This, from that

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This

All this captures, I think, the fundamental truth that we can never adequately understand a human performance as a product independent of the performer. However outwardly focused the performance may be, its essential meaning includes the self’s development through its own exertions. We express ourselves not only to achieve something “out there”, but also because something “in here” drives us to it, and in the expressing we strengthen and deepen our inner powers of expression. As Kass puts it, “our genuine happiness requires that there be little gap, if any, between the dancer and the dance”. And the same principle applies to our assessment of the achievements of others: we rightly value every human expression, from the pianist’s recital to the scholar’s text to the quarterback’s athletic artistry, not merely as an external product, but as part of the unfolding revelation of an expressing self. Therein lies its ultimate significance. Conversely, whatever does not arise from the expressing self is not fundamental. There are, in the end, no worthwhile “things” in the world; there are only worthwhile doings.

from that via this made me think more about this. Which is good, I think.

And yes, I have subscribed to his newsletter. Heh.

Moving, virtually

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As part of the exodus (movement of jah people) of the Burningbird flock, the ‘bottle might be in for a hiccup or two as DNS changes propagate and the hamsters switch wheels and so on. If a comment or trackback goes missing, please forgive, and repost.

Thanks, as always, to my kind and generous host and friend, the ferociously, gloriously and undeniably female Shelley Powers.

Update : I think I’ve smoothed over most of the slight post-move wonkinesses, but if something looks broken, please let me know. Thankee.

What Are You?

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What are you?

No, really. What are you? If you stop to ask yourself the question, let it roll around behind your eyes for a minute, what kinds of answers do you get? Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Well, friend wonderchicken, I hear you say, I’m many things. I’m a human. I’m an American. I’m a writer, I’m a painter, I’m a mother, I’m a husband. I am my children. I’m a big fraidy-cat. I’m an alcoholic. I am a philanderer. I’m a survivor. I’m a thinker, I’m a lover. I am a Christian. I’m a woman. I’m a miraculous fowl. The possibilities are limitless, I know. We’re all many things all the time, and as selves die, new ones are born within us to take their places. That’s what makes life worth living, what keeps us from going snake-raping bonkers from boredom while we scamper madly around in our hamstertopias.

So, what are you first? What is the facet of your being that stands before — or behind, if you wish — all the others? What, to put it another way, is the part of you, of your self-perceived identity, that you cherish the most, that you would be the least willing to have cut away like a tumor, or wiped from your present or your past?

To be fair, I suppose I think of myself and define myself, if forced to do so in a phrase, as a wanderer, a seeker, a lover of the new and the outlandish. As a meat machine for saying ‘yes’. These are all the same thing for me. Were these things to be taken from me, I don’t think I’d be myself any more, whatever that actually is. Or even a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Your answers will differ, no doubt. This is as it should be. But I’ll bet that in response to my question above, none of you who took a moment said to themselves ‘First and foremost, I am my weblog’.

It is possible, though, that some chose as their centrepiece ‘I am a woman.’

Recently Shelley initiated some discussion about women in the digital world and whether and to what degree they (or more properly, the persistent textual avatars that are their weblogs, avatars that seem so often to be mistaken for the actual person in weblogging discussions) are or are not undervalued or pushed aside or whuffie-starved on the New Frontier. Not being ogled enough — non-pruriently of course — in our eyeball economy, not linked-to enough, despite the fact that they have just as many important and useful things to say as the wrinkly old Y-chromo dangler-waving oligarchs like myself.

I’m not sure I understand this, to be honest, and so my response may be off-target. I answered at the time she brought it up, off the cuff, that

Me, I’m less concerned with what I _am_ than with what I do, and what I say, both in life or online. This goes for my attitude towards others, as well.

I mean, I do understand that some women feel that some not-women are somehow unfairly barring them from the prominence they deserve, and that Women As A Group are under-represented in the Link Market, and that it seems natural to think that since we have a clear duality with women on the one hand and not-women on the other side of this Weblog Gender Gap, that it must be the not-women who are to blame, especially since we’re talking in the context of Power (if not power laws) here. As much as I am able with my feeble faculties, I do follow the train of thought.

But there’s a reason I asked the questions I did, above.

Although I grant that many women who read this may define themselves first and foremost as a woman, there is no real reason for anyone else, male or female, to look at them through that lens. In other words, I may think of myself primarily as a Pundit (like all these assholes), for example, while the vast majority of people I interact with, on the IntArwEb or elsewhere, may well think of me first and foremost as a f–kwit.

Now, if I am shunned and ridiculed because most people (rightly or not) think of me as a f–kwit, I can hardly accuse them of discriminating against Pundits, of withholding their sweet linky love because they are set on unfairly restricting the rights of Pundits to punditize! They’re denying me because they think I’m a f–kwit (or a Cheesehead or a WonderMonkey or something), regardless of how I want them to think of me.

Now this example was not intended to accuse anyone of being a f–kwit, other than perhaps myself. My point is this, and I apologize for the tortuous path by which I’ve reached it : on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, or cares. Unless you tell them, and even then, not much. That is, regardless of what you perceive yourself to be first and foremost, or fifth and hindmost, and quite probably regardless of what facet or facets of your identity you strive to push to the fore in your online persona in your weblog (which, to belabour the point, is your avatar and not your self) others will more often than not react to you based on what they perceive you to be. Not what you wish them to think. Would that they did.

And, further, out here in Textistan, I think it may be fairly said that your gender is less important as a cue for the way people treat you than it is back in the office, or on the bus, or on the street, even if you do make it a point of order. We are all more brain than gonad out here. Well, most of us are.

So, does being a woman (or a homosexual, or a juggler, or a drunk) come first for you? Fine. I have no problem with that, and I applaud the self-awareness that has led to that understanding. Does that apply for your internet presence as well as your Real Life Persona? That’s a fine thing too. But expecting me to interact with you in ways that are constrained or defined by the fact that you have made that choice? Don’t bother.

Shelley asked

Are women linked less because our voices are different? Are we not as confident when making our assertions and are therefore less quotable? Are we not as aggressive in our opinions, and therefore less interesting?

My answer, then, is that asking about women just doesn’t make much sense to me. Not much of an answer, perhaps, but the only one I have at the moment.

About a year back there was much discussion around the neighbourhood about ‘identity‘. I think of the above as a coda of sorts to that discussion. I was intending to come out guns blazing, but I have not, in part because I’m too busy for a fight, in part because I don’t think it’s something starting a fight over is going to help, and in large part because all that crap above notwithstanding, I actually do think that Shelley’s probably right.

The dominance of males at the Big End of The Hockey Stick in our extended weblogging family is a symptom, not of deliberate exclusion of women, for the most part, I’m certain, but of systemic undervaluing of the contributions of women out there on the streets and in this other place, this place which still bears the imprimatur of the button-and-lever gearbox mentality that men have made their domain, to the slightly disdainful laughter of most women, since the first wheel rolled out of control, bounced down the hill and ran over Og’s favorite goat.

