serendipitous weekend part two

Later Friday night:

OK. In Korea there are many places called Hofs, which, perhaps, stands for House of Food, or something, but in any case require that you purchase food whether or not you want it or they will not bring you a pitcher of beer (if one can call what passes for beer here beer). So, we order a fruit plate and while we are waiting for fruit we are served a platter of peanuts (standard pub fare, cool) and papery tiny dried fish, with heads and eyes intact. Lovely. Exactly what I want to eat with fruit. Yum. But, at this point, very little about the food here surprises me anymore. We move on...

What we discover, however, is that we all need to use the toilet (toilet is a word most Koreans know, while restroom or bathroom confuses them) so we stop at the first one we find: The Sexy T Girl Bar. As we live in Portland, the city with the highest number of strip clubs per capita in the nation, we figured we could get in, use the bathroom, have a shot of soju or vodka, and leave in just a few minutes. We were wrong. The Sexy T Girl Bar is a high class establishment. High class in the sense that they only cater to monied folk-- you can't buy a shot, but only a $130 bottle of liquor. The girls are dressed in sexy, but not super trashy, outfits, and when you order a drink, they sit on the other side of the bar and talk with you. Of course, we figured out that what they are really doing is servicing a segment of the population that wants to forget they are chatting with an escort, despite the fact that we are pretty certain you can rent a private room upstairs and order anything you want, literally. So, we drink our shitty beer, use the toilet and continue with our evening.

We meet a random group of folks in the street a short while later: the abtholutely fabulouth Angus from New Zealand, Lacey and Carey, from Vancouver, Washington (what are the odds?), and Sue, a bilingual Korean whose father happens to work for the ferries. Thanks to her we learned that there were no tickets left to Jeju-do and together her group of friends came up with alternative travel ideas replete with the Korean and English translations of a host of questions/directions. Of course, we did all this while getting drunk on soju in a bar with red velvet seats, random plastic toys, and a young Korean man that spent most of the evening snapping cell phone self-portraits (self-photography is quite popular here). We left the bar at 1:30 with the address of our random homestay written in Korean, a pocketful of notes from Sue, and plans to get up at 5:00 a.m., leave the homestay and chance walk-on tickets to Jeju-do, and, failing that, get tickets to one of the other islands that Sue and Angus had suggested. We go in search of a cab.

We find a cab without much trouble. He drives us to the place he thinks we belong, but we tell him, "no, anio. This isn't it." He gestures for us to walk through some field. We are not in the are we'd been originally dropped off in. We drive around with him for a short, frustrating while, trying to figure it out, but it's no use. We get out and he tries to charge us twice the fee the meter said we owed. We find another cab, but before we can talk to him, the guy in our first cab goes over to talk with him. We leave them both in search of the pokpo or waterfall, in this case a man-made waterfall that is one of Mokpo's main landmarks. All of us have very clear idea which direction our homestay is, all of which are differing, and all of us, of course, are convinced we are correct. Fortunately, I found our way back, and nobody came to blows, and by the time everyone else began to recognize where we weer, we were all so satisfied that we were not lost that nobody cared about who was right or wrong about anything. We went to bed around 2:00 a.m. with plans to wake up at 5:00.

5:00 a.m. Saturday Morning:

Despite Abbye insisting that she could hardly work up a buzz the night before, and despite that she'd been the most militant about our going to Jeju-do at all costs, these are the words we hear upon waking to the alarm:

"I'm drunk. Let's sleep. I'm going to pee and you have as long as my stream to figure it out."

We decide to sleep a while longer and take our chances on the other ferries to other islands. We wake up to our random Korean homestay families having prepared breakfast for us, which was nice, except that two out of the five of us are vegetarian and couldn't eat most of what was served. Instead, Wim eats five bowls of seaweed fish soup, so that we don't appear ungrateful, and we catch a cab back to the e-mart of buy beach towels, and then proceed to the ferry terminal. We arrive at the ferry terminal in time to buy tickets to Big-eum-do, the island that Angus and Sue had recommended. Tickets were cheap and the ferry was only a 2 1/2 hour ride. It was a lovely afternoon. We met a Korean in a Mt. Hoos, Oregon shirt (who had no idea really were Oregon was, or why we were so interested in his shirt). We ate crappy snack food, and napped (on the floor, just like we did at the homestay) and played cards. We pull into port.

Our first glimpse of Big-eum-do, is the expanse of parking lot at the ferry terminal, an apparently abandoned or unfinished visitors center, a mud flat beach covered with what appeared to be rocks, but were actually crabs, a fish shack and no one in sight that seemed as though they would at all understand anything we asked for in English. Just about the time we were starting to wonder what we'd gotten ourselves into, we see a white guy. Abbye runs up to him, shouting, "Do you speak English?" He turns around as he says, "Yes. Yes, I do." He is wearing a Clinton-Gore t-shirt. It turns out Nick is from New York and living in Seoul with his bilingual Korean girlfriend, April. We ask her to help us call a taxi and get to a motel. She is approached by a woman from the fish shack who tells April that her husband is a cabbie and will be there in twenty minutes.

