Halloween in Seoul

I said I’d mention Halloween and I’m only a couple weeks late. Go me.

It kind of goes without saying that Korea isn’t exactly into Halloween. To my surprise, there were some decorations and things in a few of the bigger stores. You could buy some small items, but costumes were few and far between. I did Halloween in Italy, so I was kind of prepared for that. Unlike in Siena, I was actually able to find a few things, so it wasn’t just a scavenger hunt through other peoples’ clothes.

I was a fairy. It wasn’t much of a costume, but it was enough for school. We celebrated Halloween at my school, and it was rather awesome. For the morning classes, we had the children do pumpkin piñatas, face painting, and scary stories. The best part was the “Ghost House.” They took my room for the Ghost house, and we put up black trash bags and made a labyrinth. Then they proceeded to scare the children mercilessly.


I did the face painting. It was kind of fun, even though I was really bad at first. One group of boys wanted Power Rangers (they were just stick figures when I did them) and that was rough. After that, I kind of pushed spiders and lightning bolts. I know the boy doesn’t look all that happy in the picture, but after the wicked lightning bolts I gave him he perked up.

For afternoon classes, we got to be in the Ghost House while our own classes went through. Not to worry those at home, but everyone enjoyed scaring the pants off our kids. Naturally, the most evil child in our school (who happens to be in one of my classes) took advantage of the dark to punch a teacher (not me). Other than that, though, it was really fun. My oldest class also reacted the most. Some of them actually refused to go further than the door. This contrasts sharply with the youngest student I had, who just wandered through the place, calm as you please.


I included a picture of most of the teachers at my school. We have a haggard bunch of costumes, but some of them are pretty cool. The creepiest one was the cowboy. The funniest was the guy dressed as a hiking Ajussi. On the weekends, the subways are inundated with hiking couples (Adjuma is an older woman, Ajussi is an older man) dragging huge backpacks and hundreds of dollars in equipment. People didn’t know that he was in costume (he has a flame handkerchief over his face in the picture), and strangers asked him where he was going to hike.

We went out on Saturday night. H was Waldo (Where’s Waldo), which I thought was a really inventive costume. It turns out there were about five other Waldos. It was kind of like the Where’s Waldo with a whole host of people in stripes and you have to find the true Waldo. Except, you know, only five. D was even cooler: She was Sandra Park from 2NE1, a Korean pop group. If you’re curious about her Frank Lloyd Wright hair and odd costume, check out the music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIRW_elc-rY We actually saw another girl in the same costume (a little more accurate, but with shorter hair). Koreans who saw her often sang a 2NE1 song at her. As a result, we tended to go down the street singing “Ey, ey, ey, ey, ey,ey, e-ey, 2NE1” (If you’re curious or bored, here’s a link to the song we were quoting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwq-XdPfpeA&feature=fvst ).




Oddly, we didn’t see any other fairies that night. For Saturday, I was a goth fairy. It wasn’t much of a change from my costume for school, but it sounded cooler. It served me well, and proves that your own costume is only secondary to seeing all the other costumes out there.

Naturally, we went to the two main foreigner neighborhoods for Halloween (Itaewon and Hongdae). Aside from meeting a Korean guy named Ham, it wasn’t really that different from the usual weekend. It rained, but we had a good time wandering around. I also learned that you have to be careful in pronouncing the word “kebob.” If you say “gebob,” (which is easy to do in Korea because they use the same symbol for those sounds), that means dog food. So you might wander around saying “I’m hungry! I could really go for some dog food!” Ham made fun of me, but a guy whose name is Ham doesn’t have much wiggle room in the mocking proteins department.

Chill, Korea, just Chill

I know I went from not posting anything to a new post every day (don't worry, it won't last), but I have to tell everyone this news:

My school is temporarily shut down because of Swine Flu.

Just to give everyone a general idea of how the Shin Chan (Swine Flu) is affecting Korea, I'll tell you how this came about. Obviously there's a Swine Flu pandemic going on. Now, this has been slowly building since August (for us). Unless I'm mistaken, the public schools in Seoul have been closed this whole week.

I looked up a couple statistics, and I thought I'd give you an idea of how serious it is here. (There are roughly 48 million people in South Korea.) This past week, there were an average of 8,857 new cases of Swine Flu every day in South Korea. As of now, there have been 42 Swine flu deaths. Of the tens of thousands of people infected, that's a small margin. But I'm not writing to express the statistics, which will be moot practically as I write this.

