Food food food

I'm going to write about a bunch of stuff that I only half understand, or actually probably quite a bit less. Cool? Alright, here goes.

Just in time to probably be unable to do anything about it, I've started getting intensely interested in learning about nutrition and living healthily. I'm not sure exactly why I've just gotten into it so hard, but I think maybe it's because of bread. I've been thinking a lot, on and off, about bread lately.
   If you've been reading this blog for a long, long time, you may remember a time in my first year at college when I had just discovered something called the paleo diet. The premise of the diet is that you should eat what humans evolved to eat, and humans did all that evolving before the following things existed, making them verboten: grains, processed vegetable oils, and refined sugar. So I did a little one-week trial of the paleo diet where I hardly stuck to it at all and didn't notice anything change very noticeably in my health, and then I guess I forgot about it. But over the last year or so it's been creeping back into the forefront of my consciousness, for two reasons. One—Since I finally read The Omnivore's Dilemma and a few other books about food, I haven't been able to shake the notion that I'm almost certainly not eating how I should be, and that I should figure out the right way without too much delay. Two—It keeps popping up here and there in things that I read. Since one of my big convictions is that our modern civilization is deeply wrong in almost every direction, the stuff I read has a certain tendency to mesh with that idea, and the way of eating that makes the most sense from that viewpoint is basically paleo. So whenever food comes up, which it does fairly often since it's so important to the world and its ecosystems, I'm likely to end up reading something about paleo (or one of its close cousins). As a result, for a while I've been carrying around a vague idea that paleo is the right way to eat, but I hadn't actually gone to the trouble of figuring out whether it was actually true, or what the science is.
   With that notion in tow, I started minimizing the bread I eat. Not based on any careful reading of anything in particular, just out of a knowledge that grains are somehow supposed to be bad, and industrially made bread is even worse because of all the chemicals and processing involved, and anyhow I get a huge scoop of rice at school lunches so it's not like I need more carbs. But having given it up, I noticed that I missed it. Those who've seen me eat dinner at Grandma & Grandpa's house will probably remember some of the many occasions when I took home the loaf of poppy-seed-adorned bread that Grandma & Grandpa got specifically for the meal, though you may not know that I often finished the entire loaf during the car ride back home, sometimes alongside a can of root beer. I really enjoy bread. So I thought it was high time to figure out whether it was responsible for me to keep eating it.
   You could pretty reasonably ask, Why? Clearly I'm the kind of person who can eat pretty much anything, in tremendous amounts, and never gain a pound. So why should I want to diet? Basically, because being overweight isn't the only way to be unhealthy from your diet. It's just the most visible. In fact, from what I've read, it's pretty likely that most of the ways of being unhealthy that we see in civilization are results of eating bad stuff. Things like: diabetes, heart disease, and most cancers; also things like: acne, headaches, and feeling sleepy during the day. I generally feel pretty healthy, but even that's not a guarantee of anything because some of these diseases of civilization just wait and build up without you noticing until one day you go to the doctor and she tells you, "You have diabetes." Or later on in life, "With your arteries, you're set to have a heart attack within the year." And I realized a few months ago that my relationship with food here couldn't possibly be healthy: the lunch ladies noticed that I eat a lot, so they started giving me extra of everything (including the rice I mentioned), and since I hate to let food go to waste I ate it all every day, and since it's what you do I came back home each day and had a nice big dinner too, followed by snacks here and there until bedtime. At restaurants I've gained a reputation as the garbage disposal—I make sure none of the food gets thrown away, sometimes by asking for a doggy bag but usually just by eating it all (and then realizing when I stand up how bloated I am).
   So I finally started reading about the paleo diet, and also some of its kin, like the Weston A. Price Foundation's diet and the (ambitiously named) Perfect Health Diet and various little variations on the paleo diet created by bloggers around the internet. I wasn't disappointed; it basically all makes sense, and all the forums about the diet (of which there are a lot, most of them built around the idea of helping people learn more about why things work the way they do and how to do the diet) are full of people talking about how much better they feel when they eat paleo-style and how much weight they've lost and kept off (or, if they started already thin, sometimes about how much muscle they've put on). The caveat here is that I haven't really looked into the opposite viewpoint very carefully so far, but that's next on the list.