Over an hour later, two taxis pull up; one is the husband, irritated that the other is there stealing his business, the other is the most fabulous taxi driver on the planet. More later.

Serendipitous Weekend (August 10-12)

Part One: Friday August 10th.

Five of us decide we want to ditch the celadon tour plans and go one of the thousands of island of Korea, Jeju-do. We have the requisite complications in trying to find out bus and ferry schedules with our non-existent Korean... I took to drawing stick figures and lots of miming to explain to my host family where it was we wanted to go. I'd still speak to them in English, but broken English:"Bus time? Need help. Ferry. Ship. Ship schedule? Not certain. Maybe we go to Jeju-do? Ferry time [question mark, arrow to port name, etc.)"

Fan-fucking-tastic. Miming. It's not just for the French or circus freaks. Seriously, it works. If I come home and speak to you with a total lack of prepositions and articles, but extensive line drawings and hand gestures, please don't mind, it will go away soon enough. Anyway, back to the story.Two of our Korean co-teachers offer to give us rides to Mokpo, where we can catch the ferries, and one even sets us up with one of her elementary student's family-- who invites us to stay for free in their spare bedroom (on the floor, 5 to a room, but with a bathroom and no expectation as to when we come or go. not bad, really).

We are dropped off in this friendly stranger's house and we leave again almost immediately to pick up a few things at the local e-mart (e-mart-euh, as the natives say) and head out for dinner and drinks. At the e-mart (think walmart, meets costco, meets a weird mom & pop store (the girls working in various departments have matching uniforms, including leg warmers) we wanted to purchase a couple of ice cream bars; it was hot and they are tasty chocolate coconut milk things, but we were chastised by an older Korean woman working the frozen food section. She gave us a bag. We put our ice creams in the bag and began to walk away. We were chastised a second time. She took our bag away and put out ice creams back in the freezer. She pointed to the Korean sign. We had no idea what to do.

"We want three," we say, holding our fingers up and gesturing. She says" anio," and crosses her wrists to indicate no. We walk away not understanding why we are not being permitted to buy ice cream. We encounter a clan of Korean school girls in uniform. "Hello," they say, in unison. "Where are you from?" [giggles ensue.] We tell them and then enlist their help. Please help us buy ice cream. They lead us back to the cranky Korean lady. Eventually we learn that we can buy eleven ice cream bars, or we can't buy any. Silly. We buy cans of bubbly wine (ewww, but a novelty) and then leave to get pizza.

After pizza, we decide we really want ice cream. We buy eleven. We eat as many as we can and then Wim begins to distribute the remaining ice cream to random parentless children. He wasn't seeking them out; Korean children seem to wander around at all hours pretty much unattended. Even late. It wasn't creepy by Korean standards, but we laughed at him as though he were a creepy old man. What I haven't mentioned thus far is the rabbit hutch. Yes, a rabbit hutch. Just sitting outside the e-mart, randomly. Seven bunnies in their cages, apparently for customer entertainment. They looked hungry. They licked our fingers through the cages.

"I wish we could feed them. There's some old lettuce in the cage; they look fed, but they seem hungry." One of us said this, or something like it. I think either me or Fallon. We sat down on the bench and watched the rabbits and ate ice cream and laughed at Wim and the children. Then a man walked by with a huge bag of lettuce and he proceeds to drop it on the ground and walk away. We exchange glances. Bag of lettuce falls from sky. Sweet. Fallon and I rip into it and feed the bunnies. They love this about us and no one seems to have a problem with it, so we feed them some more. But the evening is young. We decide to go out for drinks. "

Next up: the sexy T girl bar, the fish and peanut bar, the random white people on the street and our walk home.

the love shack, baby

I'd really like to blog about the amazing weekend I had this past weekend on a small, remote, and incredibly beautiful island named Big-eum-do, but I'm going to have to save my stories of bunnies and ice cream and the bag of lettuce that fell from the sky; the ferries getting cancelled on account of the approaching typhoon and the private boat we had to charter to get off the island and that sort of thing. Instead, I am feeling compelled to blog about the love shack we are currently staying in...

There are vending machines on nearly every floor in which a person can procure the following: condoms, love lube, dildos, and fake vaginas (no joke! only 20,000 won-- get yours while supplies last!). Pretty sweet, yes? Also, there are two free channels of Korean porn (some of which is decidedly unsexy) that some televisions have been programmed to spontaneously turn on (no pun intended) in the middle of the night. Since there are no driers in most of Korea and laundry all is hung to air dry, it is very comforting to see the hotel bath towels (each the size of a standard bath mat or smaller) are hung on the hallway handrails to dry (consider again what's sold in the vending machines for a second). But best of all, was walking up to the seventh floor to deal with the laundry situation only to overhear a woman having sex... which would have been fine (most of us, since we aren't getting any ourselves, would be pleased that at least somebody is getting some) except that it sounded like she was having the shit beaten out of her and her screaming was punctuated with sobs. The hotel host was in the hallway too... You try miming "hey, is that normal Korean sex? is that a hooker putting on a show? seriously, should we be intervening and killing some abusive man? just curious."