The point is, South Korea is really afraid of the flu right now. There have been several quarantines and whatnot, but one of the results of this outbreak is socially acceptable xenophobia. I'm not going to describe the xenophobic experiences I've had since arriving in South Korea. Though they're annoying and insulting (the episodes, not the people), Koreans as a whole aren't awful to foreigners. But the fact is that several hagwons and schools have quarantined foreign teachers, but not their other teachers. Most schools tell teachers that they can't leave the country (though they can still travel in South Korea, which makes no sense. It's obvious that Swine Flu is already in the borders). We have been asked to avoid the foreign parts of town. I've had many people put on masks because I sat next to them. If you need to get people out of your personal bubble, all you have to do is cough and there will be a wide berth around you wherever you are.

The flu has killed some children. It makes sense that several of the private schools shut down this week for that very reason. Even if it's only a PR tactic (there were a couple cases of actual Swine flu in our school, but I'm fairly sure PR was a bigger factor), it's at least an indication that the schools are doing something. This is a country where people go to work no matter how sick they are (I know you think that's the case in the US, but this is a little more extreme. For instance, sick days aren't in our contracts. When I asked about it, they said "Don't get sick."). Children spend massive amounts of time in school and around other students on low amounts of sleep and high stress levels. South Korea has something like 487 people per square kilometer. Some schools have the children cleaning them (not ours, but many public schools), and I won't really touch on hand washing here. Suffice it to say, this is a place ready made for a pandemic.

I'm kind of hoping the current situation will bring about some change in the way Korea treats illness. It's a little difficult to say, however, and let's be honest: I'm not exactly an expert social critic. Either way, I could be angry about some of the reactions to the flu. I could roll my eyes at the hysteria. But considering the expectations Korea puts on children, I'm pretty pleased with the break. If nothing else, kids might get a chance to relax a little and get healthier.

Oops

After posting about Beijing yesterday, I realized that it'd basically been a month since I went to Beijing. So I think it's probably time I stop trying to wait for time to discuss Beijing. Here's a short version of the rest of my trip. Erika and I went to Tienenman Square at night and in the daytime (Erika got gently pushed aside by a soldier when she got in the way of a regiment marching). We walked up to the forbidden city, but decided we didn't feel like waiting in line. The two of us went to a couple parks, had traditional Peking Duck (AWESOME!), and went to a Chinese Opera. I'll include a couple clips of the opera so you can get an idea. We had loads of fun haggling at the Silk Market (I bought a kimono or two, fake Pumas, a fake Gucci watch, a fake Jimmy Choo handbag, and a few other odds and ends). The Summer Palace was really beautiful; the hostel we stayed in was incredible. We ended up befriending the Finnish couple we shared the dorm room with (we got lost together and ended up having some beers in a Chinese bar). Erika and I got so caught up in our enjoyment that we both almost missed our train/flight back to our respective homes. I'll include a few more pictures, but suffice it to say, Beijing may have been the greatest trip I've ever had. We had an amazing time and I loved the city. There are too many stories to tell without annoying everyone, so if you're curious, ask about the Wisconsinite we met, or the bird with a better Chinese accent than me, or the chopsticks "expert." I'd be happy to relate more, but I think it's time I return to discussing life in Korea. For instance, I had a great Halloween weekend. That's a story for a later post (I don't want people to have to catch up too much), so I'll just tell you that Korea doesn't really provide costumes, but I did get to see a guy in a nun habit. No Halloween is complete if you don't see at least one guy in a habit (at least, no Halloween after you start college is complete). One video is at Tienenman Square and the Gate to the Forbidden City. I just wanted to give you an idea of how packed it was. The other two videos are from the Chinese Opera we went to. It was a unique experience, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to see something they haven't before.

AN EPIC TALE

Here we are again intrepid readers. I will relate the epic tale of the Great Wall of China and our not-so-intrepid hikers. To make this abundantly clear, I would like to point out that I did NOT THINK. I didn’t think at all. They said there would be a walk, but I was picturing the kind of walk that you usually do at tourist places. You wander around, surrounded by other tourists, and don’t really work up a sweat.

The “free water bottle” that came with purchase of our tickets should have been a sign.