I suppose the balance will change as the machinery becomes more irrelevant and the men less proprietary, as more women wade in and kick a few asses around the block, and the phallerati will lose some of their dominance. I suspect it is an inevitability. But for my part, I won’t be paying any more attention to anyone’s gender — even if they ask me to — than I do now.

Hanguk Hamlet

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It’s been a week of firsts for me.

I started the first job I’ve had in Korea where I feel like I am a valued professional rather than another Disposable English Monkey™ (parse, monkeyboy, parse!), and where I am treated (and compensated) accordingly. I did my first television interview, kicked interview ass, and got my first comments about how (inexplicably) good I seem to be at it.

Although I’ve eaten raw octopus before, I ate it for the first time seconds after it was killed and chopped to bits, in the casually cruel Korean style, tentacles wriggling obscenely on the plate, suckers gripping fiercely to the insides of my cheeks and my teeth as I chewed.

And tonight, I saw a Shakespeare play, on stage and in real life, for the very first time.

Not only was the play — a performance of Hamlet, directed by Korea’s most famous and lauded theatrical director, Lee Yoon Taek — my first Shakespeare, it was my first play in Korean too.

Not having much to compare it with other than a vaguely-recalled Death Of A Salesman about 25 years ago, it’s hard for me to say if it was a masterful interpretation of the material or not, but hell, I loved it. It was affectingly (and athletically) acted, beautifully designed, and, for lack of a better word, crunchy. Although I couldn’t understand more than one word in ten thanks to my pathetic efforts thus far in mastering Korean, I knew the story, of course, and though it may be sacrilege to say so, I didn’t mind the fact that my Shakespearan cherry-buster was essentially mime, with music.

I was wondering before we went if the translator would be able to preserve the music of the language, the rhythms and surge of it, in Korean. Sadly, they couldn’t, for the most part, not, I would assume, because of a tin ear, but because the music underlying Korean plays such a different song than the one that makes us dance in English.

The setting, at least in its cultural accoutrements, was Korean — the samulnori drums and percussion played a major role, and there were countless other references that anchored the performance firmly in Korea; in music and dance, in costume and prop, in set design and approach. The costumes were a mix of traditional Korea, ye olde Denmarke, and 20th century styles both modern and archaic. I was pretty sure that the suit that Guildenstern was wearing at one point was supposed to be a reference to the Japanese emperor during WW2, for example, although I may well have been farting in an interpretive windstorm on that one.

Regardless, I found myself wondering how many references I simply wasn’t getting, or getting entirely wrong. There I was, watching a play I haven’t reread in a decade, in a language I can’t speak worth a damn, chock-full of cultural references I almost certainly wasn’t catching, and I was in pig heaven! In part I suppose that was due to the Korean-crowd-pleasing song and dance routines, the swordfighting and the broad comedy, but not entirely, I don’t think.

What I mean to say is that there were certainly scores of well-educated Koreans in that concert hall who were soaking in the myriad subtleties in Lee’s directorial choices, in the deliberate linguistic felicities of the translation, in the references deliberate and merely fortuitous to matters of Korean history and culture in the dance and music and set design and in the ways that the actors delivered their lines, and whose minds were awhirl with the buzzing intelligence of this cross-cultural artifact. While I was just happily watching, with perhaps the thinnest rivulet of drool dampening my goatee a bit.

And it doesn’t matter. While their take-away from the performance was certainly different in perhaps every aspect from mine, and in both kind and degree the experience they had and the one I had were incomparable, it’s of no consequence at all.

This is why I could never have studied art or literature or film or anything of the kind at university. Because nobody has ever been able to convince me that even if (for example) you’ve studied a Shakespearean play for years, until you know the history and context of each and every nuance of the language and can name every innovation in every performance in the last 50 years, until your encyclopaedic knowledge of the author and his works dwarfs that of any other living human, until your wife has divorced you rather than hear another goddamn work about that scribbling bald f–k come out of your mouth….no one has ever convinced me that you the ‘expert’ are any closer to the kernel of the art than me, unschooled and unsophisticated, if I roll up to the show in my pick-me-up truck never having heard of ol’ Willy before, and leave the theatre 150 minutes later with my head ringing like a bell.

I’m funny that way.

This above all: to thine ownself be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Not Responsible

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Given that Koreans are inclined — except in those areas of Seoul where us freakish, hairy, buttery barbarians are commonplace — to stare unblinking, or point and giggle when spotting a non-Korean, and are also known on occasion (when they’re pretty sure we’re not in earshot) to make westerners-as-apes jokes, this made me giggle. I don’t mind the stares as much as I used to, unless I’m having a bad day. I’ll probably have to get used to it again, living out in the boonies as we do now.

Anyway, I am so getting this made into a T-shirt.

lessons learned.jpg

The writing is Japanese, not Korean, but that’s OK. I’ll get that added in later. [found at The Site Which Must Not Be Named]

The Move

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The move to our new locale at the other end of the country is complete, I’m freshly back online with a 10Mb/s line (comped, along with a host of other fringe-benefits, hooray!), and I’m off to Japan again (Osaka rather than Fukuoka, and staying at the Nikko on the company dime this time, double hooray!) tomorrow to get my sparkly new work visa glued into the passport.

My kornet.net email address is defunct, a little prematurely, so if you’ve tried to mail me within the last few days, it probably bounced. Send mail to anything your fervid mind can come up with at emptybottle.org, and I should get it. Claim an wonderchicken email namespace thingo now†! Supplies are limited, offer void where prohibited by law.

Pics and tangentially-related blather, coming soon. Stay tuned to this bat-channel.

†You know, or not.

Digital Revelation

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My birthday present this year, back in early August, was meant to be a digital camera. I’d done my research and come to the conclusion that the best bang for the most minimal buck was the Canon Powershot A70.

Unfortunately, that was right around the time that I became unemployed again. This usually does not worry me in the least, but seeing as how I’m all adult and bewifed and all, we decided to defer the purchase of any non-necessary stuff until I got re-employed, which I recently have been.

Hooray for me, skyrockets in flight, doves are released into skies of deepest azure, the baby jesus laughs with glee, etcetera.

Point being, friends, that the camera was delivered yesterday, and it’s been well over a year since I’ve bought anything for myself other than food and beer, relentlessly frugal as I am and downright cheap as She Who Must Be Obeyed can be, and I’m like a kid with this thing.

Now I don’t know the first goddamn thing about Art and Photography and all that crap, I just want to use this amazing new technology to help me remember. As regular visitors to the ‘bottle may know, I’ve had me some Amazing Adventures, mostly lubricated with whatever chemical stimulant easily came to hand. The problem with that, unfortunately, is that in my dotage I have rapidly fading memories, and rapidly fading images in my brain of who I did, and how what and when I did what I did, never mind why. And very few pictures to help the stories emerge, when I’m in a story-telling mood.

From regret at this deplorable synaptic deficit, therefore, I’ve resolved and now have the technology to make images, on the fly and without expense, to document for myself my life. My Life. Starting now! Not unlike Matt’s new thang, or Shelley’s new photo projects and pursuits (and hopefully career), I guess, but more artless, naturally, and less public. I plan to share little things that I particularly like, but it can be assumed that they may not have anything like the significance for you out there, my friends, that they do for me. Me and my brainfarts.