So, as you might have surmised, we are in a no-tell motel type of deal. I'm not sure they rent the rooms by the hour, but I do know that I feel as if we are stuck in 1982 and I'm a little tired of it. What we overheard was certainly no husband and wife honeymooning; most likely it was a prostitute we heard screaming and I hope it was simply an act. But, given that women aren't treated as much more than chattel here anyway, you can imagine that a prostitute is probably treated like a dog here, and considering how I've seen those treated (not to mention that they are food items as well) it is easy to see why I am a bit disturbed. Also, for those of you who remember the West Hall incident not so long ago, I'm fucking tired of this sort of thing.

Anyway, my next blog post will be about the amazing, serendipitous, wonderful weekend I had. Until then, sleep well and know that I am avoiding three starches at each meal, flip flops that smell like, as Wim put it, a homeless person's sleeping bag (though he was referring to his, not mine, but all of us who went to Big-eum-do have shoes that qualify for this, um, ranking), and drying off with any hotel towels... wish me luck.

oh.my.god.

I've gained nearly six pounds in the three weeks I have been here!! I keep telling people that not ALL Americans want to eat every ten minutes, but no one listens and keeps right on pumping me full of food anyway. Yes, yes, I can not eat it; you try doing that when you risk offending the ancestors of everyone you come in contact with by refusing food. In any case, I've decided that three meals a day is too many, especially when there are three kinds of starch available (i.e. pushed) at most of them and especially when all food consumed falls within a 12-14 hour period. Yikes. Also, it seems Koreans have a particular fondness for addding sugar to everything, frying lots of otherwise fresh vegetables, and making things salty. I can't wait to come home to my own fridge.

AND did you know...

that typhoon is just a fancy word for hurricane? The odds are fairly good we will be hit by one (choose your designation) while I am here. I admit I am a little curious, but know better than to tempt the universe like that.

ten more things you really wanted to know

The same caveat applies to this posting as my last one:

1) Jackassery knows no cultural, political, or geographic bounds.

2) The swastika symbol is used with its original (peaceful) meaning in Korea; small villages with such symbols emblazoned on road signs are not Korean Nazis, but rather a peaceful enclave. Still, creepy to see.

3) Koreans suck the grape out of its skin and discard it, but eat the seeds.

4) Korean girls are not afraid to hit Korean boys and they are not afraid to hit back. Actually, there is a whole lot of hitting among children, even to the point of giving bloody noses. In his defense, she was a tough girl and she kicked first.

5) No one, not even our Korean co-teachers, can determine or agree on the ferry schedule between the mainland and the island of Jeju-do.

6) Eating two year old fermented, pickled cabbage will not actually kill me.

7) Still, I am perhaps never going to eat cabbage again, even raw, but especially not the aged kind.

8) Pink Martini songs are played in the background of Korean evening television dramas. So is Bobby McFerrin. Also, soap operas are pretty much the same everywhere. I don't have to know the language to understand what is going on. This makes it difficult to ignore when it's on in the background.

(9) Korean men, when they are good looking, are really, really good looking. There isn't really a lot of middle ground, it would seem. Totally hot, or really not. I didn't mean for that to rhyme. Shallow observation, I know, but there it is.

10) I take direction well. Eat. Shower. Leave. I know it's really just the limited English and the trouble with translation, but I like to think I have finally learned to do as I am told. That's a bunch of crap and I know it; I only do as I'm told when I want to (it's always been this way) but I'm pretending that for once, even in a relative stranger's house, I am the good daughter.

22 things i've learned in korea thus far...

Before I go any further, let me state for the record that what follows are my observations and my observations only; nothing should be taken as a sweeping generalization and while truthful, I'm sure not all of it can be taken for fact. Judge the veracity of my statements against your own intelligence and experience. Actually, that's a pretty good formula for judging the veracity of anyone's statements.



1) It is considered (somehow) disrespectful to wear a seat belt in a person's car.



2) I don't need to know the conversion of miles to kilometers to know that 150 kph is fast, especially on a slick, narrow, country road.



3) Mayonnaise is almost as ubiquitous as rice.



4) Foreigners can only withdrawal cash from international ATMs, making the won in my pocket pretty scarce, as I am in a reasonably rural province.



5) When asked if you like "soybean noodle soup" discard any visions of steamy broth-laden vegetable and noodle and then say "no thank you." Imagine the milky remains of a bowl of honey nut cheerios, you know, that last bowl when all the powdery cheerios falls into the bowl and makes the milk not only sweet, but grainy. Then add julienned strips of cucumber, a whole lotta fat noodles, and a single soybean.



6) Anything not human is treated decidedly less than humanely here. Little girls threaten dogs with umbrellas (and said dogs subsequently flinch) at church when they dare to consider stepping in out of the rain. They don't like people wearing shoes in their houses; you can imagine what filthy, filthy people that makes animal lovers like myself, who for instance, sleeps with two cats and would care little if I had a dog and it came inside.



7) Generally, the mosquitoes here don't really like me, but when they go in for a bite, they invariably chew on my ankles.



8) Stick figures, line drawings, and liberal gesticulation work wonders to get one's point across, especially when one's dictionary is hardly comprehensive and all shared language has been exhausted (about 12 seconds).



