Still alive: Ulaanbaatar

I made it safely to Mongolia yesterday, minus my raincoat, which Air China seems to have stolen. I'm not going to write about it now at full length since this is just a check-in sort of thing. (I think whenever I do a quick post like this I'll call it "Still alive: [wherever I am]".) But from what I saw from the plane, I'm going to really like Mongolia. That's in the future tense because I'm still in the city, which isn't a terribly exciting city, but it certainly has its charms as well, like the absolutely amazing band I saw yesterday (with a couple Grinnellians and a Cincinnatian). But that's a story for later. Today I've got exploring to do.

The end

As I advertised on my Facebook, I'm about fed up with Facebook, so I'm switching over to this blog. This will now be the place where I post the occasional weird thought or nugget-sized update on what's been happening to me recently. But I'm still going to mainly be doing full-size, non-half-baked blogs that I take some time over instead of just dashing out. Unfortunately, right now I'm not sure I have the proper time or energy to make this blog optimal. I've actually just pulled my first all-nighter since college. It'll hit me sometime tomorrow. For now I'm still doing okay, but feeling a bit drunk and slug-fingered.
   I had an amazing last day. It seemed like Sachangni was trying to cram all the cool stuff it could fit into one single day, or at least it did when I wasn't in school. (If you've been reading my Facebook, you might notice I'm repeating myself. That's so I can take down the version of this that's on Facebook.) I taught my four classes today almost exactly as I would on any other day, except that five minutes were set aside at the end for the students and me to say goodbye to each other. There was a bit of an exception where my co-teacher somehow organized for all the teachers to meet in the conference room between second and third bell in a clearly hastily-arranged farewell ceremony. The principal stood up and said a few words (which I mostly didn't understand), and Amanda and I both said what a good year we'd had, and that was it. Took maybe seven minutes, and most of that was spent waiting for everyone to arrive.
   They really don't have the process for sending people off organized well at all, and as a result they were still making frantic phone calls to companies that wanted me to pay one last bill, and so I had to pay my electric and gas bill in cash, and I had to go down to pay my last internet bill at the ATM, which is a thing you can do here. But as I was going down, four little boys, all from Amanda's classes, maybe third graders, fell in line with me and started chatting. They're actually fairly good at getting across messages with what little vocabulary they've been taught so far. But what was far more impressive was when one boy burst into song with an English rendition of "You Are the Music in Me" from High School Musical (I didn't know what it was from since I've never watched it, but the boy named the title for me). He had it memorized the best of all of them, and I don't know how long it took him, but the other ones had pretty decent-sized snippets of it memorized too. I was pretty impressed, and I made sure they knew. (신기하다! Shingihada!—"Amazing!")
   And on the way back uphill from the ATM, I got proselytized, just to remind me that the place I'm leaving is the Bible belt of Korea. A woman who looked like she'd just witnessed a fatal multiple-car pile-up insistently handed me an English-language religious tract ("Whose Side Are You On?") and asked me in Korean if I believed in Jesus. It was a surreal experience. It seemed like she expected me to burst into hellfire right there and then if I gave the wrong answer.
   I spent the afternoon with all the folks who were left, which was everyone except Amanda and Ben: Amanda left early in the afternoon, and Ben's been gone for a couple weeks in the Philippines, getting married to a Filipina lady and having a honeymoon. We just chatted, mainly, about nothing, and about getting ready to leave, and about how we'll try to keep in touch, and about what we're going to do next and how fun it's going to be. I will actually see Sean and Natalie (Natalie's back, by the way) again, when I go to England. And Deanna too, since she's taking my filled-up journals home with her so I don't have to trust the postal system. Everyone else, I don't know. We'll just have to see.
   While Russell and Deanna were busy cleaning Russell's apartment, Sean and Natalie dropped by for a final goodbye, and then left. They're off to southeast Asia, to see all the cool stuff I saw in January. They'll have fun. Then I went up and made an omelet, but of course I had to go into town for dessert—my last waffle from the waffle guy. Waffles aren't a breakfast food here, and when you think about it, it's kind of absurd that anyone treats them as such. They're basically made of sugar, aren't they, with a bit of batter to bind them into a more porous form? As a dessert, though, they're amazing, especially since the standard way of serving them is with jam and whipped cream. I talked with the waffle man about shipping. He was a ship engineer a while back, and went all over the world working for shipbuilders. Now he sells waffles in the backwoods of Gangwon-do. Go figure.
   I needed a bit more dinner too, though, so I got an "onion toast" from Paris Baguette, and in so doing stopped into a Paris Baguette for the last time. I ate it in front of GS25, the convenience store. Convenience stores here have plastic tables and chairs out front so people can drink their soju at those comfortably instead of somewhere else stumbling around and being nuisances. I assume that's why. It's sort of a much cheesier version of Italian sidewalk cafes. As I was eating, a lady came up to me and seemed just amazed that I was having a sandwich dinner there, alone in front of GS25. We got to talking. She was tremendously friendly, and I eventually remembered that I'd met her at the soldiers' temple on Buddha's Birthday back in May. We got really into talking, in fact. She told me her time learning English had been miserable (and ineffective, too—we were talking mostly in Korean, but sometimes she would switch to English to try to make something clearer for me, and it often ended up very garbled, and she knew it wasn't right, but she was valiantly trying, as was I really), but she knew it didn't have to be miserable, that it was so only because the Korean education philosophy is all textbooks and memorizing and writing practice, and no life. So then we got to talking about the difference between that and the USA, and I had to come up with all sorts of opinions that I hadn't thought of before, and make comparisons I hadn't made, and she got me thinking.
   Meanwhile, we were joined by a shifting cast of extras, including the woman's sons (third and fifth grade; they go to Ben's school), some older friends of theirs, a very old man who spoke with a slur that I couldn't pick two words out of, a little boy passing by on a bike who scratched his handlebar against a classy car next to us, and a policeman with a clipboard who came by later on to ask questions about the boy. She told me she tries to raise her two sons with a more free-thinking philosophy, because she can't stand the Korean system, and the way it kills creativity and communication. Most parents send their kids to 학원 hagwons, which are basically rooms where they do extra studying outside of school. I finally started understanding them a little more when she explained that the hagwons are there to fill a gap in the kids' educations that's left there by teachers who don't communicate with their students, just command them and lecture at them. At a hagwon the kids get something closer to one-on-one teaching, but they're pricey places, and why pay for that if you can give the same thing to your kid yourself? That's her philosophy, and she's been putting it into practice, but it's hard, because she's going against a very ground-in social norm. She has a lot of anxiety about it and just wants to raise her kids right.
   It was fascinating, sociologically or anthropologically. I was finally getting an insider's insight on Korea... on my very last day. Why didn't I start hanging out in front of GS25 sooner?! I'll keep that in mind when I'm traveling: go where the people are, and interesting conversations will happen. If we'd met and started talking sooner, Eun-mi (that's her name; her English name is Amy) could have been terrific friends, I think. And she could've told me about the Chinese chess (xiangqi) lessons that they offer at the Culture Center in town. If I ever come back to Korea, I know the sorts of things to check out. But as it is, I'm off tomorrow, and I just have to rue that I never did that. Oh well. What's past is past.
   With that done, it was time for me to spend the night researching things that pertain to my trip, estimating the costs so I can take that much money out, and other stuff. Soon it'll be time to Skype with folks back home for the last time. I suppose I'd better brush my teeth and have something highly caffeinated.