I am interested in becoming more skilled at seeing, and at capturing images that approximate what I see, but that will come with time and practice, I hope. I have little of either thus far. In the meantime, though, what fun!

Here are a few for you out of the dozens I took today. I don’t know if they’re ‘good’ or not, and I don’t care. I like them and that’s all that matters at this point, and I’m thrilled with the effortless alacrity of it all. I hope you like them too, if only to help you get a better mental image of the place whose portrait I’ve been trying to paint with words alone.

Komedy Korean Kontracts

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[Update : It's a hoax. A good one, though, and not far off reality by any means.]

I’m busy with getting ready to move house again — yet again — and so haven’t written what has become my weekly essay here on this incarnation of the ‘bottle. In lieu of that, I offer you this Komedy Korean Kontract, which had me damn near peeing myself with laughter. This comes to me third-hand, and its veracity is possibly a bit suspect, but I have seen ones nearly this bad out there, so I’m just going to throw it up for your amusement and elucidation, dear readers. Be assured that Korean labour laws are being violated and loopholes exploited (like people frequently getting fired at the 11 month mark, arbitrarily, so the employer can weasel out of the paid return airfare regulation) both in fact and in clear future intent all over the map here. Not that they’re enforced or anything, of course.

There’s a goldmine in Korea! ‘Course, you’d have to be f–king loopy to actually go down in there…

Employment Agreement for English Teacher

This Employment Contract (hereinafter, the “Contract”) is entered into between Krazy Korean Konglish Institute the Republic of Korea, (hereinafter the “Employer”) and the native English speaker XXX (hereinafter the “Employee”) a XXX citizen residing in XXX

Article 1. (Term of Employment)

[1] The Term of Employment shall commence on xx/xx/2003 and end a year later.

[2] If the Employee or Employer wishes to terminate the employment contract prior to the date of expiration, the Employee agrees to have the final pay deducted to reflect the cost of airfare, recruiters fees, housing deposit early termination fees, utility shut off fees, and an inconvenience fee which is to reimburse the school the trouble that early termination causes both the staff, students and the school.

Article 1a. (Conditions of Employment)

[1] The Employee attests that they cannot speak or read the Korean language and that this will not change significantly during the duration of the contract.

[2] The Employee attests that they are of Caucasian (white) descent and that they have no blood Asian relatives.

[3] The Employee attests that this is the first trip outside their county of origin for the purpose of work.

[4] The Employee attests that they are between the ages of 18 and 28.

Article 2. (Salary)

[1] The Employee shall be paid 2,000,000 Korean Won per month.

[2] The Employer will deduct any and all Employer deemed necessary deductions, to include but not limited to Korean Income Tax and Pension, as needed on a month-by-month basis.

[3] The Employee’s salary will be paid at some time on the 10th day of each month. Where that day is a Saturday, Sunday or School Holiday, the Employer will pay the Employee on the next business day.

[4] A fee of 700,000 won will be deducted from the first pay check as security against damage to housing, unpaid bills, and sudden breach of contract by the Employee. After said employment concludes the Employee must submit in writing a request for the balance (if any) of this deposit to be sent to the Employee somewhere out of Korea. In no circumstance will this be paid to the Employee while the Employee is still in Korea.

[5] If the Employee has been absent from his designated work place without prior approval, the employee will forfeit 50,000 won per hour of absence. A 1-hour fee will be automatically deducted after the employee is late one hundred and sixty (160) seconds for any class.

Article 3. (Working Hours)

[1] The Employee shall teach 120 hours per month. In Korea, as well as in the rest of the world, 1 hour equals sixty minutes.

[2] The workweek will be Monday through Friday.

[3] The Employee shall work any and all hours that the Employer specifies. This will change on a month-to-month basis.

[4] The Employer will pay overtime for all working hours in excess of 120 hours. The rate for overtime is calculated at 12000 Won per hour.

[5] That the Employer will require the Employee to work a different schedule during the government school vacation periods and other ‘special’ times.

[6] The Employer may change the working hours at will.

[7] There shall be a 10-minute break between each class regardless of how long said class lasts. In no event will a class be ‘split’ so a break may be taken. Employees are expected to behave in a professional manner and not leave the students unattended for any reason.

[8] In the event that the Employee teaches for less then 120 hours (7,200 actual minutes spent teaching) the Employer will assign various chores to the Employee to complete so as to be paid in full. An accurate count of all teaching minutes will be conducted on the 3rd Friday in the month. The following Monday the Employee will be given a list of tasks to complete to compensate for the lack of teaching hours. These tasks must be completed to the satisfaction of the Employer for the Employee to receive credit for them. Any tasks completed unsatisfactory or unfinished will be deducted from the pay.

Article 4. (Working Conditions)

[1] The Employee shall be assigned a classroom. Any decorating of this classroom, to include posters, is the responsibility of the Employee. It is expected that the Employee is a professional and, as such, will properly furnish the classroom with materials conductive to learning the English language.

[2] The Employee will be issued 2 (two) whiteboard markers every 3 (three) months provided a properly filled out requisition slip is submitted.

[3] The Employee shall be given a code to use the copy machine. The Employer assumes no responsibility for lost, forgotten, stolen, or misused codes. The code will credit the employee with 5 ‘free’ copies per day. Any copies over the initial 5 will be charged to the employee at the rate of 500 won per copy.

[4] The Employee shall be expected to keep the classroom presentable. This includes the floor, table, chairs, walls, door and windows. The employee shall empty the classroom trash at the end of each day. A broom, bucket and mop will be issued to the employee at the beginning of employment. These must be returned as serviceable or a replacement fee of 30,000 won will be deducted.

[5] The Employer will provide 1 internet connected computer for every 2 teachers. A login system will be used and tracking software will be installed. Any attempt to circumvent said software will immediately result in loss of login credentials. Additionally the Employer reserves the right to monitor and record any and all activities on the Employers computers.

[6] The Employer will offer a meal plan to the Employee. The meal plan will cost 9,500 won per meal at the Institute. This will give the Employee an opportunity to eat healthy and delicious Korean meals at a deeply discounted price.

[7] A list with all Foreign Employees names shall be posted on the first of the month assigning common area and school / Korean staff vehicle clean up duties. Those Employees with vehicle duties will be expected to completely wash and wax the vehicles they are assigned to once a week. Additionally the vehicles must be cleaned daily after the last vehicle has returned to the Institute for the day. The vehicle operator will make the final determination on vehicle cleanliness.

Article 5. (Housing)

[1] The Employer should provide the Employee with housing. Housing may include a leased room in someone’s house, officetel, apartment, or in a Korean type ‘Study Room’ or Yogwon.

[2] The Employer may provide temporary housing not exceeding 185 days until appropriate housing becomes available.

[3] The Employee may be required to share the said housing with anyone the Employer so sees fit.