   There are a whole lot of scientific explanations for different facets of the diet. These are what seem to strike me as three of the most central parts. First: carbs are kindling and fat is firewood. Most people constantly supply their body's fireplace with kindling, so it only burns that, and never lights the bigger fire below. (Imperfect analogy alert: kindling that goes unburnt becomes new firewood.) But a fire burns stronger and steadier on firewood. Eating fat turns out to actually be a good thing, contrary to what most people learn, because your body runs better on it.
   Second: now that you'll be eating more fat, it's important to pay attention to what kind of fat, and the healthy answer is, "Not vegetable oils." They're modern Frankensteinish inventions of factory food technology and science is continually finding new ways they're bad for you. Probably unexpectedly, and counterintuitively, what's recommended instead is animal fats, like the ones that are inherent in meat, as well as butter, lard, and tallow. Other alright fats include the fat you get when you eat avocados and nuts and such, and coconut oil (which gets heaps of praise), and debatably olive oil.
   And third: when grains grow on their plants, they don't want to be eaten, because they spread by wind, not by getting eaten and then pooped out. So they make chemicals called lectins that give a stomachache to any animal that eats them. Then we figured out that if you cook grains the lectins aren't powerful enough to bother you. But they're still there, and they build up and cause bad health along down the line.
   There are other things that I haven't mentioned too, like getting lots of variety of fruits and vegetables because they're good for you in a slew of different ways including providing you with vitamins and other micronutrients, and also trying to eat as fresh as possible so you know the provenance of everything. One of these little other bits is intermittent fasting, which is that thing I tried out the other day. I had actually been thinking about fasting even before I started reading so much about paleo. A blog post about fasting once a week got me thinking about it; the guy explained it as having lots of different good effects, like getting him to be less automatic in his behavior with food, and reminding him what the starved half of the world's people chronically feels like, and reducing his ecological footprint. Then I found out that there's a sizeable contingent of paleo people, as well as other people, who fast once a week because it's supposed to do some good things for health, like slow down high-strung metabolisms and also apparently even lengthen lifespan. Though I kind of just went off half-cocked on the fasting thing, without a particularly clear idea of what I was supposed to be accomplishing, besides maybe shrinking my enormous appetite by a size or two. (In that I think I might've succeeded, at least briefly.) Maybe I'll try it again, or even regularly, but I'm going to keep reading.
   So I think I actually would like to try this out. But here's the thing: I'll be able to control it as an experiment for maybe three weeks. Then I have another week of school lunches, and then I'm off to a bunch of other countries. These are all countries with incredibly diverse cuisines that I want to try out. I'm not going to skip having pizza in Italy, or a baguette in France, or a pretzel in Germany. (Though sausage and sauerkraut are highly approved foods.) And perhaps more to the point, as a dumpster diver I won't have the opportunity to be too picky about what I eat. Some days I'll probably get lots of vegetables and maybe some freshly thrown-away meat (which I'll cook very well, don't worry), but other days I might find a bunch of bread or a bag full of donuts or something. So I guess maybe I'll have to wait a little while before figuring out this whole health thing entirely. But I guess I'll do what I can while I'm traveling. Go fishing in Mongolia, look for uneaten sausages at Oktoberfest, keep an eye out for fresh healthy stuff in dumpsters.

I'll probably write a few more posts soon and probably none of them will be about nutrition. It's just I've been thinking about it a lot lately.

Also, I mentioned a lot of stuff in this post and didn't link to any of it. So here's a whole constellation of links to keep you busy if you feel like reading some of the stuff that I've read.
A pretty good introduction to one variety of the paleo diet.
The same guy explaining about burning fat instead of glucose (from carbs). 
A different guy's introduction, which I think I like better, though he peppers it with unexplained acronyms.
The Weston A. Price Foundation has a largely pointless website, but this cookbook/advice book was interesting.
The Perfect Health Diet.
The blog post that got me thinking about fasting (by the same guy, from my college, who got me thinking about using computers excessively).
Wikipedia's page about intermittent fasting.