Anyway, we drove up to our starting point with a group of American students (younger than Erika and me and mostly female) and two Brits in fluorescent short shorts. I was so excited to get out of the car that all thoughts of nausea were stolen away by the early morning breeze. It was the perfect weather for a hike: cool with a little bit of a bite, enough to make you feel good, but not so much that you should bundle up.

Our driver led us to a map; he pointed out where we were and where we needed to meet him in four hours. That was the red map I put on the previous blog post. That’s also when I realized our hike might be more that a little wandering on a wall. It was a serious hike. With hills. And parts of the wall were crumbly, so we’d have to jump over sections.


We had four hours to get from Jinshanling to Simatai. This didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. However, it was about 11 kilometers of hiking, and this wasn’t an easy eleven. My family likes hiking, and I’m not in terrible shape. But there was no section of wall that was level and easy. We hiked up and down mountain after mountain. If I’d known the difficulty level, maybe I would have prepared a little more. Like getting a good night’s sleep, or drinking more water. There really wasn’t any way to remove the whole vomiting thing, so we’ll ignore it.


Anyway, when we started, Erika and I were kind of behind the group. Not to be pretentious assholes, but neither of us really wanted to be associated with a rather loud group of Americans. We caught up to them talking to six or seven Chinese people. Erika and I kind of ignored them and continued. Then one of the ladies of the group started walking along with us and told us about how she was a poor Mongolian farmer and she had no job. I thought that was an interesting contradiction. Then she pointed out that one side of the wall was Inner Mongolia, and the other was China. I thought that could be interesting if true, but didn't do more than grunt. She then told me about how difficult her life as a Mongolian farmer was, and I found that to be an interesting bit of fiction. We were polite, but not encouraging. After several minutes of attempting conversation, she finally gave up and tried to sell us some shirts.




The first two hours of our hike consisted of that exact group of people trying to sell merchandise. Erika and I managed to avoid most of the hassle because we didn’t encourage them from the start. However, the other Americans had a harder time. When we were going up a particularly steep mountain, the “Mongolian Farmers” would grab their hands and “help” them to the top. Then they’d ask for payment. (I included a picture of the "help") I really don’t blame them for trying to make a living, but then again, they didn’t bother Erika and me (we just weren’t friendly enough). I think the other Americans may have learned the whole “If they’re too friendly, they’re selling something” lesson.



Along the way, there were other people at various towers selling water, pop, juice, t-shirts, postcards, and (my personal favorite) beer. Alas, the years of soccer tournaments taught me that beer would only dehydrate me further (that came out wrong), so I didn’t partake. Also, I didn’t want to spend five won on water.

Eleven kilometers. That’s around seven miles. It doesn’t seem like much, but try doing it in non-hiking clothes, going up and down mountains, dehydrated, and with no food in your system. The first three hours were fine. We took in the stunning beauty of the wall. And I do mean stunning. I took over a hundred pictures of the Great Wall, and Erika might have taken twice that. We really did get an incredible grasp for why the Great Wall is actually great. The views were spectacular, the wall itself was a marvel of epic proportions, and the thought of all the effort and materials that went into it was staggering. All I can say is that the Xiongnu must have scared the pants off the Chinese.

After three hours, however, the wall was just a freaking wall, and the hike seemed like it had lasted for an eternity. I started hallucinating about how I had fallen and broken my head early in the hike. That would make the unending hike Purgatory, and the people selling their overpriced drinks were demons. Or angels. Even after reading Dante, I find Purgatory confusing. It’s a good thing I’m not Catholic. Our fellow hikers were getting incredibly negative, and I realized I was definitely developing a sunburn. Three and a half hours into the hike, we realized that we were lost. None of us knew where we were supposed to stop. Four hours into it, we were even more lost. It seemed like we were supposed to have reached the end, but we didn’t see anything.


After about four and a quarter hours, we reached an area filled with tourists. We were psyched. It had to be the place. The only question was: where was the bloody turn off? You’d think it’d be easy to see.
It was not.


(Insane Cable Suspension Bridge. Picture included mostly for the civil engineers I'm related to.)
Also, we were faced with one of the steepest mountains in our hike. I’m including a picture because the sight alone was enough to make two of the hikers cry (not Erika and me, I swear). It's sort of hard to tell, but look for the towers. It's not that big a deal unless you've been hiking for FOUR HOURS.