[4] The Employee is liable and responsible for all fees, namely utility charges, gas, electricity, telephone, incurred whilst the said Employee is in residence.

[5] The Employer should provide the Employee’s accommodation with furniture, (one bed or rakuraku style bed, a tray or rack for hanging clothes, a few assorted kitchenware utensils, mini-refrigerator, bedding, washing machine).

[6] The Employee must take all due and reasonable care of said furniture and equipment, and that the Employee shall be liable for the cost of replacement to any equipment or furniture damaged in any way by the Employee.

[7] In order to conform to Koreas strict fire codes the Employer shall have the right to conduct safety inspections and fire drills at the Employees home at any time.

[8] The Employee may not change or tamper with any lock or safety device in the Employees home. There will be a 75.000 won locksmith charge if this provision is violated.

Article 6. (Airfare)

[1] The Employee’s economy airfare to Korea via the most direct route from outside Korea to the nearest airport near the place of employment will be reimbursed in Korea by the Employer.

[2]The Employer will reimburse half (50%) to the Employee on the first pay day.

[3] Where the Employee completes the contract as stipulated in Article 1 hereof, the Employer must pay to the Employee no later than 1 day prior to the end of the contract, the most current inexpensive return economy airfare to the country the Employee is a citizen of.

[4] Where the Employee is hired in Korea, the Employer shall roundtrip airfare for the Employee’s visa run to the nearest non Korean mainland Embassy.

[5] Where the Employee terminates this contract within 11 months of the commencement date, the Employer will deduct all the air fare paid to the Employee.

Article 7. (Medical Insurance)

[1] The Employer should pay the half medical insurance coverage of the Employee.

[2] That the Employer should provide the Employee a medical insurance booklet during the contract period. This typically (due to insurance company paperwork) is done around the 4th month of employment.

Article 8. (Sick leave)

[1] The Employee shall be entitled to 2 semi paid days sick leave per contract, calculated as one day per 6 months accumulative.

[2] If the Employee is sick they will call the institute and arrange to be brought to a doctor. In order to help the Employee with any language problems the Employer will and must remain with the Employee for the entire duration of said trip to the doctor. If the doctor and the Employer agree the Employee will be awarded a ‘sick-day’ at 50% of the specified rate of pay. If the Doctor or Employer deems the illness to be minor then the Employee will be expected to work that day. Failure to work that day subjects the Employee to the penalties outlined in Article 2 clause 5 for the duration of that day to include the lunch period as well.

[3] The Employee must advise the Employer in advance of the sick leave and expected duration thereof.

[4] Sick leave above and beyond the said 2 working days stipulated in [1] hereof, shall be unpaid.

Article 9. (Job Description)

[1] The Employee shall carry out all duties required by the Employer to (a) provide English language lessons to students and or Korean teachers.

[2] The Employee shall be required to work at any place of employment seen fit by the Employer. If travel is involved then the Employer must pay the Employee public transportation traveling expenses, and where travel exceeds 90 minutes via any one-way transportation, the Employer will pay 60% of the hourly wage for the said travel time.

[3] The Employer requires the Employee to attend any meetings or functions the Employer sees fit. These will not be compensated.

[4] During the term of this agreement, the Employee will accept, obey and comply with the instructions, supervision, training and discipline of the Director and any Korean staff of the Language Institute. These duties will include instruction for regular classes, administrative duties related to the Employee’s classes, student placement testing, attendance at scheduled instructors’ meetings and workshops and extra curricular duties (such as Bus classes, Lunch-time table classes, Field trip etc. would be included) as may be assigned by the Director. The Director is to set standards of performance for the Employee and is empowered to take reasonable steps necessary for assuring that those standards are met.

[5] The Employee will sign a ‘no compete’ contract stating that they will not teach any students not specified by the director and if they break the contract, agree not to teach English in Korea for a period of 5 calendar years.

Article 9a. (Employee Conduct and Appearance)

[1] The Employee shall post a ‘code of conduct’ in the teachers break room that shall be followed by the Employees.

[2] Breaching this code of conduct will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. However the minimum fine for a breach of the code is 75,000 won.

[3] The code of conduct is in force 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

[4] While in Korea the Employee is the public face of the institute. To that end the employee’s behavior has a direct effect on the perception of the institute by other Koreans. Damage to that perception will be dealt with severely harshly.

[5] In order to maintain the good will the institute already enjoys in the community the institute will hold bi-monthly ‘fun days’. These special days will always fall on a Friday. During that day the Employee will entertain prospective students during the regular workday. This entertainment can include taking part in a pie toss, the application of performance make up and the wearing of costumes, participation in the ‘dunk tank’ event, and other activities as required by the director. A special meal will be provided at the conclusion of the event, free of charge.

[6] A de facto professional dress code will be enforced for all foreign Employees. A poster displaying proper work attire will be displayed in the Teachers break room. Teachers who vandalize this poster will be fined 30,000 won.

[7] Employees must be ‘camera ready’ at all times during the workday as there will be sporadic photographs and video shot during the year.

[8] Male employees will shave daily. Male employees will take reasonable steps to ensure that their personal odor will not become disruptive.

[9] Female employees will take all reasonable steps to ensure that their personal and menstrual odor does not become disruptive.

[10] Employees will wash their hair at least once every 2 days and maintain proper nail hygiene at all times.

[11] Employees must endeavor not to dramatically change their appearance during the period of Employment. Planned significant change to the Employees physical appearance should be discussed with and agreed on by the director in advance of such change.

[12] Employees shall refrain from consuming alcohol during the week and shall never use illegal drugs while employed at the institute.

[12a] Additionally a 12 am curfew will be imposed Monday to Thursday to ensure that the Employees are receiving the proper amount of sleep.

[13] Employees may be randomly screened for the use of illegal drugs or the presence of communicable diseases, to include AIDS, by blood test.

[14] Single employees shall refrain from engaging in romantic relationships with Korean citizens while employed at the institute. Interracial dating is still a social taboo in Korea and reflects poorly on the Employee and the institute.

Article 10. (Vacation)

[1] The Employee shall be entitled to 5 working days annual leave per contract.

[2] The Employee shall be entitled to all public holidays stipulated on the official institute yearly calendar. These may vary from those holidays specified by the government.

[3] That where the Employee has worked the entire contract without absence, the Employee shall be granted a lunch at ‘Carne Station’ (various locations in Seoul) with all you can eat of food and beverages that are normally offered during lunch to be paid for by the Employer.

Article 11. (Termination of Contract)

[1] The Employer may terminate this contract upon any serious occurrences

[2] In the event that the Employer terminates the contract for a serious reason the Employer shall pay the Employee up to the date of termination minus any and all expenses previously referred to in this document. Additionally the Employees visa shall be cancelled within 24 hours. The Employee will vacate the apartment prior to any money being paid to the Employee.

[3] In the event of clause (a) termination, the Employer may terminate the contract forthwith, and further, that the Employer shall, if this section occurs within 11 months of the start date hereof, not be liable for the return airfare of the said Employee, and (b) the Employer may seek reimbursement of the airfare paid pursuant to Clause 6 hereof.