What I'll miss

Now that I can look back on the entire year as a sort of unified experience, one that'll soon have a line drawn under it and be a bygone section of my life, I guess I ought to write something about how I feel about that.

   When I came here, I was about as apprehensive as possible. I was on my way to a country thousands of miles away from everything I was familiar with, a country very close to the diametrical opposite side of the clock and the world from the US. And this after having only been out of the country once besides to Canada, with that trip (Costa Rica) lasting just two weeks. And besides that, I knew I was coming to a country with a reputation for groupthinking, rule-following, and strict hierarchies, everything antithetical to my own life philosophies. And I would be teaching, though I had no experience teaching, and no idea if I'd like it.

   It turns out that my apprehensions were fairly spot-on, actually. All those things that I was nervous about are the things that I had trouble dealing with during the year. I've discovered that, aside from a stay in prison or being stranded on an uncharted island, there are probably few things better than a fourteen-hour time difference to get you feeling isolated from all the people you know. Whenever it's possible to chat (be it on Facebook or Skype or whatever), one of us or the other, or even both, are at the margin of the day, either just rubbing away sleepy-eye mucus or waiting for the chat to finish in order to go to bed. And it did get lonely. Toward the middle of the long winter, in the lonely days with nothing to do at night besides wait for the next day to start so it could slip by too, was the low point for that. But then it warmed up, everyone here started hanging out together again, and life generally improved. It's not irrevocable, that isolation. And I did have the odd really awesome chat, like the time when I spent Thanksgiving dinner remotely at Grandma & Grandpa's house. She probably won't, but I still like to think Cammy will one day dimly remember that time that her family tried to get her to talk to some face on a screen. 

   The culture was harder to get over; I still haven't quite, and I don't know if any amount of time living here could fix that. Certainly I might get a start on it if I lived someplace where there are people my age who are more communicative. It seems like I never really had a deep conversation with someone who lives here. I have had some interesting conversations, I suppose, but they were hard to find. Even when I had a language exchange with Martin, the second grade teacher from my school, it was awkward and was definitely more along the lines of a lesson than two friends hanging out together. Partly I'm also making excuses because I never went to much trouble to make any friends here. I could have gone back to the soldiers' temple and talked more with the resident soldiers there, and I probably would have learned a lot. But it did seem like there was a barrier between me and everyone I talked to, even beyond the language barrier. We were informed at orientation that most Koreans only make friends with people in their own very narrow age range, and that's how it seemed to me. I talked to the vendors at the market, and they treated me nicely, but it never seemed like they had much interest in me as a person. I was someone to whom they could relate their anecdotes about when they, or their sons or daughters or cousins, went to America (and, invariably, visited LA and only LA, and thought it was nice.) But I was the American, or the English teacher, and inside of those boxes was where I stayed for them. And conversely they never related anything about themselves that reached outside the constraints of their role in relation to me, except to mention that trip to America. It was the same with anyone else I met: shopkeepers, my co-teachers, Martin, ladies at festivals, people on the street. The one time I didn't feel so much like this, it was with soldiers at the soldiers' temple, who, probably not coincidentally, were just about the same age as me. I really should go back there. I still have some Tupperware I should return from when one of them gave me kimchi. 

   And the teaching—well, I discovered that teaching really isn't for me, at least not elementary school teaching, and especially not in Korea. I'd envisioned teaching by way of conversations where I used real with the students while getting to know them and laughing and sharing life stories; I would also break down grammar for them and teach them fascinating differences and similarities between the way our languages work. What I got was a textbook and a CD, and classes never smaller than 24 students, half of whom had no interest whatsoever in English, some of whom couldn't even write the alphabet right. (You can always tell because they copy every letter directly from some printed material they're looking off of, and as a result it has fancy-style two-story a's and double-bowl g's, and goes up and down and sometimes has no space between the letters and sometimes has an entire word's worth.) I could complain about the textbook all day, but that's been more than adequately complained about in other places, like on the forums for English teachers in Korea. So suffice it to say that the book doesn't teach how to speak English, it teaches how to memorize English phrases and repeat them on a test at a later date. To my endless frustration, I couldn't think of any way to do better than the textbook if I was going to teach all 24 students at once; it's optimized for that use, for teachers who will never really get to know their kids closely, and who have no plans on engaging them in real conversations about real topics. Maybe the takeaway from that is that trying to teach such large classes is next to pointless.

   But despite all the negative, there were positives that I never dreamed of before I came here, many of which actually belong in the same domains where I just mentioned all those negatives. These are the things I'll miss after I leave. The food is the easy one to talk about first. It's certainly not the only one, or maybe the biggest one, but it's true. I entered this country knowing how to cook maybe six foods. Or, if I had no recipe in front of me to follow precisely, two. (Spaghetti and grilled cheese.) Then I came here and there were so many new foods, and I knew I had to learn them all so I could make them back in the States. My old experience, such as it was, was mostly useless, especially if I wanted to eat fresh from the town market, where processed things like sandwich bread and canned spaghetti sauce are nowhere to be found. So I learned how to do food like Korea does, and in the process I learned that this is a place where "fresh" is a concept that isn't just paid lip service. Everything here is made from scratch, from real foods that are fresh, partly because that's the way things are done and anything else would strike people as nasty, and partly because it's hard to do it any other way, prices on imports being what they are, and processed food being so dismal and sparse. (The prices for out-of-season fruit here never fail to astound me. The price of presumably imported apples at the store in town has held steady for the last month or so at 2500 won or about $2.20, for a single apple. I'm pretty sure I've seen it as high as 3500 won, though.) As I've learned I've gotten the courage to do things I never would have thought to do before, like buy completely unknown vegetables on the spur of the moment and do research on them when I get them back home. The only unfortunate part is that when I get home it's going to be really hard to find all the stuff I'm used to working with here. Does Jungle Jim's have kkaennip? If they don't what will my dakgalbi be without it? But I guess that'll just make me learn more, by figuring out what there is to do with whatever's at the local farmers' market wherever I am.

