So Ko in Autumn

Fall in Korea raced by in a blink of an eye. One day I was sitting in the subway station daydreaming in shorts and the next I was huddled in a coat staring glumly at the weather, my curse words frozen mid air. The Korean teachers look at me amused and worried as I scurry around school, my winter coat buttoned up to the neck, trying to keep my frozen limbs moving to ward off frostbite. Every morning I walk in the school doors and stare at the janitor in disbelief as he props open all the windows and doors in frigid 20 degrees weather. I haven't quite figured out the reasoning behind this, particularly considering the huge H1N1 scare...guess there's more than one way to carry out population control in this country! Teaching is coming easier to me. There are some seriously precious students who bring me rice treats and hand me hot canned coffee to warm my hands with during the morning bus ride. First grade has weaseled their loud rambunctious way into my heart mainly due to the fact that when I collapse from exhaustion in a desk chair three little boys run over to resuscitate me with a back, arm, and leg massages. I fell in love in 2.5 seconds! I'm taking all three of them home with me! This living in a different country can have a strange effect on a person. I've never felt very possessive of American fast food,in fact, i've always thought it was highly offensive when foreigners assumed that all there is to American food is McDonald's and Pizza Hut. But then again no one has ever tried to steal them away from me before either. The first time i saw the shocked look on peoples faces when I said McDonald's started in the U.S, i thought surely this was just a fluke, Korea is far from the epicenter of junk food. The second and third time however is far from just a mere mistake! What are they thinking trying to claim McDonald's as their own?! Now I just want to tell them to get their own fast food joint and leave mine alone! I may refuse to ever eat at one of those places, but all us American products, esl teachers and fast food joints alike, have to stick together! =) It's hard to believe I've only been here 70 days and look what it's already done to me!

Jeju-do

As the morning light crept from beneath the clouds, I snuck out onto the Backpacker Hostel's rooftop balcony, nursing a cup of coffee, and watching Jeju island wake up. People dressed in suits and ties sped by heading to relative's houses for the Korean holiday, Chuseok.
Our first day on the island, we found an open air market as we wandered through the small town. Vendors and little old ladies sat selling strange looking dead fish and sea creatures, veggies and fruits, kimchi and beans and slabs of meat hanging in store windows. After exploring and taking pictures for hours we picked up some fruit for the road, rented bikes and took off 2hrs down the coast for a warm sandy beach. The entire southern part of the island is a maze of nectarine orchards and greenhouses situated against the deep blue of the ocean. It is beautiful and rural with rolling hills and mist shrouded islands just off the shore begging to be explored. After two hours on very uncomfortable bike seats, we finally made it to the beach. We napped in the sun in our bathing suits to the sound of lapping waves and laughing children and didn't budge until the sun turned bloody red as it prepared to meet the horizon. Just a side note, Jeju bike seats were not made for the female anatomy or any human anatomy for that matter! When you make a date with a seat you intend to spend hours on you most definitely need to try it on for size, penetration, and cushioning or you'll end up like us at the end of the day, howling at every tiny bump in the sidewalk with our beach towels wrapped around the seat for cushioning and all three of us leaning as far back as possible with our knees sticking out at odd angles trying to un-squish what had already been squashed. It was absolutely pathetic. We literally couldn't sit properly for days! The last day of our stay in Jeju we hiked up Halla mountain, the volcano whose explosion and lava flows created the island. It was an 8hr hike round trip and all told about 15miles. Our 5 days on Jeju were wonderful and we packed a sunburn and sore muscles home with us on the plane.

Seoul City

"Not all who wander are lost"