[4] It is a condition of this agreement that the Employer must provide the Employee with 2 days written notice of Intention to terminate the Contract, setting forth the reasons therein, and allowing the Employee to remedy the situation within that time.

Article 12. (Renewal of Contract)

[1] As no contract renewal issue has ever been addressed this will be taken care of on a case by case basis rather then having a ‘policy’ to address it.

Yeah! Where do I sign?

[found at ESLCafe]

Death and Bali, A Year Later

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It’s been exactly a year since the bombing in Bali that killed my old friend Rick Gleason and 201 other people.

Is there a statute of limitations on mourning? Should there be? If we stop feeling that skip in the heartbeat and stab in the gut when we think of someone we loved who was killed, have we stopped caring? Should guilt then rush in? Should we try to leave behind our grief, and get on with it? What is left of the dead one, a year after they’ve gone, in the world? What do we learn from their lives, what can we learn? What have I learned?

A year on, I wish I could say confidently that I’ve consciously changed my life for the better after Rick’s death, taken the lessons his life and his sudden death taught me, plowed up some fertile ground. I wish that in the decisions I’ve made in the intervening twelve months, a reflection could be seen of some nebulous tribute to him, and the things we both believed about life. Maybe it’s there, and I can’t see it. When you’re too close to the mountain, you can’t see how high it really is.

I’ve lived my life with death all around me — not in the way that the billions of poor people on this planet do, perhaps, with family members dying slowly in the corner of the shack, or ripped apart under American bombs — but with frequent visits from the reaper, until he became a familiar presence in my life, neither feared nor hated. I have no fear of death, but I resent it, and the curtain it throws around our brief little lives.

My father died when I was about five years old, my younger brother, right in front of me, a few years later. Aunts and uncles, great- and otherwise, died with regularity through my teens, as did my dearly-loved maternal grandfather. The rest of my grandparents were gone by the time I was in my mid-twenties, and then my step-father, who’d married my mother not long after my father’s death 20 years before, also died. I have friends who never lost a family member or dear friend until their mid-thirties, for whom Rick’s death was a shock more singular, and I always wondered how they thought about death. Did they fear it? Do they hate it more now, or less? Do they put it from their minds, and go on with the humble daily things, keeping the stink of terror well hid?

Scars were left on me in the wake of those deaths in my young life, furrows and welts in my brain some of which are even now just working their way into the light. This is as it should be. My great and abiding love for the drink, moderated and benign as it has become in my later years, as much passed on genetically and nurtured environmentally as it may be, certainly has some roots there. My fear and loathing of the very idea of having children, absolutely. My carefully-chosen expatriate existence, yearning contrapuntally as I sometimes do for the deep, cold coniferous forests of my youth. The vigour with which I counter those who I perceive to be attacking me, yes. All of these and more. I have made my peace with the ghosts, made it many years ago, and carry my wounds with awareness and a quiet understanding that what happens is good by virtue of the sheer fact that it has happened, and that to claim otherwise and rail against our experience is to refuse life, and shrink from it. To say no, rather than yes.

But Rick’s death marked me, more than I could have expected. I still feel that weightless skip in my heartbeat, that stab in the gut, when I think of him. One year on, there are more questions than ever, about what my life is to mean to me, and what it has meant. About what is important, what is indispensable, and what is good. About how to reconcile a love for individuals with a deep, heart-squeezing loathing for humanity, and particularly for the sort of people that knocked down the World Trade Centre, that set the bomb in Bali, and that ordered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. About the preachers and the haters, the ideologues and the god-fearers, the killers and the martyrs, and about how deeply stupid and damaged, greedy and afraid they must be.

And in the end, of course, I’m left with more questions, and I’m left with a rising knot of choking rage and resentment that I consciously push down, squeeze back, and try to transform into something useful, into words and actions that don’t feed the killer monkeys, that keep the bloody chaos at bay, and I’m not usually very successful.

I said this, about 18 months ago, long before my friend’s death :

To regard the death of those you know and love as a natural thing, to turn the painful experience of their loss into something that enriches and strengthens your own life (because, face it, they ain’t got one anymore) – that’s the mostly truly reverant eulogy and memorial one can make. Which is trite, perhaps, but people seem to forget it, again and again.

and I suppose I still believe it to be true.

But Rick’s murder marked me, more perhaps and nearer the surface than any death I’ve lived past since I was very young. I suppose I am a better man because of that mark. I would be a happier man, and one less uncertain and questing, if it had not happened. Would that Rick were still walking around in his loose-limbed way, falling in love at the drop of a hat, laughing and drinking and seeing. Would that he could share a drink with me tonight.

But that is not the way it happened, and I’m still not sure of how to live with that.

Biting Through Meat

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The sound that is made when you are biting through your own flesh is a little like that of thick rubber being torn. It’s wetter, and when you hear it inside your head, it’s kind of terrifying.

I bit a hole about the size of a dime deep into the top of my tongue, near the centre, the other day. I don’t know how the hell I managed to do it. I was eating some soon-dae (potato noodles spiced and stuffed into pig intestines, with boiled, sliced organ meat on the side – tastier than it sounds) when suddenly the molars on the right side of my mouth met a bit more resistance, there was that odd sound, loud enough that my wife beside me started and stared, and the hot, salty flood started. No pain, not right away.

I went to the bathroom and let a mouthful of blood pour out — a real Wes Craven moment, which made me once again wish we could afford that digital camera I want — and had a look. Great meaty flap, deep hole, reddish-black blood gushing out. Cool.

I hate doctors, so I applied ice and didn’t eat for a few days. The nub of flesh that pokes up out of the scar and the crater beneath it will be with me for life, I suspect. This is, in its way, good.

The sound that the small bones in your foot make when they break are not so much a crunch as a crack, startlingly loud. About 3 months back, I drove the corner of a doorjamb between my third and fourth toes on my left foot as I walked calmly into the bedroom to get the ironing board. Broke both toes, and a couple of bones in my foot as well, judging by feel. I did the ‘apply pressure/apply ice/elevate above your heart’ routine to minimize swelling, and bound the toes together.

I hate doctors, so I self-medicated, went back to work the next day, and limped around for the next 6 weeks or so while my foot slowly changed colour. I don’t think some of the bones set properly, and the area is still a little tender if I poke or prod it the wrong way. This is, in its way, a valuable reminder to watch where the hell I’m walking.

I’m not sure precisely what led me to my wholehearted loathing of the medical profession, although I do have a few ideas as to the antecedents.

My hometown, an island of a couple of thousand brave and drunken souls isolated in a sea of trees way up in the part of British Columbia where the map merely notes ‘Here Be Monsters,’ was served by an odd, sullen, ragtag crew of medical practitioners over the years I grew up there. Most were South African, and were bound by contract to be there in order to get their residency in Canada. How much our town benefitted from the Immigration Department requirements that doctors migrating to Canada spend their first few years dealing with family violence and alcohol-related injury in the Boonies was debatable, perhaps. Still, they were a novelty, with their funny accents and poorly disguised, simmering resentment.