   But other stuff, too. Like the culture. I know I just decried it as exclusive and unfriendly, but even from without, I've been able to see some fascinating things. Just earlier today I saw the guy who lives downstairs go out to his garden and start working on it with a hand sickle. Would you ever see that in America, outside of an organic farm on an intentional community? No, and nor would you see produce drying on bamboo mats on the roof or by the side of the street. All through the summer stuff is drying all over town, sometimes so that you have to step around it on sidewalks so as not to squish it: peppers, chwinamul, deodeok roots, greens I haven't learned anything about. This part of Korea's culture is unfortunately ceding to a youth that wants a machine for everything, but for the time being I can still see the workers who are putting up a building in town doing everything by hand, the hard way, and I can watch old grandpas in the city pull gigantic handcarts full of cardboard to be sold to a recycler, and I can stand on the bridge and see people who walk through the river with fishnets rather than go down to the store and pick up a box of frozen fish. I can even meet ginseng men who make their entire living out of doing things the hard way. This sort of philosophy is starting to catch on in America, where a small movement of forward-thinkers are starting to question the value of a convenience-based society where everything is automated and people are all estranged from the real-world effects of their work. It's a way of thinking that people seem to believe is good in theory, or if you're the sort of person who enjoys that sort of thing and has the leisure time to devote to it, but could never catch on because the easy way is just so darn efficient. Meanwhile, over here it's just old-time common sense to do things that way. The wife of the guy with the hand scythe, who has a whole bamboo mat covered with hundreds of red peppers that she sets out to dry when it's sunny, isn't making a political statement. She's just making kimchi. That's how you make kimchi. Obviously. 

   And it's a place where everyone is family. I'm not just talking about how the same three last names (Park, Lee, Kim) account for 45% of the Korean population. There's also a trust here, a faith that everyone is looking out for each other. It's to do with the groupthink, I suppose, but while I'm generally against everyone thinking alike, especially if it's because everyone has accepted some sort of conventional wisdom unquestioningly, this is a facet that I enjoy. You can leave a bike unlocked around here and go away for hours, and it'll still be there. I sometimes walk into stores and find no shopkeeper there, and anyone could easily rob the place, but no one does. No one takes the food that's drying in the streets, either, or shortchanges you even if you're clueless, or vandalizes stuff (except in a little section of Hongdae where graffiti seems to be encouraged). Generally you can trust almost anyone, probably even a bum on the street, to be upstanding and have a strong personal moral code. I don't know how they manage it.

   And I suppose being all on my own has forced me to figure out how to go about being my own person. Of course, I've already spent four years at college alone, after a fashion—at least not with my parents. But out here, I'm living an independent life, the only support structure being my free rent, plus a person I can call to sort out contractual questions and such. I've had to decide what it is that I do with my free time when I have free time. And the answer to that hasn't always been something I look back on proudly, but I've been getting better at it, and I'm pretty sure that I'll get better still once I leave my computer behind and especially once I get home to the States where I can communicate with people and make new friends and not be in a perpetual state of mild confusion.

   There have even been parts of the teaching that I've enjoyed, despite the somewhat belittling work environment. There are a few students that I've really connected with. Jin-seon is really good at English and he and I have talked a lot: about his dad (Army commander of some rank), his ambitions (scientist with a cool car), his family (twin brothers, among others), and other stuff. I've also gotten to know several of the other kids from my after-school class fairly well, even the rambunctious ones. They're sweet kids, really, and I'm sure I'm going to miss them. (Although it might take a while for that to happen, because first I'll have to get over how glad I am not to have to stand in front of a classroom full of kids every day, and I don't think that'll happen all too fast.)

   I guess what it comes down to is that there's good and bad in the year, just like there is in everything. Some things I'm pretty sure I won't miss. The cobbled-together concrete architecture. The occasional unexplained bomb tests at nearby military bases. The feeling of never quite knowing what's going on. Having to climb a big hill and then two flights of stairs to get home. Soju. Plastic surgery ads everywhere. The way you can hardly explore anywhere outdoors without accidentally stumbling onto a military base. K-Pop. Eight-hour days in an office working on pointless, ineffectual textbook lessons.

   But I like to think they're more than outweighed by the miscellaneous little things I will miss. The mountains. The misty mornings (even if I wasn't awake for very many of them). The way you can find a 400-year-old pagoda without even trying. The way the old lady at my favorite vegetable stall slips a few hot peppers or leaves of lettuce into my bag for free. The little trumpet fanfare that plays when a subway train is approaching. The unbridled enthusiasm they put into their terrible karaoke. $2000-a-month paychecks with practically no bills to spend them on. Sitting out on the roof, or going out to a restaurant, or playing cards, with all my expat friends. Makkeolli: $1 for a one-liter bottle of 7%-alcohol sweet ricy goodness. Opening and closing ceremonies for everything. Getting a necklace of clover flowers or a dried squid tentacle from a student. 

   If I had to do it again, sure, I'd do some things differently. Motivate myself more, write more, figure out how to make the lessons more useful for the kids, make more local friends. But on the whole, I have to say I think I'd live the same story. I'm glad I came.

Here goes nothing

Someone once said that every writer has a thousand lousy stories in them, and you have to just write them and get them out of the way to get to the good ones. I figured I'd better get started.

You probably noticed I haven't posted for a while, and I really should be writing some stuff, just sort of general thoughts on the end of the year and my thoughts about the whole Korea experience. Well, that'll come next, but first I wanted to finish this story and put it up here so anyone can see it. So here it is.

Before you start, I'll mention a few things about it. It's not the frog story that I kept mentioning a while ago; it's a different one. It's 25 pages long (these are roughly equivalent to fairly large-print paperback pages) and, since you may not be expecting this from me, there's also copious profanity, mainly because most of the characters in it are just that kind of people. Also, if you know what's been going on in Micah's life, it'll probably become obvious that I drew pretty heavily on his story. But it's only inspired by a few real events here and there; it isn't actually a faithful retelling of anything.

So that's it. Maybe it's good, maybe it's not. In any case, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, so it's a story.

(Oh, by the way—it's set in that font I've been working on.)

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.

Transitional period

There's still quite a while before my contract here finishes, but psychologically I'm already starting to wind down. (Actually, I started winding down pretty much the day I came back from my trip to Southeast Asia and realized I was far more interested in doing that sort of thing than in hanging out in the English room for eight hours a day, but up until lately that was just sort of a low-level background feeling.) Recently I've been preparing in various ways for the next phase of my life, the one that involves me traveling constantly for an unfixed but long amount of time.
   To start with, I figured out my schedule in probably as much detail as I'll ever have it planned, so why don't I just post it here so you can see what I'll be doing?

• 8/25 Sat— My contract finishes. I go to Incheon in the morning in time to catch the 19:00 ferry for Weihai, China. 
• 8/26 Sun— I arrive in Weihai in the morning and take a train to Beijing, find my hostel, and wander around.
• 8/27–29—Time for exploring Beijing. I wish I could allot more time, but my four months of travel in Eurasia, which originally seemed to me like a practically endless stretch of time, became alarmingly fast and cramped when it actually came time to cram them into a calendar, and I have to hurry somewhere.
• 8/30–31— In transit to Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia. 
• 9/01–18—Time to explore all over Mongolia and try to learn how to be the best nomad I can be.
• 9/19 Wed— Board the Trans-Siberian in Ulaanbaatar. 
• 9/24 Mon— Arrive in Moscow in the afternoon. Look around.
• 9/25 Tue— Another day in Moscow.
• 9/26–29— Stick that thumb out and start hitching, allowing four days to get through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany, to arrive in München in the evening on the 29th.
• 9/30 Sun— Watch the brass band concert at Oktoberfest. Drink beer and eat sausages and pretzels.
• 10/01–03— Continue drinking beer and eating sausages and pretzels, but with a focus on seeing München and the places around it. 
• 10/04–16— See as much of the rest of Germany as I can in thirteen days, and possibly spend a day or two in Prague.
• 10/17–19— Hitch (and/or take a train, since research suggests Spain is lousy for hitching) to Lisbon, and meet Grandma and Grandpa there. 
• 10/20–21— See Lisbon with Grandma and Grandpa.
• 10/22 Mon— Set out to see the rest of Iberia, mainly Spain, probably starting with the Way of St James. 
• 2 weeks later?— Move on to Italy.
• 2 weeks later?— Move on to France.
• 2 weeks later?— Move on to England. Meet Sean's friend who does parkour, and spend some time in Southampton doing that. Also see Stonehenge and such, and eat British Christmas food, which apparently is delicious.
• Late December— Fly out of London and go home. Christmastime. Tell everyone story after story until they wish they hadn't asked me about the trip. 