9) I really don't like plates of food that can look back at me.



10) Hanging squid out to dry, with clothespins, on the clothesline, right next to the towels, is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.



11) Looking like a westerner and smiling and saying "I don't speak Korean" is not enough to dissuade old ladies from speaking to you in it regardless.



12) A bow and a nod go a long way.



13) I am fluent in family.



14) Six hours of church won't actually kill me.



15) But, with few exceptions, the bible still pretty much manages to evoke at least a low-grade irritation. If I cared more, it would probably piss me off.



16) Thunder was named such for a damn good reason. Wow.



17) Postcards are almost as difficult to find as international ATMs.



18) Koreans can tell you every health property imaginable in your food (onions are good for lowering cholesterol, didn't you know) but there are trucks that drive around town letting off huge clouds of gas (imagine a dense fog that covers an entire block at a time, so thick you can't see through your windshield, and that takes a good 30 seconds to disperse) which are either anti-septic, or pesticides, to kills germs and bugs. "Same thing," they say, "makes it clean."



19) I'd almost forgotten how much I love the sound of frogs when I'm drifting off to sleep.



20) I did not, however, forget that I love the smell of rain.



21) I can't recall what it feels like to be hungry. I mean really hungry. I hope to be so as much as possible, once I leave my homestay family.



22) Koreans like ice cream. A lot.



Well, that will do for now, I suppose.

somewhere between meh and moo

Though I am surrounded by rice paddies, I noticed the smell of cow the first night I arrived at my host family's house, just outside of Haenam. I've yet to actually see these cows, but they are baying into the night and listening to them is somehow of comfort. In Korea cows don't moo, they meh, or something rather like that. Cats don't meow here either, the yeown. And where someone from the States might hear bird or crickets sing, in Korea they only hear crying. But there are the cows and, Korean or American, they are chatty and smelly and I can count on that.

cheese custody

This will be a brief post. My brain is melting. But I wanted to share with you the kinds of interactions I am having with my host family.

host daughter: taste?
me: yes, ne ne.
me: mashi soyo (it tastes delicious)
host family: more eat

These people seem to eat every two hours. Not just my host family, but all of Korea. Three meals a day and lots of snacking. And any excuse for a ice cream bar, which, with this heat, I understand.

I learned that the inside a cloud phenomenon is a result of monsoon season. That has ended, but the clouds linger longer. Soon they will blow away and the skies will be clearer. It will also get to be about ten degrees hotter, throughout August. I'm not sure how I feel about that, to tell you the truth. And I like heat.

On my first day here, my host family stopped by a grocery store in Haenam to have me choose some food items to eat. I didn't know what for exactly, so I chose things, randomly, that I like: cucumbers, bell peppers, tofu. I was feeling like I needed some vegetable matter. They picked up a purple cabbage for me. I selected some eggs. They chose three kinds of breads. They wanted me to get cheese. the only non-kraft singles style cheese I could find was the brie and the Camembert, so I chose those. Breakfast has turned up all these items. And a strawberry salad sauce. It has been interesting, but good. Today, the cheese appeared.

host daughter, pointing to her phrase book: Can you show me how to eat it?

me: well, it's not usually eaten at breakfast, but sure. You slice it, like this, then you put it on some bread and eat it. (the bread is toasted white bread)

host daughter: [takes cheese and reaches for the strawberry-fig jam]

me: try it first without the jam, then try it with the jam.

host daughter and brother: [blank expressions]

host daughter: [wraps bread around cheese and takes a bite. wears odd expression.]

host brother: [laughs]

host daughter: [turns to computer translator, looking for the word she wants.]

host daughter: It tastes anything. [takes a second bite]

host daughter: Very good!

host brother: rapid fire Korean I don't know how to translate, even if I knew what was actually said.

You get the idea. After breakfast, Sinae turns to the computer again. She is searching for a word. Finding it, she turns around and asks me: "Cheese custody?"

I determine that she wants to know how to keep the cheese.

me: you store the cheese in the refrigerator. when you want to eat it, take it out of the fridge and let it warm up a little.

sinae: [blank expression. looks to brother.]
namho (brother): [blank expression]

me: when you eat the cheese, not cold. when you keep the cheese, cold, in the fridge.

sinae: Ah!

Just thought I'd share...

driving the point home, and the country

I don't know where to begin with this post... I feel I am at two opposite extremes with what I would like to convey. Do I begin with the sauna and the humorous encounter between eight nude American women and several of their Korean compatriots, or do I venture straight to the part where I am sitting in my homestay family's house wondering whether I will be able to avoid attending church four times a week with them?

Well, I'll start with yesterday evening, I suppose. Several of us decided that we'd rather skip dinner (if necessary) so that we could go to the second floor of the hotel to enjoy the sauna. There are two hot pools (one regular and one very hot one) and two dry saunas (again, one normal and one awesomely hot) and a cold pool. To either side are showering nooks, where you squat down on a very short stool, soap up and rinse off, before heading for the pools. The pools are lovely, with sulfur water I think, and very relaxing. We ended up doing yoga inside the hottest sauna-- talk about hot yoga!-- and alternating between the hot and the cold. The cold pool seemed to have something mentholated in the water; it was something we each felt in our lips and our lungs, but it felt good.