I particularly remember one Vietnamese doctor who was, in fact, one of my favorites (and a rarity in a town where there was precisely one Asian family – the Chinese folks who ran two of the half-dozen restaurants), and who, thanks to his redneck comedy gold inability to pronounce /r/ and /l/ according to my expectations, precipitated one of the funniest conversations in which I have retrospectively been involved when he handed the 10-year-old me a plastic cup and a small wooden ice-cream spoon and asked for what I swore was a ‘stew’ sample.

One of the various medical mistakes, blunders, and life-threatening f–kups (back before the first thing I did upon injuring myself was Google up some advice) that I was either the victim of or a witness to was, for example, my bottomless prescription for tetracycline (a broad-spectrum antibiotic) as a teenager, intended to combat the Aetna-shaming eruptions that my face and body produced. Not on-and-off, but on, for years, nonstop. My body, strong as it is, is still paying the price for that. And this was in the early 80′s – not before medical thought had come around to understanding that continual massive doses of antibiotics might just have a deleterious effect on the patient overall.

My step-father, who pulled Dad Duty from not long after my father died until about 20 years later, died, I am certain, as a direct result of the interactions in the cocktail of drugs prescribed by his doctors — by this time another ragtag gaggle of Africans, mostly — but not after going quite mad beforehand. Or if not bibbledy-bibbledy mad, so far sunk into full blown paranoid delusions that it was painful to carry on a conversation with him on anything but the most trivial matters.

My current step-father, ‘Ol’ Number 3,’ a tough, boozy, no-bullsh-t ex-cowboy, experienced runaway heart fibrillations and tremors and pitty-patting for more than four months this year, to the extent that any kind of physical labor would sometimes make him lose consciousness. This was deeply embarrassing to him, and made life extremely difficult for him and my mother. He visited the docs over and over again, several times a week, a situation made more difficult by the 140 km of unpaved road between the fishing lodge where my folks live and the nearest town. Bamboozled, they merely scratched their heads in confusion, and ordered more tests. Finally, after months of this, unable to take it any longer, he just stopped taking his meds (including the new ones the doctors had prescribed), and the problem simply went away.

(There are more stories, and I’m sure you have a few too. C’mon – share!)

To hell with doctors. They can keep their pills and their guesswork. Unless I need a limb sewn back on, I’ll be taking care of myself. This attitude draws great chagrin from the wife, who is a big believer in the power of The Doctor, like most Koreans I’ve known, who tend to run in panic to the nearest doctor (and Korean doctors are a worry in and of themselves, let me tell you) if something flies out of their noses when they sneeze.

I tell her that whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. I’m certain, as she shakes her head in annoyed bemusement, that in her mind she replaces ‘stronger’ with ‘stupider.’

I can live with that.

Retail Rituals

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In Korea, there’s F-Mart and D-Mart, L-Mart and G-Mart, and the current top dog of the X-Mart retailers, E-Mart. They are all much of a muchness, and are a microcosmic case study, I suppose, of the Korean predilection (and skill, it must be said) in taking someone else’s idea (in this case, a household goods retailer, K-mart (of course)), reshaping it for the Korean market, and barfing it out again, adding only the most cursory Groucho-glasses-and-nose disguise.

Yesterday we went to the nearby E-Mart to do some shopping, pick up some beer, and generally engage in the Retail Ritual. The Retail Ritual calms me, these days, if it’s in one of these huge ultramodern, brightly lit stores. Odd, for an old hippiepunk like me, who has little good to say about our marketing-driven civilization.

That said, I loathe shopping for anything other than food, so I guess I can still fly my freak flag proudly. And although stores like Walmart and Costco are a scourge on the landscape back in North America, sucking the life out of smalltown centres, feeding low-wage, no-security, permanent part-time slavery, homogenizing the already desperately whitebread-and-mayonnaise landscape even further….that’s not so much the case here. The box stores sit in the middle of already existing major shopping areas, beside subway stops, and have the opposite effect, if anything, revitalizing cruddy areas and triggering some urban renewal. These stores also tend to employ women under better conditions and for better wages than they might otherwise receive in this sexist nightmare of a nation. But more on that later.

So the wife and I were trundling around with our cart, happily sampling and grazing and knocking small children down (well, I was the one knocking them down, and the wife was the one scolding me – she pretends to understand my aversion to the little bastards, but I don’t think she really does), when one of those spine-chillingly weird Korea moments happened, that nobody else much seems to notice or comment on, a situation which sometimes leads me to theorize that I’m living an extended hallucination in a goo-filled pod somewhere, fed imagery to pacify me by some higher machine intelligence which is extracting my life energy to run pachinko machines or some f–king thing.

[Note to self : try not to injure children, at least when SK's looking.]

Some facts first that will help explain, I hope, my flash of The Weird.

In Korea, like Japan, walking into a shop or restaurant will usually result in a hail of welcomes and other ritualized greetings from the employees. I hate these, but I must admit they make me feel all shiny and special too. I am a good consumer, and I really am welcome here, and I should buy something to celebrate that, I say to myself, before I realize their cunning ploy and adopt the anti-salesperson scowl that is my customary demeanor while in-store.

In Korea, it’s (and excuse the romanization, but I’m going for clarity of pronunciation more than the current textbook romanization) ‘uh-suh-ohseyo,’ which more or less translates to ‘welcome, and please buy lots of our crap!’ On departure, particularly if you have in fact purchased some crap, it’s ‘kahmsahmnida‘ or ‘kohmuhpsoomnida‘, both of which mean ‘thank you, and crap again’ more or less.

The other necessary fact to know is that upmarket department store chains like Hyundai or Lotte and also these more middle-class retails outlets like E-Mart and Walmart and Carrefour (and so on) all employ way, way too many people. Behind a typical watch-counter at Lotte, for example, you might see 6 to 8 men (always men, behind the watch counter, for some reason) loitering about, trying desperately to look busy, beseeching you with their eyes to please come and look at a watch or two, just for a f–king minute you rich bastard, come on …and then swarming up like Keystone-Kops-as-filmed-by-David-Lynch when someone does.

It’s good, in some ways, that so many are employed when they might otherwise not be, but you can be sure that the only way such a situation can be justified is by paying extremely low wages. The idea behind these clusters of clerks is that such heavy concentrations of service-people enhance the feeling — that wealthier Koreans, including the growing middle class, seem to just love — of being catered to by hordes of low-born types, grovelling before the shopper’s imperial whims. See also : Dynasty, Chosun.

Walking around the aisles of the supermarket sections of these stores is a hazard course of (usually) miniskirt-clad (invariably) young female product demonstrators, who want to give you a sample of coffee, or help you choose that perfect shampoo, and (usually) older (invariably) females in the fresh-food areas, cooking up some pork or slicing up some veggies, and inviting you to chow down, using the (invariably) plastic green toothpicks.

(What’s the female equivalent of ‘avuncular’? Damned if I know, but that’s what these fresh-food ladies are. Ajummacular, perhaps.)