   Anything further than that is far too cloudy to assign numbers to it. But after I've caught up with the family and with the few friends I still keep in touch with in town—mainly Aaron and Keith—I'll probably head down Florida way to start my grand tour of America. I get more questions about this. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but maybe not very comprehensively. Basically, the plan is that after Christmas, I'll just start traveling full-time so I can see all the parts of America that I haven't visited yet or don't remember very well from those road trips my dad took me on when I was twelve. It's a big continent, so this could take a year or more.
   The instinct upon hearing about a period of travel that long is to wonder, What about me getting a job and becoming a responsible part of society? There are a couple different ways to respond to that. One is the predictable rebel response that I don't believe in becoming a productive part of our society, since that would mean that I'm complicit in American culture's continuing destruction of the planet and of healthy communities and minds, and since I think that selling off half of your waking day for most of the year, year in year out until old age, is basically tantamount to taking your one absolutely irreplaceable allotment of life-force and burning it up.
   That's an answer that I do believe in. But the other one is this: This year of traveling isn't just going to be a year of marking time and putting off the beginning of the rest of my life. I'm going to be spending it actively thinking about what I want to do afterwards. Visiting so many places in America—I have a growing list that so far has a dozen cities on it, plus living in the wilderness and working on farms—will allow me to figure out which one I could be happiest in, and what I could do there if I decided to live there. A year is long, and I'll have a lot of time to think about what kind of work I'd like to do in order to have the money to live in whatever kind of place I'd like to live in. I expect I'll learn about a lot of things I don't know about right now. To me it makes much more sense to look for an American job by traveling around America and meeting people who can tell me about their interesting jobs than by sitting here in Korea looking at Craigslist or LinkedIn or whatever and hoping I stumble upon something that interests me and is obtainable through submitting my résumé online and maybe doing a Skype interview. It's not what you know, it's who you know, they say, and as I travel I'll come to know so many more people.
   That, by the way, is important to me for another reason as well: I'm not going to be looking just for people who can give me jobs, which would be a pretty depressing and mechanical way of thinking about people during a trip all around the continent. I'm going to be looking for friendships that will last and last. Friendships like that are what make life enjoyable, basically what make life life. And if I travel the way I want to, the gregarious vagabond's way, I'll be meeting a lot of people who think along the same lines, who I can learn a lot from and who I can have incredibly enjoyable times with. So I think I have ample defense for a year or so in which I won't be strictly economically productive.
   Anyhow, I was ostensibly writing about preparing mentally and physically for all this travel I'm talking about. On the physical side, I've been getting my things ready. There are a surprising number of them to take care of. Visas are one of them. China and Russia, our old Red rivals, both apparently really don't want Americans entering them, so they make it as inconvenient as possible. As of now, my passport is in New York waiting for a company called VisaHQ to receive it so they can take it to the Chinese embassy. VisaHQ is doing this for the sum of $49.95, and for the privilege of having my documents glanced at by the Chinese embassy, I'm paying that country $140. I had to send the documents home because just within the last year China has decided to enact a new, inconvenient, byzantine rule that stipulates that foreigners living in Korea can't get a Chinese visa from the Chinese embassy in Seoul if their Korean visas will expire within the next six months. Basically this ensures that no one can finish their time in Korea and then go straight to China. Why China wants to prevent this is a mystery. But apparently I can get around this by sending my passport and visa application to New York and keeping quiet about the fact that I live in South Korea at the moment. Once I get my passport back, I'll have to get the Russian visa, which is annoying in totally different ways. I have to get an invitation to the country from a citizen (travel agencies will do this, of course for a fee), and get official documentation that I'm invited to Russia. Only then can I take that to the Russian embassy in Seoul and pay a fee a extortionate as China's to get my visa. You may not be surprised to find out that I think national borders are a stupid concept.
   I've also been amassing the gear I need for traveling, and at the same time paring down my collection of other belongings. Recently I dumped a bunch of clothes in a donation bin here. (Where they go from there, I have no idea. There's basically no such thing as Goodwill or used clothes shopping in this entire country. The best guess I can come up with based on internet research is that they get shipped off to the third world.) I'm throwing other stuff away, anything that I can do without, and as I get closer to leaving, I'll have fewer and fewer things. Meanwhile I've gotten a new backpack, a big one made for carrying heavy stuff comfortably for long periods, and which has a compartment in the bottom that's perfectly sized to fit my sleeping bag. I've bought a tiny, lightweight tent from eBay, and it's on its way to me. I've made my journals: in a departure from the 500- to 600-page journals I've used since Volume II, I'm splitting Volume VIII into four (possibly five) subjournals of 100 pages each (except VIII-A, which is 160 pages to fit in all the time between when the current VII fills up in early August until when I get home around Christmas). That way they won't take up so much room in my backpack, and if I lose one of them I'll lose at most 160 pages of life history, rather than possibly hundreds. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be practicing using campfires and homemade camp stoves, and cooking road food that won't debilitate me. The idea is that by the time August rolls around, I'll have most things pretty much figured out and won't have to learn by annoying or dangerous or expensive trials and errors while I'm out on the road. I'm bombproofing myself, basically.
   I sort of started the cooking part yesterday. We had a big barbecue by the river with all the foreigners in Sachangni and even a couple from Hwacheon, the next town over. I made myself a hobo pack. This is something I learned about from my friend Molly. The recipe is this: take some potatoes, onion, carrots, and meat. Cut them up and plop them on a sheet of foil. Put some butter and salt and stuff on top. Then wrap it up so it's waterproof and stick it in the coals of a fire for like 40 minutes so it can turn into stew. Pretty simple, but I'm glad I'm getting practice with it, because mine was pretty underdone. Instead of the coals of a fire I substituted the inside of the barbecue where the charcoal was. But the charcoal apparently wasn't very hot or didn't stay hot long enough. Lesson learned for next time. Even underdone it was pretty good, though.
   But that wasn't even close to the coolest thing that happened yesterday. Obviously another great part was how we all hung out together and swam in the river and had a smashing time. I could write all about that, but really, you can probably imagine it pretty well with just the basics. Just picture a barbecue on warm sand next to a rocky stream with a bunch of friendly people, and we'll both have saved some time. More significantly for my transition to travelerhood was what happened just afterwards. There were too many people to fit in one car—some of us had taken a taxi to get there—so Sean, Amanda, and I walked back along the little rural road. I decided it was high time that I tried hitchhiking for the first time. So I flew the Asian version of an upraised thumb (one palm flat toward the ground, waving slowly). And the very second car to come by stopped for us. A grinning guy invited us into his car and I pushed his badminton equipment to one side and thanked him a bunch and told him we'd like to go to Sachangni, please. He took us the few minutes into town and we all got out and thanked him again several times, and he turned around and went on his way—which caused us to realize he'd actually gone out of his way for us. We all thought that was pretty splendid. And it gave me a huge boost of confidence for my upcoming hitchhiking-heavy travel plans. It seems it's not nearly as hard as I imagined. Now I can actually picture myself doing it. I love it when things become real like that.