Crowduck Dreamin'

I'm glad I'm going to Crowduck next year. Another summer of missing it like this might make me completely lose touch with reality and just live there in my imagination the whole week.
   For example: on Sunday night while you were probably having some fried fish with tartar sauce, I was just about to wake up to another Monday at work. But for the moment I was having a dream about Crowduck. My dreams are hardly ever on topic like this. (For example, in another recent dream, I followed the story of Giant Bo Peep, about 30 feet tall, as she rescued a herd of cows from witches who had trapped them in a sinkhole full of their own milk; she took them to a majestic walkway along the edge of a world that was shaped like a thousands-of-miles-long flattened hot dog suspended underneath a giant archway of a sky, and met eagles bigger than houses, who told her what to do next on her quest.) But there I was at Crowduck with everyone. Micah and Mom were there too. Micah climbed down a little wooded hill and got in a shallow sand-bottomed bay of the lake, and started fishing with his bare hands. And he was catching fish, too—little flat ones that sometimes buried themselves in the sand. I wanted to go down and try it too, but then another part of the dream started. I was out on the lake in an outboard boat that was sized maybe halfway between a real Crowduck boat and a Camp Manito-wish canoe, which made it tippier than the real ones. I got stuck in a massive weedbed, which happened in real life last year, and when I pulled the motor up to unclog it I nearly capsized the boat. When I got it upright there was a foot of water in it, and I was nervous about getting it back to camp like that, but I figured I had no choice, and hopefully the bilge pump would help me out.
   When I wasn't dreaming of Crowduck, sometimes I was daydreaming. Mainly it happened like this: I would look at my watch, subtract fourteen hours, and think: "Everyone's playing poker now, except me." Or: "Grandpa's probably just made a BLT and now he's getting ready to go out on the lake for the morning."
   But I suppose I had enough things going on back here to distract me. There was another cookout, for instance, with Sean and four other folks from neighboring towns and lots of swimming and sunburn. I'm getting better at making hobo packs. These are something that my friend Molly from college described to me that I thought sounded like the perfect food to make while on the road. You lay out some foil; put on a bunch of potatoes, onions, pork, and whatever other vegetables are on hand; then add lots of pepper, butter, and salt. Then you stick it in the smoldering coals of a campfire. What I've discovered is that campfires are kind of a hassle, especially when you have to wait for them to die down to coals and then wait another forty minutes for the hobo pack to cook. But, provided there's foil, hobo packs would be fun to make some night if I've just made a bunch of friends somewhere in Europe and we all feel like heading out into the woods to sit around a campfire and chitchat and then eat dinner when we're good and ready. I've been trying to practice my camp cooking, but it's tough because I don't have ethanol for my ethanol-burning stove yet, so I have to use my wood-burning stove, and that one requires really dry wood, and Korea is currently firmly in the grip of the rainy season. In all this humidity my shoes still haven't dried out from three days ago.
   The reason they're wet is that I climbed Hwaaksan on Sunday, with Sean. If you look at it properly, this was probably our most "adventurous" mountain climb yet, and it probably won't be surpassed either, since there's not much time left. Hwaaksan has been looming over us since we got here and first looked at a map of all the mountains in the county, waiting for us to finally get around to conquering it, weighing on our minds. It's the highest one around here, at 4800 feet. And maybe more importantly, it's not popular. At the beginning of the year we climbed Seoraksan, which was taller, but aswarm with gaggles upon gaggles of sightseeing Koreans. On Sunday, as far as I could tell, we had the whole mountain utterly to ourselves. I guess that's what happens when you climb a mountain in a rainstorm.
   The night before, everyone (except Amanda, who tries to never spend a weekend here because she goes stir-crazy when there are no parties) got together and played euchre, and we all decided that we'd hike together in the morning, even Ben, who smokes at least a pack of Camels a day and eats pizza for maybe half his dinners. But when we got up it was looking like the ultimate soggy day. I had invited everyone up to my room for biscuits and gravy. I was making these so as to teach the British people what the word "biscuits" really means. In Britain they use it to mean cookies. But the word "cookies" already exists there too, so they've had to invent some kind of weird contrived distinction where a biscuit is hard and a cookie is soft, most of the time, except when I ask about some certain kind of cookie because I think I've got the hang of it, at which point the definition always switches. Sean was the only one to come up for them. He agreed that real biscuits with gravy are tasty, but perversely insisted that they're more like a scone. Come on now, scones are sweet. While we were eating, we got word from everyone that we were the only two still planning to climb.
