weekend so that I can get some peace at work in the midst of rowdy children, the crowded teachers office and my perpetually screaming boss. I've been thinking a lot lately about how I want to go back to school for a masters degree once I'm finished my year in Korea. It occurred to me that I don't really need the supervision of a class environment to learn, though, and so I've started using my mp3 player to listen to lectures series that I've downloaded. I'm halfway through a 45-lecture series on "Interpreting the 20th Century," which so far has been very interesting. The lecturer has a strong bias supporting the universality of American values, but it's easy enough to weed through it. I've found the lectures really useful for contextualizing Western disillusionment in the period between World War One and Two, including a lot of stuff about the Great Depression that I wasn't aware of. I've also found it useful for filling in some gaps about the Russian Revolution, the Nazi and Stalinist states, and most recently the Chinese history surrounding the Opium Wars, the Unequal Treaties and how these led to the establishment of the Communist Revolution under Mao Zedong. I've found that all these things help me transcend the repetition and monotony of my daily routine. I'm hoping that by listening to some other lecture series, I'll be able to get any idea of the specific field that I'd like to pursue further education in.

One of the other teachers arranged for us to meet up with four other foreigners from Naju last Wednesday after work. It was refreshing to know that there are other people around here whose jobs are mostly boring, but who find exciting things to do on the weekends. We were supposed to go somewhere an hour away by bus and climb a mountain this morning, but it was rainy and only a little above freezing and under those conditions I couldn't pull myself out of bed at 8:30 in the morning. I was disappointed with myself once I finally got up a couple hours later, so I spent most of the day playing Super Nintendo on my computer. We went into Gwangju later in the evening as some excuse to get out of the house, and while we were there we decided to do the "rent a karaoke room" thing. I was skeptical at first, but it was a lot more fun than I expected and I sang out some stress until my throat was hoarse. It's on these type of trips that I listen to the lectures, so it gives me something to think about and keeps me from getting bored. I don't feel like there's much else I can say about my life at this point, so this is where the entry will end.