The Ginseng Men

One day last week I took a walk to get out of the house after staying inside all morning. I went down a different road than usual and found myself in a part of town that I'd never seen before. It was unfamiliar, strange; I want to say foreign, but of course I'm living in a foreign country, so I could call everything that. It's just that I've gotten used to Korea, but this seemed unlike what I'd gotten used to—doubly foreign. It wasn't actually that drastically different. The streets were narrower, and the houses were closer to them. One house had flowers growing inside the concrete barrier between it and the street. There were some tiny cinder-block stores with no English on the signs out front. I walked up a hill and passed a mushroom farm—a series of greenhouses each with a few cables strung from one end to the other and, leaning on the cables, logs with holes drilled in them and inoculated with spores. Across from it was a very old man walking out of a blue tin building, and hand farm equipment that looked generations old was lying around. At a crest in the hill I looked out and I could see the rice paddy that's down the hill from where I live, which I've never really seen before because it's obscured by buildings—this paddy is where the multitudes of frogs live that I hear chorusing in high voices every night through my window.
   I suddenly felt a deep sense of the profoundness of this place, simultaneous with a realization that I was only connected to it in the very shallowest of ways, not even knowing well a single person who lives here. I've come to this town and lived on the very surface, interacting with the people here barely any more than absolutely necessary to let me buy groceries to survive. But people have been living here and doing things for longer than I have any idea of, maybe only for a few decades, but maybe for centuries. There's a war memorial just outside town on the road to Chuncheon that's dedicated to the soldiers who retook this place from the Chinese army in 1951. However old this particular town is, there have been people living near here since time immemorial, surely back through all the dynasties that warred for power over the Korean peninsula starting when there was no writing to record the victories and losses. With something akin to a panic, borne of the knowledge that I have less than three months left here, I decided I needed to hurry and start understanding more about this place than just the places where it's possible to find food. It felt like if I didn't do that, I would look back later and think I'd wasted a whole year that was made entirely of the opportunity to learn, but if I did, all the stuff I'd observed over the course of the year would finally solidify into actual knowledge.
   Ways to fulfill my resolution started materializing with an almost magical speed. This Friday, I went out jogging with Sean to the disused bridge over the Jichon Stream that we tend to go to. It's right next to a bridge that's in use; I'm guessing that it was deemed unsafe and replaced, but then never torn down. When we got there, there were a few trucks parked on it and a tent set up among them. A middle-aged guy was hanging clothes in the dilapidated gazebo that stands at one end of the bridge, next to the modern road that we'd just arrived on. I jumped over the guardrail and said hello, and asked if he was camping (which was a bit of a stupid question because, well, obviously, but my command of Korean wasn't up to asking more intelligent questions). Through much repetition and simplification, he eventually managed to explain to me that he and his friends were a group of guys who climb mountains to hunt for wild ginseng. It's a highly prized medicine, much more esteemed than the farmed kind, and can sell for a lot of money. I immediately asked if I could come along. He told me to come back at 8 in the morning, and they'd be going up soon after. So I commenced getting excited, and said goodbye, and Sean and I jogged back home.
   I showed up bright and early the next morning. Before I even got to the ginseng men, I came to a couple guys in a little blue flatbed truck, the kind that you see everywhere here. The guys were in beekeeping suits and after I noticed that I realized that the wooden boxes in the back of their truck were hives, with bees flying in and out. I watched them lay a white tray on top of a few white honeycombs on the ground by the wildflowers and weeds that grow along the old length of road that leads to the old bridge. I didn't manage to strike up a conversation with them, but it was pretty clear what they were doing, anyhow. After they laid the tray down, they drove off.
   The ginseng men were unpacking various stuff from their trucks to make breakfast. There were some mats laid on the concrete, and a giant, dented old pot boiling over a gas burner. We all sat down on the mats and someone brought out a pot of rice, and the giant pot was brought over. It turned out to be full of broth made of chicken and deodeok (a root that they might have found in the forest or might have bought in a store, I'm not sure). We talked, though mostly they talked and I didn't quite understand what was going on. Then breakfast finished and everyone started getting ready to climb the mountain. Only, I discovered then that they hadn't actually invited me to go hunting ginseng with them, they'd only invited me for breakfast. They told me that I needed boots and long pants, because there are snakes on the mountain. This smelled like an excuse to me, but I didn't press the issue, because when I stepped back to consider it, this was an obviously pretty tight-knit group of guys who were having a good time together and also knew what they were doing, and I was some foreign yutz who barely understood them and had invited himself along. They all suited up in long pants and boots, but they did tell me that I should come back at five and we'd have dinner. I was disappointed, but I understood, so I biked off back home.
   To assuage the disappointment a little, I went and climbed Chang'an Mountain with Sean—the same mountain we always climb, but this time we climbed it from a different direction. At five I biked down to the bridge again and met the ginseng men. "Good luck?" I asked them. "No," they said. They'd only found four ginseng plants. One of the guys showed me the plants, kept tenderly in a plastic bag for the time being. They'd explained to me before that the older the plant, the more it sells for. It's possible to find plants that are as much as a hundred years old, though these are of course quite rare, the find of a lifetime. Such a plant could sell for ten million won ($8500). These, he told me, were nowhere near that league; they were mostly five or six years old. I didn't catch the price he expected to get for them.
   We settled down and they brought out the burners to start getting dinner ready. The menu tonight was chicken cooked baeksuk style—just a plain chicken dunked in a lot of water and boiled for a long time with a few roots and wood chips. I'm not sure if they even used the roots and wood chips. While that was boiling, we had some banchan (side dishes) and some pork-kimchi stir-fry. It wasn't gourmet fare, but it was pretty well suited to the occasion: a bunch of mountain men camping out in one of the most middle-of-nowhere parts of Korea.
   In addition to all this, there was of course a profusion of liquor. They gave it to me liberally and before long I was pretty well smashed. This happens when you eat dinner with Koreans, especially men—pretty much every time. We talked a lot, but regrettably, the thing where you can talk in a foreign language more fluently when you're drunk doesn't work on me, at least not with Korean—I have yet to try it with any other languages. We did manage to sustain a few conversations about America, and how I liked Korea. They also told me that another reason they didn't invite me up the mountain was because I haven't had training, and I'm not old enough. I don't see where age has anything to do with it, (it's probably the traditional Korean hierarchical system shining through), but it was true that I didn't really know what to look for, and I'd probably be telling them all to come over and check out some weeds that I was convinced were a jackpot. Or more likely just wasting their time by needing lots of explanations. At some point, the guy sitting next to me, Cha U-jin, invited me to have dinner with him where he lives in Seoul next time I go there, and gave me his business card (it was for his mountain ginseng business, but it seems he also does some exporting of various items). And we had a merry old time. We all ate and ate, and talked and laughed and enjoyed being out under the stars next to a mountain where they'd just found a bounty, albeit small. It felt like longer, but when I staggered over to my bike to go home, it turned out to be only about ten o'clock. I managed to bike home and then collapsed.
   The next day (today), they were off at a different mountain some thirty minutes' drive distant, but they told me before I left the first dinner that I should come back and bring them some of the American food that I was planning on making for dinner. There's really only one American food that I make anymore, and that's 5-ways. My bi-weekly 5-way is sort of precious to me, but they had given me tons of food last night, and even if it weren't for wanting to repay them, there was also the fact that I was pretty well stuffed and probably had no business eating an entire 5-way. So I compartmentalized the ingredients and brought them over to the bridge.
   At five o'clock they were still cleaning stuff and putting stuff away from the day's hike. This included themselves—one guy was down under the bridge right next to ours, bathing himself in the Jichon Stream, naked and unconcerned. One of the other guys on the bridge warned him that someone was liable to take a picture of him. They were sort of talking among themselves, probably about logistics and boring stuff, so I stood around and watched things happening. Cranes were flying overhead—they've gotten to be plentiful around here. One crane was standing in the stream.