Toward the end we were wanting to scrub down, but didn't have anything. Missy saw a woman with some sort of scrub on her face and tried to ask her about it. The woman proceeded to smear this creamy mask-like substance (cleanser?) onto Missy's cheeks. She then brought the tube over to the rest of us and pointed it at each of us, then back at herself, saying, "mine" as if to indicate she'd like us to get it back to her. The women were quite friendly, actually, and animated. Cross-cultural communication facilitated through naked bathing. Not a bad practice, when you think about it, and it was nice because there was no sense of shame about bodies in that room. Very different from what one experiences in a girls' locker room back in the States. But perhaps the highlight, and certainly the most humorous moment, came when we were examining a strange platform over which red lights hung from the ceiling.

Missy and I stood there debating whether or not to press the shiny red button... who knew what would happen? We hesitated quite a bit, until finally, an older Korean woman came over to show us how to use it. She pressed the button, the lights came on, and she gestured for us to get onto the platform, which we did. But the three of us (because Claire had joined us by then) didn't want to lie down, so we sort of crouched there. This was apparently silly business, because it didn't take long for another Korean woman to come over to show us how to do it correctly. She put three towels down on the platform and gestured to us to lie down, which we did. But she kept gesticulating, mostly emphasizing whatever it was she war trying to tell us. She looked at Tara, who was standing nearby, as if she could somehow translate the message, which seemed urgent. Blank exchanges circulated among us. We had no idea what the woman was trying to tell us.

This seemed to frustrate the woman a little. She was standing, hips tilted forward, crouching ever so slightly, while still upright. She was very dramatic, insistent in whatever it was she wanted us to know that we were not understanding. Finally, exasperated with is, she reached out her open hand and slapped herself, but not in the face; she slapped herself directly on the mound of her vagina. Hard. The sound reverberated through the platform chamber. Missy looked for a moment as though she were considering whether or not we were being asked to mimic this gesture. When we still had confused expressions, the woman again turned to Tara, dumbfounded as to why we could not understand and why Tara could not make things clear. Tara gave it her best guess, given the action that had just occurred. "I think she wants you to turn around to that you are facing the wall and not the room," she said. So we did. This appeased the woman; finally we had understood that our naughty bits should not be exposed to the room as such.

Of course, once we figured this out we couldn't stop laughing. Was there really no other gesture that would have sufficed? Did we really all just experience a grown naked woman slapping her vagina at us? Certainly this is an experience I will never have again. We lay there, Claire, Missy and I, on the towels, under the red light, giggling uncontrollably. After a while, we decided that we had no idea what the benefit was of being under those lights. We weren't any drier, and we weren't quite close enough to be warmed by them. So, apart from looking fabulously like the cover of a 60s album, we weren't sure what the point of that particular experience was, so we got up to rinse off and leave. You can imagine this made for quite an entertaining dinner experience right afterward, when we relayed the entire event in detail.

So, now, today, I have met with my homestay family: Mr. Jo, Mrs. Koh, and their daughter Sinae (Shin-ay) and they are all very nice, though each of us has our nose in a dictionary trying to communicate. My Korean is obviously terrible, and the daughter's English is minimal, while her parents' is non-existent. She plays the piano and the drums, and her father is learning to play the drums. They all seem very sweet and their house is in the countryside of Haenam. The surrounding area is rice paddy fields as far as the eye can see. And the attend church four times a week. I am curious how this will unfold over the next two weeks.

I have told them I am agnostic and that half my family is catholic and episcopalian while the other half is atheist. I have not told them that the atheists tend to make more sense to me. But, I respect everyone's traditions and they seem good people, so I am keeping an open mind. I am hoping to use their church time to either write, or do yoga, things I feel a bit awkward doing around them. I am staying in their son's room, who is older that Sinae, but I don't know by how much; he doesn't appear to live at home any longer. I think dinner is almost ready, so I will be cutting this post short. Ad if this beast could be considered short. I hope you all are well. More to come later.

post from inside a cloud

Well, it only took three planes, four airports, and two bus rides to get here, but we've arrived and are staying in the Park Meudung Hotel in Gwanju (though, each city I've seen has an average of three different spellings, depending on the map, so don't take any of my spellings as fact) and have begun our orientation with the Jeollanamdo English Training Institute. It has become quite clear that our being here is actually a very big deal. We knew this, to a point, since our airfare was something like $1,500 a piece and there are 35 of us and the provincial government is picking up the tab. But, we had no idea how big a deal.

Yesterday, we met the Jeollanam-do Governor, a Mister Park Junior if I've got that correct, and there were news cameras and lots of photography. We have become the defacto ambassadors of Portland, Oregon and we are slowly discovering what exactly we are to do here. And, it's turning out, we are to be much more involved in the teaching than we were led to believe. We will be running one booth for the duration of our work at the Jeollanamdo English Camp, which means we will teach lessons on art, music, nature, science, math, etc. to elementary and middle school students every day. We think they have lessons planned and supplies, but we don't know for cerrtain yet. I know they thought we would have chosen which booth we would be working in, which we have not, because we didn't know. Obviously, the language barrier is presenting a bit of confusion, but they are taking this whole thing very seriously and are otherwise very organized, so I don't think it will be a problem. Besides, this will not be the first time I've had to do any sort of improvisational teaching. Still, wish me luck.