   But Ben was awake anyhow, so he offered to drive us to the trailhead, which was damned nice of him, I thought. It was in an especially deep pocket of the middle of nowhere. Out here, close to the DMZ, the definition of the middle of nowhere isn't quite the same as other places in the world. Sometimes it means forest and undeveloped mountains, but just as often it means mountains covered in army bases. Such was the case; we drove past two or three bases on the way to the trail. Ben let us out at a muddy turnaround next to a sign that said 개조심 (BEWARE OF DOG) and we started walking uphill along a nice cobblestoned trail.
   Within three minutes we ran out of cobblestones and ended up at someone's house with no trail in sight and some unchained dogs getting steadily more pissed off at us as we wandered around looking for a way up. There was no obvious trail along the mountain brook rushing past us, or across the patch of tall, wet grass, or even on the other side of the brook where things looked very promising at first but turned out to be nothing once we waded across. Then Sean's predator-instinct seeking of high ground that offers a view paid off, because on the little rise we summited, a trail magically appeared. Signposts would have been nice, but we just figured that as long as we went generally up, that would be the right direction.
   The trail was steep. It didn't mess around. Some trails might switch back and forth to make things easy on you, but this one was like: "The peak? This way. Hurry the hell up. You're tired? You asked me to take you to the peak. Quit bitching." Which is admirable, but the thing is that it was still raining, and the whole world was made of mud. Whatever. We soldiered on.
   After maybe an hour and a half, Sean piped up: "We must be getting close to the top." I shrugged as noncommittally as I could and said, "Mountains have a way of deceiving." When we got to the top of what we could currently see, sure enough, there was another peak further on. We couldn't see any further than that because we were inside of a cloud. This became a pattern. The first couple times, I allowed myself to hope that the peak wasn't all too far away, but every time we hoisted ourselves triumphantly up some rocks, it turned out we were just at a flat spot and there was some more climbing in front of us. So I gave up on wondering about the peak and just resigned myself to the fact that I'd probably be climbing Hwaaksan for the rest of my life. On my deathbed as an old man I would be able to open my backpack and pull out the corn dog I'd gotten myself at the market earlier as a lunch to bring, and it would taste like the culmination of my life. Meanwhile, Sean kept hoping for the summit at every crest. "Ah, this must be the peak," he said, at one that looked particularly promising. "Nah," I said. "Just don't worry about the peak. This mountain feeds on dashed hopes."
   We emerged into an ethereal realm of low alpine plants and wizened old rocks, and peaked the mountain several times only to find further peaks awaiting us. Then I rounded a corner in a corridor of bushes and saw the army base. Our research had advised us that the peak was occupied by an army base, so we were actually heading for the second-highest peak, but that must have been on the other side of the base, because we didn't see the rock that marked it. Instead we just stood there, a ways back, and looked at the fence of the base, and failed to fathom what it was that soldiers actually did there. And then I had my corn dog, and Sean had his sandwich and then, nearly hypothermic, quickly insisted we get up and head back down now or he might never be able to move again. So we did.
   We'd tried to keep an accurate account of where we'd turned, but there were no signposts, and Korean mountain paths often branch out with nonsensical profusion. So we ended up coming down the mountain on basically the exact opposite side from where we'd gone up. We found ourselves on a deserted road with signs indicating two different military bases. We walked downhill on this road forever. There really didn't seem to be any limit to how far it could go down. But eventually it emptied onto an almost equally deserted main road. This was a recently paved, wide, two-lane road, with crisp yellow stripes and modern guardrails and such, but it was ten minutes before we saw a car, and another ten minutes before we found someone going the right direction who was willing to pick up two sodden hitchhikers. But I was able to have a little chat with the driver and find out that he was visiting Sachangni for the first time so he could see his son, who had just started his mandatory two years of army duty a month ago and been posted at a base here. No idea which base. When the guy dropped us off he even insisted that I didn't need to wipe off his seat, it was fine. Two for two with incredibly nice drivers when hitchhiking here. With spotlessly clean cars, come to think of it.