While I took a picture of it, some people came wading up the stream behind it, toward the bridge, one of them carrying a bucket. I went down to ask them what they were gathering, and they told me, "Meat." If I recall right, there was a woman in her thirties or so, an any-man, and a shriveled, white-haired, but very nimble old guy. Two of them were carrying heavy metal spud bars, for reasons I couldn't fathom. They brought their bucket up and I discovered that "meat" meant fish, lots of little ones about four inches long. (Later I figured that maybe the spud bars were poles they had used to secure fish traps.) The Korean word for fish is mulgogi, and I'd always wondered if it was just a coincidence that it's the same as if you joined the words mul (water) and gogi (meat). I guess it's not. The ginseng men gathered around to look at the fish and then wished them a tasty meal.
   It was raining a little today, so we had dinner in the old gazebo instead of on the bridge. While the more time-consuming dinners were cooking, I assembled the 5-way in a pot they got out, and we ate it with chopsticks.

The temperature was all wrong because it had had too much time to cool down, but we still all ate it with gusto and they asked why I hadn't brought more. A couple of them took to eating it with kimchi, and convinced me to try the same. (It was not good.) We drank a little, but they were aware that I had to work tomorrow in the morning, so they didn't give me a lot. They didn't drink much either, but they didn't have to worry about being in an office; it was around this time that I thought to ask how often they do this, and the round-faced guy who'd taken a shine to me told me that this is every day for them, at least during the season, which runs from May to October. Here I'd been thinking that they were just a group of old army friends who liked to take a yearly vacation together, looking for mountain ginseng and drinking. It seemed like it couldn't be lucrative enough for them to break even, so I asked again about the rewards they could expect to reap. They had a twelve-year-old plant out so I could take a picture of it, and they told me they could expect to sell it for about 700,000 won, or $600. That was way more than I'd been thinking. It got me to considering that I should probably keep an eye out for mountain ginseng too when I'm out walking. Not that I'm likely to find any, if a party of six men who do this for a living (or at least part of a living) can come down from eight hours of searching with only four plants. But all the same, it's something to keep an eye out for.

This is the guy who sort of became my sponsor, inviting me to dinner and  answering all my questions so other people wouldn't get tired of me. He also told me my hair is handsome. He's holding a young plant, maybe five or six years old. Price unknown. The guy on the right is the one who had all the luck—I think he found all four plants yesterday.

They let me hold the twelve-year-old plant.

   For the rest of dinner we had Korean-style chicken noodle soup, and we talked a bit, but it seemed like we'd exhausted the number of things I could talk about with my limited vocabulary, and we ended up repeating stuff we'd already talked about. One of the guys, who I guess was drinking a lot more than I noticed, started talking about how much sex he was having when he was about my age. (The rest of them smiled stoically and bore it.) Dinner tapered off and everyone got up. I took a few pictures and then called it a night, and promised to come see them if they were ever around here again. Tomorrow they're driving to mountains in other parts. But it's okay, because I have a date to make cucumber and radish kimchis with the the women from downstairs tomorrow. The country is starting to reveal itself to me, finally.