I've almost adjusted to the time change (16 hours ahead of home, so most of the time, I'm on a different day than most of you) and the weather is hot and sticky. We are literally walking around inside a cloud most of the time. Looking out at the sky, through the air out in front of me, it reminds me a bit of Ireland, in that the air is just different, thicker. You can see it and feel it in a way we don't usually. You can feel it as you inhale it through your nose. Looking out over the city at night, one might think it is a smoggy haze, but it's not. They are clouds. I'd seen paintings that give this sort of dreamlike impression, which I mistook for artistic license, but this is actually what the surrounding countryside looks like. We are almost always inside a cloud. Even when it is sunny. And, did I mention it is hot? It will get hotter in August. By about 10 degrees I think. I will be glistening and sticky for weeks yet.

Last night Abbye (one of the other girls here) and I were in the hotel gym looking at the back of the TV to see if I could plug B's iPod into it to do some yoga (thank you again for that B, I have already used it!) and then we caught sight of something interesting outside the window: a snack shack with moving chairlifts shooting out of the back. We decided to explore. Of course, not speaking much, or really any (hello and thank you are very limited in their use, but we've used them a lot) Korean, it took a while to figure out what the deal was. After much charades and broken questioning (imagine me waving my hands in a circular motion, then pointing up the mountain and making "look out at the view" motions, saying the Korean word for "where") we determinied that the chairlift took us up to the top of the mountain and back. Of course, we missed the part about us being able to get off at the top and look out at the view from up there, so we stayed on and came right back down. It was still an amazing view.

We traveled up through the trees, the sun had just set, and the higher we went, the more incredible the view of the city lights spread out behind us in the distance. A large bird flew out in front of us and the trees were alive with the singing of what I think are cicadas. So loud. The Koreans call this sound crying. Birds cry, crickets cry; they do not sing. South Korea is also a very philosophical sort of place. We had visited a garden earlier and were told to discard our pragmatic thinking and to use our imagination. They believe that to cultivate the mind is one of the highest and most important pursuits. We also happen to be in the province best known for it's cultural heritage, specifically for it's poetry and literature. I learned about sijo (short form poetry) and gasa (long form prose poetry and/or novels) at the Museum of Literature yesterday. So, as you might imagine, I am enjoying myself quite a bit. We find out what city we are going to today when we meet our Korean teacher/partners. We meet our host families this weekend and will stay with them for two weeks and two days before being transferred back to hotels in our respective cities. I am still hoping to make a weekend trip to Jeju-do, off the southwestern-most coast, near Haenam, which is said to be the Hawaii of Korea. I am also considering doing a temple-stay one weekend and living like and among Buddhist monks for a spell. It will surely all be interesting.

There is more, of course, and I'm still digesting it all. They call the vegetarians among us "the different ones" and assume that this means we eat fish. I am doing better than others in this regard, since I am no longer a strict vegetarian, but it has been interesting. I'm feeling sorry for the meat eaters, because apparently the rest of the world thinks Americans are extremely fond of beef, and so far they've been served it twice in one day, once as something resembling salisbury steak, and again as what we think may have been chicken fried steak. The meat eaters are wishing they'd get Korean food and not the Denny's special as the Koreans here have interpreted it. In any case, I am off to discover what we are having for breakfast today and then to begin our training.

Much love to you all.

twenty-one days

I will be on the other side of the planet in twenty-one days. Twenty-one days to complete the course I am teaching. Twenty-one days to figure out how to say a few necessary things to people I have little to no ability to communicate with. Twenty-one days before a 12 hour flight to Seoul, and then on to another city, and then another, with no idea where I am going or exactly what I'll be doing until I'm there.

What I know: it will involve teaching English to 9-13 year olds and I will live with a family I have never met in one of three cities (Damyang, Goksung, or Haenam). I am excited and nervous and doing lots of yoga in preparation for my time away. I will miss my kitties and my sister, who will be taking care of my kitties, and the beautiful Portland weather, and the five weeks of summer that I could be on a beach somewhere recreating the universe, or laughing uncontrollably, or maybe even kissing.

But, I'll have some good stories when I return, and a renewed sense of gratefulness and appreciation for what I love and am leaving behind. Plus, the tail end of monsoon season and lots of HOT humid weather to remember.

post in which the poet wonders

How is it that a whole school year has passed already? It seems not so very long ago I was freaking out about teaching composition and now I feel like an old pro. I'd also like to know where, oh where, have all the good apartments gone? Buster would very much like it if I could find him an outside to be a part of again. Minou, of course, doesn't really care so long as there is food available.

So, these are my challenges: lesson planning for a four week accelerated version of the class I taught in the fall; finding a fabulous apartment and moving myself and all my necessary stuff into it (I'm working so hard to get rid of the unnecessary stuff); a big publicity push at work; and planning for Korea.