   One other thing I've had that's taken my mind off of Crowduck is daydreaming about all the traveling I'm about to finally start. My anticipation is sort of running away with itself. Last winter while I was planning my trip to southeast Asia, a lot of the time I was thinking, "Man, Mongolia's going to be awesome when I go there in August." Now, I'm planning Mongolia, but on the back burners of my mind I'm thinking, "Can't wait to meet Grandma and Grandpa in Lisbon," and also "Mexico is going to be so amazing and I'm going to eat so many tacos." I like to think I try to live in the moment, but right now apparently I need to come back one giant step to even be living in the future.
   You may have heard my travel plans changed. It turns out that, as the internet tried to warn me, it actually is impossible for me to get a visa to China while I'm living here. Maybe I could have if I'd been more careful to make my signatures match, or if I'd warned Dad to keep quiet about me being in South Korea. But it's too late now, so I'm spending a couple hundred more dollars and flying straight to Ulaanbaatar on August 26th. That money would've been useful, but the issue kind of got forced, and on the plus side, I get a few extra days to stop on my way from Moscow to Munich so I can see Krakow and Prague. And I'll probably also spend a day or two at Lake Baikal, which is thirty million years old and contains a fifth of the world's liquid freshwater, which is to say: it's pretty special. So I guess on the whole it works out okay. Now if only I can find some fried pike with tartar sauce there.

Do You Know Korea Is the Best?

(Note: I didn't plan it, but this ended up kind of preposterously long. But I think it's probably the last of my big learn-all-about-Korea posts, so just bear with me and next time I'll write more adventure stories or something.)

Let's talk about Korea's nationalism. Oh come on. This will be fun.

When I first came here there were some differences that were easy to notice right away: say, the way you don't wear shoes inside a school, or the way that blowing your nose in public is taboo and thought disgusting while, oppositely, it's completely normal to loudly hock up loogies and plant them on the pavement as you walk. But there are other things that I caught on to a bit slower. Korean nationalism is one of these. It doesn't always smack you in the face with obviousness—though sometimes it does—but when you realize it's there, you see it everywhere.
   There's probably no better single story to use to talk about Korea's nationalism than the Dokdo issue. Dokdo is a disputed island between Korea and Japan, with a certain amount of Korean population, which I would like you to try to guess. Japan prefers to call the island Takeshima. I know the name Takeshima from some brief summary of the issue that I read online at some point. But I know the name Dokdo because of the cushions at the samgyeopsal restaurant across the river in town. At most restaurants in town you sit on the floor with a little square cushion for padding, and the ones at the samgyeopsal restaurant had a picture of Dokdo on them, with words around the border saying (for some reason in English), "Dokdo is Korean Land." I also know a few other names for Dokdo, because I happen to have a copy of the second grade language arts textbook from my school, which I used a little bit to practice my Korean. One of the pieces in it is all about the names of Dokdo through history, going back to "오래 옛날" (orae yennal, way back when): during the Shilla dynasty (57 BC – AD 935) it was called Usan-do because a nearby Korean territory called Usan-guk claimed it; later it was called Sambong-do (Three-Rise Island) because of its shape; and later it came to be called Doldo (Rock Island), which turned into Dokdo because of the local accent. (The name Takeshima was not mentioned.) The cover of this textbook has a picture of Dokdo in the background, with a gigantic Korean flag rising from the middle, highest rise. A couple weeks ago, I noticed that one of my students was wearing a shirt that said, "I love Dokdo." I also recall that when I went to one of the old royal palaces in Seoul, out in the city in an unrelated place was a random billboard saying, "Dokdo is Korean Land." My students have all done at least one project on the importance of Dokdo.
   Have you guessed the population yet? Here it is. Two people live on Dokdo. They're a married couple who fish for octopuses. You can probably circumnavigate the islands on a boat in about twenty minutes.