Things have happened here and there

You've probably noticed that I haven't written anything in a month. If you were in the right place at the right time, you may have seen the Facebook thread where I said that I was putting off all work on the blog in favor of getting my font completely done. Well, I'm done with the font—for practical purposes. It took me almost a week longer than I thought it would, which is no small margin of error considering that from the time I set my deadline until the deadline I planned to hit was only a little over three weeks. And when I say I'm done I can't say that in all capital letters like I'd like to, because what I really mean is that I'm done with all major work on it. I've kerned and I've gotten all the OpenType features working right. Those probably mean nothing to you, but they're useful and actually not all that hard to understand if you can see them visualized, as I happen to have done on page 16 of my big sample booklet. All I have left to do is to fix the kerning and nudge a few shapes here and there. I don't need to spend any more time compiling huge databases of characters. I'm guessing that the total actual amount of time I'll need to spend with FontLab open working on these fonts is less than 10 hours between now and when I can send the files off to be bought and downloaded by happy end-users.
   Due to the font, there's really not a whole heck of a lot that you've missed from my not blogging for a month. Instead of going on adventures, I've mostly sat at my computer, looking more and more like the definition of a pasty-skinned hacker shut-in, or maybe a vampire. I've listened to a lot of podcasts and learned some interesting things. But the month of May hasn't been completely devoid of interesting events, so I guess I should mention what some of them were.
   Bob came. Bob is an original hippie, now in his sixties. He went to Woodstock back in the day, and he narrowly avoided being drafted and having to decide whether to run away or to decide that he wasn't up to trying to evade the US government. He's vegetarian. Sean met him while he was working at a camp in Cape Cod; Bob lives in a trailer park near the camp and is always affable with the people working at the camp, so he ends up hanging out with them all the time. After putting in a few decades of work herding engineers for the government, he got a pension that's nice enough that he can spend his golden years traveling around the world and coming back to enjoy summer at home. Korea was his last stop on this year's world trip, and Sean invited him to use Sachangni as a staging ground for his adventures to the rest of the country. He arrived on a Thursday without having to be picked up at the airport as all of Sean's other visitors have. (Sean is the only person here who's had any visitors this year, but he's had tons: Natalie several times, his parents, his friends Kieran and Naoko who were on their way to Japan, and finally Bob.) He and Sean and I went up to the roof and we all ate dinner together and Bob told some stories. He has lots of stories and an urge to tell every one of them. But he's done so many different things that they're almost all interesting stories, so it's okay. We listened to his stories and then later he took my guitar and started singing old songs that made me wish I'd been around back when they were new.
   Some of his earliest experience of Korea came in the form of my school's Sports Day, which happened that Friday. I think he only watched from the window, actually, but I was right there being a part of it. It was basically identical to the Sports Day that the school held last semester, but I appear not to have ever mentioned that one either, so that does you no good as a description. Sports Day is a big deal. At my school  when I was growing up we had Track & Field Day, where the school took a day off from normal classes and set up a series of events for everyone to compete in outside on our big green field and blacktop playground, but I don't remember any preparation for it happening outside of maybe some special stuff in gym class. Here, they had weeks of practice in order to get Sports Day to go off just right. Every morning for maybe the fortnight leading up to the day of the event, before regular classes started, I would hear music coming in from the playground, which the English classroom overlooks (and now that I think about it, so does every classroom in the entire school). I mainly remember one song that was played on bells, bass drums, and flute, and had a simple but extremely compelling rhythm in 3/4 time; it was almost perfectly composed for getting up and moving around. Over this song was a voiceover of a woman counting, and while it played every morning, the students would stand in a giant grid formation and stretch, using almost the same series of stretches I did in hapkido. Afterwards various different grades of the students would practice highly coordinated dances. When you see videos of the Mass Games in North Korea (if you're not familiar: here's one), what you don't know about them is that these aren't just a tradition that the Kim dynasty came up with out of nowhere. These are apparently a pan-Korean thing; the tradition of having kids show off their ability to execute a carefully choreographed routine seems to be very highly thought of. It seems very much in keeping with the character of Korea to me, and here I mean Korea the way Koreans mean it when they say Korea—the two countries taken as a whole. They have more in common than many people probably realize. (Though of course a huge number of people in America probably don't even know there's a difference between North and South Korea.)
   On the actual morning of Sports Day, parents spread out all over the steps at the edge of the playground and stretched out picnic blankets to sit and watch. The day started out with synchronized stretching, and then they got into the events. The dancing was one of the main two things that they did. The other was races. I was a crucial component in the races, in my capacity as ribbon-holder. What this meant was that I stood at the end of the racetrack (marked off by paint on the sand floor of the playground, running the playground's length) and held one end of the ribbon. Throughout the day the other end of the ribbon was held up by various students, teachers, and the leg of a desk. When competitors came close to the end, I would stoop down and bring the ribbon to the ground so they could step over it. This was exactly as pointless as it sounds, maybe more so. The people determining who was in first, second, and third could have told equally as well if the ribbon hadn't been there; in fact, they probably could've seen better if there had been only the white paint line that marked the end of the racecourse and no confusion from the ribbon (also white). Nonetheless, there I stood, offering that psychological goal for the racers to work toward. There were footraces, three-legged races, sack races, obstacle races, and hurdle races. They really did make the most of a simple theme. After a few race events, there would be a break, and two grades of students (5th and 6th, say) would go out to the middle of the field and dance together. Then there would be more races. So passed Sports Day. There were a few other games toward the end, one of them having to do with throwing balls at two big metal contraptions on poles that swung open when they'd been hit enough times and let out banners saying Congratulations. At the end there was another session of synchronized stretching, and then the students all stood in their grid formation and were addressed by the principal and the vice principal in a closing ceremony, and prizes were awarded (mostly notebooks and pencils and such). And that was Sports Day.
   Then Bob, Sean, and I all took a trip to Seoul. Sean was giving the grand tour of Seoul for the last time; he'd already shown the city to Natalie, his parents, and Kieran and Naoko. I, however, had really never done a whole lot of seeing the sights there. I'd gone to Seoul Tower and seen the locked gates to some palaces while just walking along, and that was about it. So I thought it'd be good to check out what there was.
   We got there at night and talked with some travelers at the hostel and drank makkeolli. The next morning we hit the city. We didn't really have a firm idea of what we wanted to do; we planned to just kind of go with the flow. We went to Gwangjang Market first, mainly because I thought Bob might want to have some lunch there where it'd be easy to get vegetarian bibimbap, but it was too early for lunch so the trip ended up being just kind of an aimless diversion where we looked at weird foodstuffs and had snacks. We also checked out the fashion district for no particular reason except the spectacle of it, of which there was plenty. The crowds in Myeongdong bring to mind a beehive or a stampede. We were highly amused.
    We moved on to the Korean War Memorial. I'd never been here before, but it was probably my favorite thing of the day. Out front are several very well done monuments, most of them sculpted with a split down the middle. Inside there are busts and drums and artifacts, but the main thing is a long path that shows you the chronology of the war through some actually rather good multimedia that really brought some power and life to the history. Some of the best were the places where they had brush set up to look like the sort of place you'd be hiding in if you were a soldier fighting for the South, and projected onto the wall in front of the brush was a scene showing what happened at some certain battle in the war. There were also tanks and humvees and guns, plus journals and diplomatic notes that I wished I could read. It was of course intensely nationalistic, as you'd expect from a museum about defending your country against invaders, but in that special way that Korea is nationalistic. At some point I'm going to write in full about Korean nationalism. It's a weird thing.
   When we finished, and got out front, there was, unexpectedly, a ceremony going on that looked like it could have been taking place in the 1400s, with bright banners everywhere, people in elaborate costumes and tall complex hats, a red carpet and a stage, and a man periodically shouting and banging on a drum so big that he and two friends could have comfortably sat inside it. What luck to have stumbled upon a traditional ceremony taking place! But then I asked a Korean spectator what this was, and he told me it was a royal wedding, and since there is no royalty in present-day Korea I connected the dots and determined that we were watching a reenactment. This disappointed Bob greatly. He immediately wanted to just move on, so we did.