The younger ones, the ones that staff the toiletries and dry-good aisles, are just plain goooood-lookin’, though, and pretty obviously hired on that basis, and apparently instructed to bend over, but demurely, whenever possible. Which makes astonishingly little sense, even ignoring the sex-discriminatory aspects, as the vast majority of shoppers are middle-aged women, who are unlikely to be seduced by the milky thighs of these miniskirted productistas.

Anyway. Any given row in the supermarket sections of these chains will house anywhere from a minimum to two to a maximum of six women, some of whom are apparently hired just to stand there and smile at people.

So back to the trundling and the shopping and the running-over of children. As we were rolling down the ramyeon aisle, the sixth or seventh repetition of the ecstatically faux-happy, 50′s-style E-Mart Song was coming to an orgasmic close, and there was a slight crackle over the PA, and a voice.

A female voice, one that was absolutely perfect in its unctuous, saccharine, mind-colonizing tone, oozing into your ears, grabbing whatever handholds it could find and whispering, irresistably : everything’s going to be all right, there there, just lay your weary head on my soft, perfumed bosom….

Anyway, this voice sweetly but firmly intoned ‘uh-suh-ohseyo.’ And every single woman employee in the place turned from whatever they were doing, as one, faced in the same direction, and repeated ‘uh-suh-ohseyo’ while bowing deeply, to nobody in particular. The voice paused a few seconds, then said ‘kohmuhpsoomnida‘, and once again, every single woman, matching the weirdly unnatural, woman-as-service-automaton voice, chanted ‘kohmuhpsoomnida.

This repeated perhaps four or five times, and you could hear the chorus of voices throughout the store. Nobody else even batted an eyelid, but I was just transfixed, with chills literally running up my spine. The Weird.

I know what the rationale behind it was, and understand that many Koreans really think that sort of stuff is spiffy, and are drawn to shop somewhere that shows that kind of rigorous employee-indoctrination methodology, but it was still deeply, excitingly Weird.

Of course, I forgot about it 5 minutes later, while buying beer, which was, after all, my secret mission for the day.

A New House and A Walk In The Woods

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I learned an important lesson about living in Korea today, and I learned it at the point of a gun, which may just make it stick for a while, for a change.

Most people who come to Korea to teach, whether at a hakwon (the catch-all term for the private-study schools that can be found literally 10 to a city block, catering to the monomania not for quality but quantity of education here in Korea, many of which specialize in English and employ most of the short-termers in Korea), or a university or foreign school, or in-house at a company, or somewhere else entirely… most of them are provided with housing.

This is, few actually realize, mandated by the legislation controlling E-2 (English Teacher) visas. Which is not to say that this legislation is universally obeyed (‘rule of law’ not being a concept that has caught on to any great extent in Korea thus far), of course, but it goes some way to explaining why the feared-and-loathed, almost invariably dishonest and money-grubbing hakwon owners actually do something that does not financially reward them in any tangible way. That is, provide housing for their English Monkeys.

There are some decent private schools around, and a fair number of goodish universities, at least in terms of working conditions, and they do occasionally provide their foreign employees with reasonable accommodation. Some very few go one better, and provide housing that is very comfortable indeed. This is the exception, rather than the rule, naturally.

Back when I was a bachelor in the mighty metropolis of Busan†, I lived for nearly two years — although I was working for one of the better schools — in a 3 metre by 4 metre closet in which there was room for a bed, desk, fridge, (and a few dozen empty bottles, of course), located right beside a textile factory. By right beside, I mean that my one window looked directly into a window on the factory floor, about 18 inches away. Right beside.

[†I liked it better when Busan was romanized as Pusan, and pronounced Poosan by foreigners, 'san' being the Chinese character meaning 'mountain', and I could thus refer to the city as 'Poo Mountain' and actually be able to explain why without being quite as longwinded as I am right now. 'Boo Mountain' just doesn't have the same sophomoric poop-humour ring to it.]

The chatter of hundreds of sewing machines didn’t actually bother me much, as I was too regularly and fully inebriated at that point in my life to care, and rarely at ‘home’ other than to sleep, anyway. Life was good, in a dissipated and decadent, perpetually-sozzled sort of way. It was the last gasp of a bachelorhood that was becoming less amusing, rapidly.

The last couple of years, though, have seen my wife (who I met as I was leaving behind that rocket-fueled lifestyle) in the lap of relative luxury, in Australia, and after our return to Korea, in the two large, brand-new apartments which were provided by the university where I worked until recently.

The other reason for schools to offer accommodation when you take a job with them — the one that people usually assume to be the primary one — is that it is effectively impossible to find your own, as a non-Korean. This is in part a manifestation of the blithe racism that informs much of mercantile Korea’s dealings with us hairy barbarians, and in part a reasonable response to the infamous behaviour exhibited by most GIs and many young, inebriate, wacked-out English teachers (of which I was once one, with a vengeance). Stereotypes exist for a reason, after all. Not what you’d call most-favoured tenant types, most non-executive expats in Korea. If you’re married to a Korean, yes, but alone : nuh-uh, unless you want to rent a room in one of the ubiquitous yogwan f–k-hotels on a monthly basis, which many single guys do.

I’ve known some of them, guys who were capable of ignoring the nasty omnipresent fug of stale semen and cut-rate detergent, the dim green and pink lighting (creating that ambience of a festive abbatoir that just screams romance) and the weekend puddles of pinkish kimchi vomit in the hallway, the drunken screams and shouts from 11 pm to perhaps 3 or 4 am each and every night from the short-timers. Better than we deserve, though, I’m sure.

So when my contract wasn’t up for renewal (for reasons that boiled down to my lack of over-demonstrative lovin’ for the baby jesus™, basically) last month, it was a particularly stressful time, as I was forced not only to look for other work, which would then allow me to get a visa, but to do so before the beginning of September, in order for us to actually have somewhere to live (and put our worryingly large collection of furniture).

The right job didn’t materialize, and in between our chicken-little panic-stricken thoughts of bailing to Canada, or Mexico, or Thailand, or anywhere, really, we decided the cheapest and wisest option was just for me to do a visa run to Japan (Canadians get 6 month tourist visas here, on entry) and come back, and to rent our own house. That sounds blindingly obvious to the good people out there in Normal, Illinois, I know, but being locked into the mindset of job=visa=house, it really hadn’t occurred to us. Plus, I was kind of keen on hitting the beach somewhere, somewhere other than Korea. She Who Must Be Obeyed had predictable thoughts on that idea, unfortunately, and the plan was dismissed out of hand.

So we wandered hither and thither and even over yon a bit, looking for places to live, even as I was going to first and second interviews with likely employers and finding them all wanting, in one aspect or another. Seoul, for those of you who might wonder, is not small. Hither is about 3 hours from yon, and thither is another couple of hours beyond that.