   That population isn't exactly correct. Besides the octopus fishers, there's also a rotating retinue of forty-some military personnel to defend Korea's claim to the territory. Presumably these military people are also in charge of operating the official Korean post office that has been built, at great expense, on the island; they also probably run the lighthouse that was put up there. And someone has to make sure the daily tour boats run smoothly. And someone also helped during the construction of the state-of-the-art desalinization plant that was installed there and is capable of purifying 28 tons of salt water daily.
   It all starts to make a little more sense—not enough by a long shot, but a little more—when you realize that Dokdo is a symbol. Just before World War II, Korea had been taken over by Japan, and Japan did some things that were in fact awful. They destroyed Korean culture as thoroughly as they could—they changed the monuments, they changed the people's names, they outlawed the Korean language and made everyone learn Japanese. (To this day, if you're not Korean, you can hear Japanese when you talk to old Koreans. They don't know a word of English, but they also know that they have to switch languages somehow, because you probably don't know any Korean. So they switch to the only other language they know, Japanese. The now-retired principal from my school described some kind of food to me as "oishii" (Japanese for "delicious"), and an ancient man I met in the park tried to clarify the meaning of "na" (Korean for "I, me") by translating it to "watashi" (same thing in Japanese).) There were even prisons where they tortured the prisoners, apparently, and the Koreans miss no opportunity to point this out, as Sean found out (link goes to his blog) when he went with his school on a field trip to one of these prisons and found an exhibit detailing the methods of torture that were used.
   So Korea has what I suppose are some legitimate reasons to dislike Japan. On the other hand,* England and France and, well, most of Europe have some legitimate reasons to hate Germany, but for the most part, as I understand it, they don't. Not anymore: they've gotten over it. And the people who committed those atrocities in Germany are mostly dead. Hitler's ashes have been completely disintegrated and are nowhere to be found. There are Nazis still around, but it's no longer an acceptable thing to be in Germany (or anywhere really), and Germans these days are far more concerned with making lots of money and keeping the Euro afloat than they are with killing Jews. But Korea, by and large, still hates Japan as though the occupation had ended a few years ago. The old people hate Japan because they will not let go of the grudge. The young people hate Japan because they've been convinced by the old people that that's the proper way to think. There are storybooks about Dokdo in the classrooms where I teach kindergarten.
   Actually, though, like many things in Korea, this is changing. The young haven't completely bought all the propaganda. Kids here watch Doraemon and Shin Chan, and they trade Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. They eat Oishii chips (which are like Funyuns but mostly air), and some of them even like Hello Kitty, which is about as Japanese a thing as you can possibly find. So while there is the occasional wide-scale anti-Japan school project where they draw pictures of Korea vividly defeating Japan in various ways, Wikipedia also assures us that "A survey found that 60% middle school students and 51% of high school students in South Korea view the descriptions about Japan and China in the current Korean history textbooks as biased."
   The nationalism here isn't just hate against Japan, though. That's just the most unsettling facet of it. The more general theme that you see here is a constant glorification of the many virtues of Korea. There is boundless praise for anything that's uniquely Korean. (By the way, in most of this post I'm not leaving out the "South" in "South Korea" for the usual reason—that it's easy—but because South Korea still considers itself one country with North Korea. Whenever you see a map or an outline of Korea around here, it's the two Koreas put together, usually without even a hint of a line at the border. On one of the country's two main internet map providers, Naver, you can zoom in to Sachangni and then keep on dragging the map north, and the only intimation that you've dragged past the DMZ is that all the roads suddenly stop.) The same second-grade textbook I mentioned earlier, for example, has a story about the big earthenware jars, calledhang'ari, that they use here to ferment kimchi and other vegetables. These things are about as exciting as they sound. But nonetheless the second-graders get to read an absolutely enthralling tale about a kid who goes with his mother to the hang'ari store. He asks her some questions about hang'ari and she responds by telling him why hang'ari are so great: basically, because they let a little bit of wind in and somehow that helps flavor the food. If they have stories like that just about the jars to ferment kimchi, it should come as no surprise that kimchi itself has been subjected to countless nutritional analyses by Korean scientists that all come to the same conclusion, namely, that kimchi is pretty much the best food in the world, and prevents the flu, and makes your skin lustrous, and more stuff that I haven't had the patience to pay attention to. Sure, the stuff is probably good for you, since it's a vegetable and it's probiotic and there's usually fish (anchovy sauce) in it. But it's not the cure for cancer. Besides kimchi, pretty much every Korean food is played up as being healthy and "몸에 좋은" (mome jo'eun, good for the body), including of course mountain ginseng (the best mountain ginseng comes from Korea, remember, and the Chinese and Japanese stuff is crap), but also anything you get at any restaurant except perhaps the Western-style ones; it even goes as far as the guy I met a few weeks ago while he was fishing in the Han River that goes right through the middle of the megalopolis of Seoul, who told me with a totally straight face that the water in the Han is not only safe but also makes for fish that are healthy and good for the body. He was planning to eat some himself and sell the rest.