   The last stop for the day was the royal palace, 경복궁 (Gyeongbokgung), which offered even more reenactments to disappoint Bob, though he didn't seem to be quite as disappointed when he knew from the outset that it was all fake. As we were entering through the main gate, so was a procession of men towing drums on carts, all the men wearing royal-style old clothing, each one with a beard and a mustache, most of which were painted on with mascara or something because facial hair is considered such an oddity in Korea that even if you make your living as a historical reenactor you still don't want to be seen in day-to-day life not being clean-shaven. (I have seen some Koreans with facial hair, but very few. Many of my students still haven't gotten over the presence of my beard and like to reach out and touch it whenever they get a chance and are feeling brazen enough.) We didn't go into the palace itself because it was crowded and we were feeling tired of walking and thrifty, so we sat next to the inner gate and watched things happen. Eventually we had seen pretty much all the happenings that appeared to be on the docket of happenings for the day, so we called it a day and went to relax at the hostel with some makkeolli and a guitar. We watched the supermoon (one day late) and decided that it did seem a little bit bigger than usual. And since then I consider myself to have seen the sights in Seoul.
   Bob took off for other parts of Korea and I got back to my font from the welcome distraction he had been. That week we had Teacher's Day, which was kind of nice because there was a ceremony and I got a boutonniere and Amanda got a little bouquet in a basket. And one kid gave me a note in Korean about how he likes my teaching and thinks English class is fun. I couldn't quite interpret all of it, and also, to my enormous shame, I was looking at the note when he handed it to me instead of at his face, and when I looked up and thanked him I forgot to memorize who he was and he just blended right back in with the rest of the class. Koreans don't all look the same to me anymore, but a lot of them do. In my after-school class there are two girls, Shi-eun and Seo-won, and they still look practically identical to me. They even have the same pink glasses frames. What am I supposed to do? I feel so bad that I don't know anyone's names, but they just don't stick, and I suspect they never will in the little time I have left.
   Some evenings, I've been taking short breaks away from FontLab by jogging with Sean. I said I would, and I have, and it's been pretty refreshing. We don't get out quite every other day, but we do end up getting out at least twice a week and some weeks three times. The last time we did it, on Thursday, I went barefoot, and the world didn't end and I think no one even noticed, so I'm going to keep that up. Next time I climb a mountain I plan to have my soles toughened enough that I can make it all the way up and down without my shoes. In fact I might even be able to carry this out during some of my travels. I've been looking for a backpack, and on a recent trip to Seoul I found one that looks good, and it has a shoe compartment in the bottom, so that would be pretty handy. Most people would wear say a pair of tennis shoes and use the compartment to store their hiking boots, but I'd enjoy just going barefoot and using it to store the shoes that I'd wear if I ever needed to wear shoes.
   The trip when I found that backpack was the same trip when Sean and I climbed 도봉단 (Dobongsan), just this last weekend. By now you've heard report after report of the mountains we've climbed, so I'll try to distill this to just the things that were new and hopefully interesting. First of which is that Dobongsan is actually located physically within the city of Seoul. Russell expected that this meant it was really just sort of a hill that the Seoulites have decided should be preserved and made famous. Sean and I found out through experience that it is a completely legitimate mountain. It's one of a couple of mountains, the other named Bukhansan, that have traditionally marked the northern limits of the city. Certainly there's been basically no development on it aside from trails and the odd temple or shelter here and there, which is surprising enough given the absolute frenzy with which the city around it has been developed. I guess it's sort of Seoul's version of Central Park, except it's far less central, and also it hasn't undergone the manicuring of every inch that Olmsted and Vaux did with Central Park.
   At the bottom, just outside the limits of Bukhansan National Park (which encompasses both of the mountains), is where you find the things that are inevitable at the nexus of a national park and a city full of ten million Koreans: food stands, and outdoor gear stores. The breeding grounds at this particular place are incredibly rich for both of these niche organisms, and there is a tremendous profusion of both. You can find any Korean food that exists at the bottom of this mountain, and if a brand of outdoor gear exists in Korea, you will find an outlet for it here, one of the dozens upon dozens of stores lining the roads at the entrance. Buying some kimbap to eat on top of the mountain, we passed these and entered the park, where a park ranger with crooked teeth and boundless charisma explained to us in detail our various options for routes up the mountain, and made sure we knew that we were not to slip off any of the steep rocks into the deep valleys and make him call a helicopter for us. And so we ascended. The ascent was mostly like any of our other mountain ascents until we got pretty close to the top. Then the greenery became much sparser and gave way to rocks. While at Seoraksan last fall there were staircases sunk into the stone, here we walked directly on the rocks, which were at some points nearly vertical, with our support consisting of a series of poles driven into the stone with sturdy ropes strung between them. A lot of Koreans were ahead of us and keeping us from going any faster, but we probably couldn't have sped up a whole lot even if we'd wanted. It was some tough terrain. But the views were worth it. As we approached the first of the three peaks, we would stop here and there to catch our breath while sitting on some huge boulder looking out over side of the mountain. Unlike all the other mountains we'd climbed, here, the views weren't of wilderness but rather, of course, of the city of Seoul. And what a strange sight it was. The corner of it that we could see from atop Dobongsan was just a vast plain of apartment buildings, spread out for mile after mile, every single one of them the same color, most of them the same height, looking from this distance like a growth of bizarre lichen.  There was lots of smog, too, of course. But I was struck more by the uniformity. Closer to the center there's more variety, and what I was looking at was basically the analog to suburbs that exists in a country that's too small to have sprawling subdivisions. Still, it was strange.
   We got to the first, somewhat shorter, peak, and a helicopter was flying around at one of the other peaks, maybe half a mile away from us. I thought it must be rescuing someone—our lively guide had told us that two days ago a woman had fallen and was airlifted out, and that this was by no means uncommon—but it didn't stop, just kind of buzzed randomly around. It went below the level of our peak, so for the first time I saw the blades of a helicopter from above. I've probably seen the back of a flying bird before at some point, but I really don't remember when; that day I saw that too. We were fairly seriously high up.
   To get to the next peak we held on tight to the ropes and inched down a tenuous path that was more suited for mountain goats than for throngs of people. Envision two peaks of a mountain, both of them above the treeline and practically vertical. There's a ridge between the two peaks, but that ridge isn't traversible. Instead envision a little ledge that stretches between the two peaks, going down along the steep wall and then horizontal briefly and then back up to join the other peak. I thought it was tremendous fun. Sean fears descending anything and every word he spoke was suffused with worry until we started going back up, and then he was overjoyed. We got to the top peak but unfortunately there was a giant unclimbable rock in the way of our view of the city, so we had already seen our best view of the day. There was another peak, but we got confused and didn't find our way to it, so that was that for Dobongsan. We climbed back down and ate fish and porkburgers, and then we went home well exhausted.
   That was this last weekend. It was a three-day weekend here, too, so we had time to recover. In the US it was Memorial Day, and here it was Buddha's 2,556th birthday. So I went, with Sean, up to the temple in town around lunchtime. Having done some cursory reading, we'd found that we would probably be served a free lunch of bibimbap. And it was so. We came up the stairs to the courtyard and there were chairs set up facing toward the bell in its shelter on the hill, and the five-color banners strung up overhead. Soldiers were walking around everywhere and there were musical instruments on the chairs at the back. The soldier at the greeting booth told us to go in and have lunch. The bibimbap wasn't the best bibimbap ever, but it was free so I'm not going to whine. After we ate we waited around to see the orchestra play and the ceremony start, but then it turned out that we had gotten there at pretty much the very end of the party, and everyone was starting to go home. The musicians grabbed all their instruments and left, and the bowls of bibimbap all disappeared from inside the temple. We talked briefly to a Korean woman from down the road, which was kind of nice, and then we were given snacks to take home and bracelets of beads and we left. So I guess we mostly missed that holiday. Oh well, I suppose.
   There have been a few other things that happened, but I'll talk about them in some other post. This one has already gotten long and scraggly and anyhow I'm due to go downstairs and hang out. I'll write again in much less than a month.