Anyone who’s been reading the ‘bottle for any length of time knows how much I loathed the industrial nightmare of an area where we used to live, nuts deep in garbage and banana-peel-slipping-around on the constellations of comedy throat oysters horked up by the denizens of Gunpo City, south of Seoul, near Suwon. It was true that most of the other places around the city and its skirts that we looked were somewhat nicer, but mostly only in degree. Unpleasant, of course, but less so. Not precisely enticing, particularly when I had been thinking along the lines of Koh Samui or Whistler or Zihuatanejo.

Until we found the area we’re living now. I’m telling you, angels descended and blew their tinny trumpets in my ears (not unlike the appearance of the choir invisible when I first used an electronic bumrocket bidet machine in Japan on my subsequent visa run) when we started looking around here. It is the first place — anywhere in Korea — that I’ve seen that shows evidence of actual urban planning, where things are built on an almost-human scale, neither crowded together like barnacles nor consisting of massive slabs of concrete looming over massive courtyards of concrete, brutalist Pyongyang penile-surrogate stylee. No, this area was clearly designed for cyclists and walkers as well as cars, and isn’t outright antagonistic to its residents, unlike most other places in Seoul I’ve been.

Seoul is a city (like every other urban environment in Korea) that hates its residents.

I could tell this suburb was different, though, as soon as we’d walked around a bit. About as far to the west of downtown as we were to the south in Gunpo, I saw the full bike-racks beside the subway station (something I’d never seen before in Korea, as there are few cyclists in most places, it being simply too dangerous and heavily trafficked to bother) and tree-lined paths winding through each block, expressly for pedestrians. Trees everywhere, in fact, not just on top of the fortunate stubs of mountains that hadn’t yet been leveled to feed into grinders and rise again as the vast human beehives where 70% of the population of the country live. Wide, straight roads. And, astonishingly, people who didn’t perform the ‘oh-my-god-he’s-not-Korean‘ doubletake that had left me so unwilling to dare set foot outside our apartment for the last couple of years.

Even my wife, who’s spent almost her entire 31 years in Korea, said she didn’t know there were places like this here.

So we found an apartment, in one of the newer style buildings that have started springing up all over Korea, geared to singles and young couples, called ‘Officetels’ in Konglish. Basically — and completely unlike the standard, cookie-cutter ‘apart’ concrete beehive family apartment buildings that rise everywhere out the earth like buboes on a plague victim — they’re like western-style apartment buildings, down to the gardens on the roof, the hot-water-on-demand, and the emphasis on sky-light, and air, and brightly lit cleanliness.

We found a small loft, with west-facing 4 metre windows taking up one entire wall, and rather than sucking car-exhaust from the perpetually-roaring highway that was behind our first apartment, or looking straight into the baby-factory slum windows over which our second apartment had a glorious low-rise, low-rent panorama, I can watch the sun go down out over towards the West Sea. I honestly never thought we’d live in such a lovely place, here in Korea. I hadn’t thought they existed, except for the rich in downtown Seoul, and on TV. We gave our huge fridge and washing machine to the wife’s bachelor brother, and left some furniture in the apartment for the new (cheaper and more malleable, more bible-thumping) university hire to use (rather than just chuck it all), and moved on up. To the top. To a deluxe apartment. In the sky-eye-eye.

It’s no Sydney, or Vancouver — hell it’s not even Toronto – but it’s pretty nice.

One of the only good points of our previous university-supplied place, other than the fact that we were first to live there and thus didn’t need to deal with filth, was the proximity of a small mountain ridge, up and along which we (and thousands of others, it seemed) could walk, escaping the apocalyptic vision, if not the all-pervasive noise, of the concrete wasteland that is Gunpo. That was pleasant, and walking there in unaccustomed green along the trail that wound its way a few kilometres along the ridge was enough to recharge my batteries, at least when there weren’t too many shrieking, pudgy children up there too, dragged away from their computers and compelled to exercise by their parents.

The new area, Songnae, has a few wooded mini-mountains within walking distance as well, and I resolved today, after failing to find my way through a military base to a likely trail at another nearby mountain to the west, last week, to attempt to find my way up the even closer megahillock to the south. The wife begged off, and I headed out, with my usual lack of preparation. I crossed the subway tracks – on the surface, this far from downtown – and wandered around for a good hour before I found a trail that led upwards.

The weather has been flawless for a good week after a miserable summer – unsmoggy blue skies, dotted with fluffy cumuli, hot sun cool shade. It was gorgeous today; the sun spattered through the leaves as the wide trail wound its way up to higher heights, at a much steeper grade than our old daily walk in Gunpo. I got past the thundering-heart first ten minutes, and fell into the euphoric groove that exercise almost always brings, when I’m out in nature, senses heightened, brain clear. There were only a couple of people around, trudging down as I headed up. Past small plots of vegetables the trail rose, and soon became almost alpine, studded with those massive, rounded rocks protruding from that tightly-packed, cafe latte-coloured dirt that always make me think of Korea and Japan. The perfume of pines baking in sunlight. I was happier than I have been in a while, and it was good.

I reached the first summit, and there were a number of smaller trails heading off from the glade atop the ridge, wandering off to various points of the compass. Thinking one might lead to a vantage point unscreened by greenery, where I could get a good look at the geography of our new home, I struck out along one of the paths, towards the sinking sun. I realize now that that military base I’d been unable to find my way around last week was to the west, too. You know, the direction I was walking.

After about 5 minutes of blissed-out traipsing along the trail, all Homer-in-Chocolate-Land, and before I quite knew what was happening, there were shouts in Korean, and as I abruptly came back to earth, I noticed in quick succession that: the clearing ahead of me had a tall chicken- and barbed-wire fence along it, that there various dishes and antennae and stuff behind that, and that the half dozen camo-clad Korean men approaching at a trot were all carrying weapons that I could only presume were automatic.

My crappy command of Korean being what it is, I had no idea what they were saying, but from their tone I could infer that they weren’t asking me in for a cup of tea. They were young, of course — just the age of many of my university students, and no doubt doing their two years of compulsory military service and quite happy to have pulled light duty sitting on top of a mountain somewhere. Nonetheless, their excitement coupled with their tendency to gesticulate with their guns was making me a wee bit nervous, I have to admit. In response to what I thought was an inquiry as to precisely what the f–k I was doing, I shrugged, and made the two-fingers-walking gesture, which in conjunction with a goofy grin and vacant swinging of the head, as if communing with butterflies, was what I hope was the universal sign-language for ‘just, you know, wandering around, being a nature-boy doofus’.

They peppered me with more questions in Korean, none of which I understood sufficiently to make any attempt at answering, in sign-language or otherwise, and eventually the eldest, who couldn’t have been more than 25 or so, said “OK” quite clearly, waved the back of his hand in the general direction of the trail along which I’d been walking, and said something in Korean which, near as I could tell translated roughly to “Get the f–k outta here, and you’re lucky we don’t arrest your ass. Sir.”

I got the f–k out, and continued my walk, no worse for wear, up into the almost-alpine and the green, blue and white, being extra-careful to stick to the main trail.

And so, my lesson for the day, one that all Koreans seem to learn at some point: stray from the well-trodden path at your own peril, smart boy. A lesson that came complete with a moderately-sized brown spot in my boxers, for punctuation.