   The Korean alphabet, han'geul, is touted here as the most scientific alphabet in the world. (As a linguist I can tell you that although han'geul is well thought out, the International Phonetic Alphabet blows it out of the water, and if we're talking about actual languages' orthographies, Finnish and many others probably beat Korean.) Korean electronics (Samsung, LG) are universally considered to be the best in the world, as are Korean cars (Hyundai, Kia). So are Korean celebrities, and any Korean celebrity who becomes famous internationally becomes a household name and practically an object of obsession in the country. It's possible that you've hard of Park Ji-Sung. He's a soccer player for Manchester United, and of course he's Korean. As a result, Manchester United is the only non-Korean soccer team that's ever supported in Korea; quite a few of my students have Manchester United jerseys, and the teacher who used to come over to do language exchange with me said that one day he'd like to visit England to see a Manchester United game.
   More alarming is the promotion of K-pop and K-dramas. Koreans are under the impression that these are famous worldwide. They can be forgiven for that, since it actually is famous in other countries, most of them Asian countries. But since you're not from any of those countries, a short introduction. K-pop is Korean pop music and the most popular stuff is created entirely by media corporations. Imagine an entire band composed of Korean Hannah Montanas or Jonas Brothers, except with seven or more people (one of the groups, Big Bang, is now up to around thirteen), and the only thing most of them actually do is synchronized dancing. K-dramas are Korean soap operas, usually set in the times of the old dynasties when all the men had long Fu Manchu beards and everyone wore elaborate costumes. I've only caught brief glimpses of these in shops where the TV is on, because I put my own TV in storage, but what I can say is that the acting is every bit as bad as in American soaps; you can tell even without understanding it. Because these things have caught on in other countries—many of which, like Cambodia and Laos, probably consume them because they're too small and poor to create their own pop culture—Koreans are happy to talk about the Korean Wave, and may be shocked or at least a bit put off to find that you have no idea who the main heartthrob in Big Bang is.
   Anyhow, it's about time I got to some kind of point, so I'm going to make it this: Why is Korea like this? Why is everything Korean so constantly praised? The answer, I believe, is that Korea is still an immature country. It's only been since World War II that it became a first-world country (and with absurd speed), so it's one of the youngest economies in that club, and it's still figuring out who it is now that it's a totally new country. It seems to me that immature people and immature countries make an unusually good analogy. Like a middle-school kid, Korea is insecure and constantly worried about what the other countries think about it. So it puffs up its own image, oils its hair, puts on some gold jewelry or something. It ends up looking totally unconvincing to anyone looking at it from outside, but it's convinced itself that it's the coolest kid in school.
   It's anyone's guess how long Korea will take to finally get comfortable enough with its position in the world to just be itself. When it does, people might finally start taking Korea seriously and giving it the international recognition it so desperately craves right now, though by then it'll realize that's not really what it needed after all. But for all that, it's been interesting to see this country during its awkward, zit-popping phase. And everything happens so fast around here. (Just in the last few weeks, a new building has been appearing near the main grocery store. One day there was a concrete foundation, and a couple days later I went down and saw—surprise!—a three-story frame of thick girders.) So I have no doubt I'll be able to watch it grow up. It's going to be interesting.

*I got a lot of the ideas in that paragraph and in a few others from a conversation I had with some other English teachers from Hwacheon, the next town over, when we all went out on Friday night and talked a whole lot about nationalism... and other things, since we're not completely boring people, just some of the time.