The poet would now like a nap. For about a month. But will settle for unlimited massages and a few glasses of wine. And perhaps some fresh flowers from the farmers' market.

the fucked up truth

this is an act of public purging. if you don't want to think about a disturbing truth, please don't read any further.

yesterday, I was awoken from a dead sleep at 4:49 a.m. to the sound of a girl screaming, pleading for her attacker to stop anally raping her. I won't repeat her exact words, but suffice it to say that I heard each and every desperate word she cried out. I shouted out my window. I called campus security, who sent the police. I couldn't tell which room this was happening in. I couldn't make him stop. At one point the offending male shouted back at her, clearly irritated that she was messing up his game, saying, "I'm having some fucking fun!" Her anguished cries continued for at least two minutes. I learned that I was the ONLY person to call the incident in.

This fact, that so many fellow students, neighbors, ostensibly decent human beings, would sit back and passively let this happen is possibly what disturbs me most. No one knocked down her door. No one else even bothered to call the police. It has been twenty years since I was raped; it saddens me to no end that the world has changed so little since then. It pains me to know there was nothing I could to do stop it, to protect her, to help her clean up the mess. I did the only thing I could do, which was to report it and to give my statement, and that is only useful if she decides to report it, which most women do not. I can corroborate her story. I can try to put positive energy in the universe. I can choose to never let myself be a victim and to help others learn to own their power and to not foster victim mentality and the kind of toxic culture that permits things such as rape to be so commonplace. I am tired of having this in common with others.

As it turns out, this is the FIFTH rape in less than one month in the building behind mine. No action seems to be taking place to do something about it. Part of it (and I hate to play to sterotypes but here it is) is that this is a building largely populated with athletes. There are fights that break out in the parking lot, some quite vicious, every weekend. There are girls being raped, three in one night three weeks ago. This is athlete culture. This is our toxic American culture.

So, here is my request. Please tell the men in your life, the good, kind, respectful, thoughtful considerate quality human males in your life that they are recognized and appreciated for who and what they are. It does not go unnoticed. Ben-- this means you. Thank you so so much for talking me through yesterday morning. Christopher, this means you too. Heather will surely let you know. There are others: Frank, Riley, Rylan, Dave B., Andi, Dave W., Joshua, Wilson, Chris, Antoine, Jeff, Alan, Brian... There are fathers that are raising sons. There are others. You know who you are and I love you all. I admire your strength and your willingness to be both strong and gentle in equal measure. The world needs your compassion. Women like me, and my fabulous women friends, need to know you are in the world and are unafraid to be all that you are independent of what our culture seems to think 'being a man' is all about. Don't forget.

the black hole

Recently it has come to my attention that my left pupil is larger than my right; this is usually a sign of neurological trauma, ranging from a random cutting off of the blood supply due to a particularly nasty migraine to other, rather rare and disturbing things, like cancerous tumors pressing against the ocular nerve. I'd actually been noticing it myself, but thought that perhaps I'd been imagining things, especially because it is mostly noticeable in lower light when the pupils are more dilated anyway, but I didn't believe it to be real until someone else said to me, "hey, did you know that one of your pupils is larger than the other?"

Conveniently, in my work at the writing center, I have a weekly appointment with a man who is a cancer research specialist at OHSU and I thought I'd ask him whether I should be worried. Many minutes later, after he'd run through the litany of potential causes and thoroughly panicking me, he told me to go find a photograph of my eyes to see whether I could pinpoint when this change occurred, or if I'd had one larger pupil my whole life (a rare, but possible genetic condition). If it were something that had changed recently, there was a reason, and I'd need to get it looked at immediately.

So, I found a picture of myself taken when I was eighteen and, as it turns out, the left pupil was larger than the right even way back then. No one had ever noticed. Not my mother, not my boyfriends/lovers, not even me. My OHSU friend had said to me "It isn't possible that no one has ever looked into your eyes closely until this time?" (he's German) but truly, I guess not. Not really anyway. How could I have missed it all this time? Oh well, it would seem that I am in no danger of needing brain surgery any time soon, so that's a plus.

between the darkness and the light

I have not emerged from under the weight of all the work I have to complete before Thursday, but I am taking a moment to gasp for air. I've had a lot of things on my mind lately. I won't pretend to understand them all.

Earlier this week, I found myself thinking about love and cruelty. It's no secret that it is easiest to hurt those we love. But I wasn't thinking from this perspective. It was more about the dissolution of boundaries. About trust. I was thinking of the darkness we all carry within ourselves and how we can't truly be present with another in their pain, in their darkness, unless we have a firm grasp on our own. I was thinking of what it means to join someone there, to allow someone inside to see that part of ourselves and to trust them enough to be gentle. I was thinking that one would have to love me, truly love me, in order to be cruel with me. And that in the right hands, with complete trust, this pushing of the boundaries would not manifest in more pain, but would actually harness the power of that pain to liberate one from the darkness. Does that sound fucked up?

