Finding the Rhythm

(citizens of tomorrow, be forewarned)

Seven days have been crossed off the calendar since last we met, and I'm a deeper into the rabbit hole of Korea. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary happened this week, but that's a relative concept when you live in a country where selling smoked tentacles and cooked silkworm larvae as a street-side snack counts as ordinary.

Cahill came to Seoul again this weekend, after a post-new-year hiatus. Instead of heading to Hongdae, we stayed in Sillim once again, and headed for the Zeppelin bar. By the time we got there, things were quite subdued, but we enjoyed the stiff drinks and free oranges and the best classic vinyl this little corner of Seoul has to offer.

From there, we headed to Box 86, where the owner memorized my name after a single visit. We actually ran into her on the sidewalk on New Year's Eve, and she screamed "Hello, Peter, Happy New Year!" surprising and confusing me. She granted me the same enthusiasm on Saturday. Cahill approached the dusty, out of tune, but functional guitar hidden in the corner with the same enthusiasm. He picked it up, tuned it, and played around a bit. They even turned down the music in the bar, to better hear the guitar.

As we left the bar in the late-eve-slash-early-morning the street food carts were closed, so we headed to an all-night Kimbap place and enjoyed delicious Korean foods and soups. Really, it was a great idea, that I'm likely to repeat in future. You'd be surprised how well spicy Korean soup and tuna-seaweed-rice rolls replace greasy pizza as a post-booze meal.

It's funny how comfortable this all gets after a while. How natural it is to use the scant bit of Korean I know to communicate. How sights and sounds and smells that gave me a chronic case of crane-neck in my first few months now fade into the familiar.

That's part of why it helps so much to stop and make myself look around and take pictures to remind myself that this is neither Kansas nor the home I've known for most of my life. It just feels eerily like home now. Shibal, I even swear in Korean a lot of the time now, even when I'm alone and there's no one to hear it and be offended.

Another part of Korea with which I'm increasingly comfortable is teaching. With my Kindergarten class, I've finally got some semblance of order. For my first week of teaching that class, I'd go through most 40-minute classes without more than half of the kids opening their books.

A little over a month ago, I started letting every student draw themselves a star on the board if they finished all their work. These days, I'll get 10 minutes into class and kids start screaming "Peter Teacher, I'm done! One star!" Some of the worst-behaved students from when I started are now some of my favourites. It's all very cute and very satisfying, and if I did this again, I'd gladly teach kindergarten.

I wish I taught them art. Those snowmen they made are awesome, and whenever I've got a bit of time to kill in class, I let them draw on the whiteboard. William draws the best Monster House ever. Also, I forgot how kids have a biological predisposition to love dinosaurs at this age. Truly a universal phenomenon, it crosses cultures and half the globe to reach Korea with full force.

Coming up in February, I've got a little shy of a week's holiday for Lunar (aka Chinese) New Year. I think I may fly to Japan, but if I have any hope of making those arrangements, I should really get on that this week.

To close up this week, I've got three generally unrelated images, united in their general sense of Koreanosity. On the left, you see an elaborate Neon-tube Popeye being used to lure people into a Hof (aka bar; a pub moreso than a club). While not innately funny, it is worth noting that this particular image of Popeye was taken during his later years, after he'd switched catchphrases to the decidedly less-catchy "Fuck the spinach, let's get drunk!" While this was a controversial move for the once borderline-wholesome sailor-prone-to-violent-outbreaks, the move made sense to most who gave it a chance. I mean, he is a sailor, man! Swearing and drinking are kind of his thing.

Speaking of swearing and drinking and outbreaks of violent behaviour, those familiar with Newfoundland should look to the right and see a semi-familiar place name. While most people probably think of an island off the coast of California when they read this (cat-a-lean-ah), people from my dot on the globe are probably more apt to think of a small east-coast town of a few thousand (cat-a-line-a). It's not funny in and of itself, but I can't help but imagine the convolouted story you could tell wearing this kind of shirt on the Granite Planet (aka Newfoundland).

"Sure it says Catalina, I got it in South Korea, though."

Speaking of things that would look quite at home in Newfoundland, but quite strange in Korea, observe the large red ATV parked on the sidewalk there in the middle. If there's any way to stick out in Seoul (other than being a foreigner) it's to drive an off-road vehicle. I mean, I'm not sure there any places in Seoul that lack roads. At least they took the effort to dress it up with a superfluous dome with strange churchesque stained-glass flower stickers on it. Now it fits-in a little more...