The apartment is quiet tonight after our busy weekend and the words begin to flow. Doekso still buzzes and bumps outside my open window and the smell of laundry detergent and fried seafood waif up from the streets. The routines of my days are beginning to settle comfortably inside these walls. I am beginning to feel at home in this foreign country. I have become acquainted with the habits of this place- the lines of old men that occupy the park benches in Seoul on the weekends, holding their hats and canes, and passively watching the busy world wiz by. They sit at the foot of an ancient palace and their lined, winkled faces tell their own portion of Korean history. Or the lines of hikers that file into the subway cars and stack up like sardines, each dressed identically, their serious hikers outfits complete with ski poles and backpacks. The road signs are starting to semi-resemble consonants and vowels instead of decorative lines and designs and it no longer alarms me when an old men sits beside me on the subway and jabbers aimlessly to me knowing I cant understand a word or offers me red ginseng candy.
Today we took the subway into Seoul, crammed into the train cars. We wandered the streets picking up treats from local food vendors and curiously peering thro groups of men to see them haggling over watches or food or my personally favorite, dried dead snake carcasses. We discovered a maze of back streets and alleys behind the main thoroughfares where millions of shops are crammed in a seemingly themed order. There was the wrist watch alley and the tools alley, each shop filled with random odds and ends that spill out onto the street.
Late in the afternoon, we aimlessly turned down a side street that had rows of bars and restaurants. An old man came hobbling after us yelling "halloo." He smelled slightly of Soju, but his eyes were sharp and intensely fixed on his mission: me. He stared intently and asked us were we were from and we indulgently indicated the USA and tried to walk on. With tense perseverence he asked me in a garbled sentence if I were Jewish. That is not one of the top questions I am typically asked by strangers on the street. I stuttered for a few minutes trying to figure out what he was after and as his brow furled in confusion I finally admitted that yes, thro a strange convoluted line, I was sort of Jewish. He hooted in glee and clapped his hands and said he had known it was so because of my narrow nose, and he gently squeezed between my eyes, and because of my deep set eyes, he traced the indentation above my cheekbones. We smiled relieved and amused as he chortled about how happy he was to meet a Jew and about Israel's strength and the evils of Hitler. I gathered that he felt that Korea had shared a similar struggle in their fight against Chinese and Japanese occupation. Finally he released my hand and bid us goodbye and headed eagerly back to his friends to tell all about how he met a Jew on the streets of Seoul.
Our first goal in the city was to find Starbucks coffee. You don't understand how important this was. It's not exactly that we are coffee addicts (although for me at least that's debatable), but it was something about how Starbucks stores feel and smell the same regardless of the country. Plus, the only coffee we've been able to get our greedy little fingers on over the past week is this sort of dehydrated coffee that only tastes sort of like coffee if you squeeze your eyes closed tightly and pretend. In our mad search for little America aka Starbucks we dashed to the center medium of a busy street only to turn and find a Starbucks back the way we had come. So there we stood in the middle of two way traffic in downtown Seoul with cars wizzing by, their drivers staring disbelievingly as we jumped for joy, waving our arms excitedly in anticipation.
After exhausting hours of wandering thro the city and probably only managing exploring a couple square blocks of an otherwise HUGE place, we hopped back on the subway and amused ourself with games such as count-the-foreigners (Seoul seems like a foreigner mecca compared to our small town of Doekso) and reffering tok our fellow passengers by the height of their stilettoes. We bought old movies and heaping two scoop ice cream cones and crashed on the couch for a sugar dazed evening with Paul Newman and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
The end!

South Korea

Annyounghasehyo!
I made it! After thousands of miles cramped in a tiny plane seat and becoming uncomfortably aquainted with my neighbor's eating habits and bad breath I finally landed in Seoul on a dreary overcast Wednesday evening. I live in an apartment stacked 19 floors up, in Doeksu, a bustling city one hour out of Seoul. Each morning i catch the 7:45am subway out to Guksu and then jump on a yellow bus that takes me back a potholed road to my school, Yangseo Elementary. I am writing you from my classroom which smells of new wood and hums with the sounds of cicatus outside my open windows. It's a tiny school surrounded by mist covered mountains, lakes, and rice fields. The textbooks are a jumble of Korean and English with an online element and a teachers manual that is almost entirely in korean. Figuring out exactly how their system works will take some work, but I am excited and the children are adorable and try to teach me Korean as I try to teach them English.
I have now been here a little under a week and am starting to feel at home. So many things are similar to the U.S., which makes me feel closer to home than I acutally am. Today I feel like a prized pet that was just taken to the vet and poked with a thousand needles! All alien's must be in good health to get their alien card. It's a strange feeling to be called an alien, it always conjures images of little green men, but I guess in Korea I am essentially a little green man -er woman. My height and size alone makes people stare at me and I swear the restrooms here were made for midgets. The sink barely comes to above my knees and I have to squat down to see anything above my elbows in the mirror. The bathroom also sings to me when I walk through the door in the morning. Classical music blares from the speakers, for what reason I am not sure, but it definitely makes the bathroom experience more zen!
Ok back to my original story, so yesterday I was taken to the hospital for a medical exam and they poked and prodded and dressed and undressed me looking for health imperfections.They took my temperature which apparently was one degree higher than normal and went bonkers. They put a mask on me and sent me to the h1n1 testing room. They got out their needles and sent there most inexperienced nurse to poke holes in me. Ok, she maybe was not the most inexperienced, but my viens thought so! Afterward as I was hobbling around trying to maintain pressure on the holes in both of my arms, they thrust a pee cup at me and pointed to the restroom. This would not have been so daunting if I had not been so recalcitrant about drinking water that day as well as still rediculously dehydrated from the 14 hour flight. I sat on the pot for hours counting tile, daydreaming about Yosemite rivers, imagining water drops...anything! But nothing happened. In desperation I started chugging cups of water that the poor teacher, sent to assist me, snuck from the waiting room in the hospital. And finally there was a dribble of success! =) After hours of tests and demanding bodily fluids from my stubborn body I was finally sent home where I crashed on the couch with images of needles and strange Korean symbols rolling thro my brain.
The first few days have been challenging, but in all this is such an exciting adventure!

P.s.
Pictures to come, I swear! As soon as we figure out our internet situation at the apartment.

Yosemighty

It is a moment in my life where everything is at a precpice, waiting for a good shove in the right direction. While my visa was getting processed in LA for my year long stint in South Korea, I explored Yosemite and a friendship I thought I'd lost, and spent some bonding time with my aunt and Jeanne at their horse ranch. The roadtrip was full of magnificent landscapes and special memories.