A dear friend once said to me that he thought anyone would have a hard time hanging on to me, because I really don't want to be caught. I asked B about this. Wouldn't I know, if I were to meet that proverbial "one" (letting go, for a moment, of all the crap associated with such a concept)? If I were to meet, face to face and heart to heart, the person I was meant to be with, would I not somehow just feel that and know? Don't people know such things? B's response was that yes, people know, but that I would not. I have, he said, too many doubts to be that certain of anything. This struck a chord with me. Am I so faithless? And, the truth is that, for the most part, yes. I believe in many things, in many people. I like to think I have faith in them and in myself. But the doubts creep in. They are poison. I have never had such blind and committed faith in anything and I slightly envy those that can. But how to rectify this? How to reconcile it with all the things I say I believe, and which I really do believe in?

I've had it in my head, I don't know from where, some saying I remember reading, or hearing about, that said, essentially, that when one meets their soul mate (again, casting aside all of the problems, misconceptions, and confusions associated with such terminology) they will not feel the chaos and giddiness that is typically related to new found love, but instead a profound sense of calm. I wonder then at my tendency to want to be swept off my feet, to swoon and gush and otherwise lose my mind? I am so eager to believe in those sensations, but rarely do those things work out. I have had good love, and very good partners with which to walk around in that love. I will not categorize my past relationships as failures because I am somehow still not in the place I thought I wanted to be. Every person whom I have loved or who has loved me has taught me something, usually lots of somethings, and generally quite important things. They have helped shaped me into who I am and give me the strength, daily, to push forward. I can only hope I have gifted them with something of myself and that this is a source of strength as well. I want to let go of the hurt, the misgivings, the confusion.

I want to be anchored.

I realize full well that such anchoring is largely my own responsibility. I cannot look for it in others, though often others provide exactly that. I need to seek out and discover what I lack, which makes me flail under duress, looking everywhere but right here, within me, to find some way of pulling me back down to earth, to keep me from drifting out to sea. I need to become my own anchor. I know this. And yet, there is still this dark space, on the edges of my being and right down in the middle. It is not necessarily negative, this space. There is power there; something which requires unlocking and mastery. It can drive the white light of all my other pursuits. And it waits, untapped, unharnessed. This place, it feels to me, has something to do with my need for anchoring. But I don't know how to access it. I don't know how to push past my own limitations, to dissolve my own boundaries, to love myself cruelly enough, passionately enough to access all corners of my own being and thus free myself from my own habits, ideas, and poor patterns that no longer serve me.

I wish to be uncategorizable. I wish to be worthy of one I deem worthy. I wish to unlock what I have inside, to become free, limitless. This is not to say that I wish to have no constraints, that I want to do what I want and damn everyone else. I simply wish for the limits I have to become conscious ones, the boundaries in place, chosen, not imposed from outside, and certainly not stemming from my own sickness, or weakness. I want to learn to trust completely. I want to be still, in that place of profound calm, without being pinned down or trapped in place. I want to finally and completely have faith.

a bit overwhelmed

Twenty-two essays and the accompanying twenty-two pages of required response, eleven grad student essays and the accompanying marginalia and full workshop write-ups, 28 poems to respond to each week, and all that I need to read and all I need to produce of my own work, comprise my workload in the next twenty days. This is what master classes are about and I asked for it. I like it. But I can't escape the chorus of "what did I get myself into?" that occupies my thoughts. I am tired all the time. And with that, I will sign off in order to practice Yoga for Fatigue. Appropriate.

sometimes it's you.

I'm not sure I know really what to do anymore with this blog. I seem to use it as a means of communicating with myself, working things through, processing verbally as I do, or at least linguistically anyway.

Syntax baby, yeah.

It's like an extension of my head. Sometimes, most of the time, I talk to myself. Sometimes I talk to strangers. Sometimes it's you.

In this particular sentence, it is Heather. Hi Heather. I hope you are well. I will call you later this week to see about an evening with the girls.

But usually, this is just a place where I write for the sake of writing something, anything, because that isn't always forthcoming in the areas of my life where it should be. But, is this a self-indulgent and pointless habit? Is it potentially destructive to more important and creative urges (as say, myspace, or computer games, or general internet surfing, or television can be)? Should I give it up? Should I refocus my energies elsewhere?

It wasn't even my idea to start this thing. It was B's idea. He thought I should have one and that I might benefit from the personal/public aspect. Like it was a dress rehearsal for something else. I don't know exactly, but he convinced me and here it is. Now what?

another benchmark moment

I've mentioned before, yes, that I enjoy the subtle pleasures that only MySpace can produce?

Here is another beauty:

Subject: hi

Body:

i like the strappy shoes pic, you have very pretty feet !

any chance of similar pics wth maybe a bit more leg ?

kane

~~~~~

Seriously? I get a foot fetishist AND a random, ridiculous message from a stranger all in one! Does it even get any better than that? I mean, the husband cheating on his wife who sent me a message to ask if I was his mistress, who then later followed up with me, post-divorce I assume, to see if I wanted to be friends with him, well, that is pretty hard to beat. But this comes close.

post in which the poet asks...

for a glass of wine, a massage, and a nap. In that order.