We walked down into the valley, and I thought for sure the second tower was the place we turned off. Well, after crossing a rather insane bridge and climbing up to the second tower, literally pausing every five steps, there was this tiny path away from the wall.
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I said, “I think this is it.” The girl we were near said, “Let’s just go around the tower and see if the rest of the group is on the other side. We don’t want to turn off and have to retrace our steps.”

This was a sensible idea, so we did that. Sure enough, the rest of the group was trudging up the mountain. If one of my organs were predisposed to remove itself from my body, my heart would have sunk out the soles of my feet. Apparently, my organs are not predisposed to diffusion (lucky for the rest of me) so I had to keep going (lucky is a state of mind. I was kind of preferring death by organ diffusion at this point). We stepped up five stairs. We paused. We went up two more. We paused. We leaned on the rock wall, literally trying to drag ourselves up with our arms because we couldn’t lift our legs.

I’d like to take a moment from the melodrama and inject some sanity.

I can’t. We really did try to drag ourselves up with our arms. Not only that, but all these other tourists were streaming up and down the stairs past us. All I wanted to shout was “Don’t judge us! We’ve hiked eleven kilometers already!” But I didn’t know how to say that in Chinese (all I could say was hello and thank you. I didn’t think shouting those two words over and over would get any message across other than that I was wrong in the head). Instead, we hiked up that freaking mountain for something like forty minutes. The worst of it was that we didn’t have any idea how much further we needed to go. We were actually lost on the Great Wall of China. It’s a wall, for Christ’s sake. How do you get lost ON a wall? Finally, we found some people who spoke English and asked them where the turnoff for Simatai was.

I’m sure you may have guessed it, but it was that second tower. Nobody was certain, and none of us were willing to climb back up that freaking mountain a second time, so there was a lot of hemming and hawing. However, we went back down and walked off the tower at that tiny turnoff. Ten minutes later, we were in front of the restaurant we were supposed to be at almost an hour before. The only people there ahead of us were the two British guys in their florescent shorts. They’d been waiting for forty-five minutes, and they couldn’t eat until we’d arrived. The two of them mentioned this, and everyone apologized profusely. Then I said, “You guys were sitting in the shade having a beer. I feel more sorry for us.”

Luckily, everyone laughed, or I would’ve looked like a jerk. But really, we walked up an extra mountain and were late because of that. I don’t really care if they had to wait for us.

So that was the Great Wall of China. It began with extreme lack of sleep, food poisoning, and beautiful views. It ended with exhaustion, mild hallucinations and mediocre Chinese food. I suppose that’s as fitting an end to an epic event as any. To those of us who did the hike it was a once in a lifetime experience (largely because we’d never do it again). However, we probably appreciate the awesomeness of the Great Wall of China better than your average tourists. So we’ve got that going for us.

Alone and Lost in Beijing + Food Poisoning=Awesome

This story should serve as a cautionary tale for people traveling. Learn from my mistakes, which mostly consisted of me not thinking.

I arrived in Beijing with a foolishly small amount of information. First, I knew I was meeting my friend Erika at Dongzhimen station. I knew the name of the hostel we were going to stay a day from then. I knew that I was in China.

Important things I did not know:
1. How to say ANYTHING in Chinese.
2. Where Dongzhimen station was.
3. That day was National Day, and thus most things were closed (including the aforementioned hostel).
4. Where Erika was in Dongzhimen.
5. Where we were staying that night.

I'm not usually a planner. This isn't much of a problem, and on a good day I think of it as being spontaneous. On a normal day, though, it's just plain idiotic. No one should go to a foreign country without at least some idea of where they might stay that night. One would think that I'd learned my lesson in Bologna when I had similar problems, but no. At least in Bologna I spoke the language.

I got to the meeting place late (my flight was an hour and a half late because it was National Day). When I couldn't find Erika I figured she didn't know I got her email so she might not even be there. Erika didn't have a phone and I didn't have so much as a city map. That's when I realized how screwed I was.

To avoid making too big a deal out of the situation (and subjecting you to a drawn out epic) let me just summarize the following events: I couldn't find Erika even though I wandered around the station for about two hours. I tried calling the hostel and a Erika's friend's contact number, but both numbers were "out of service." After that, I figured my only way of finding her was through email, and I needed to find an internet cafe. The cafes (what few there were) were closed for National Day. I befriended a nice British couple who took me to their hostel and let me use their laptop. While there, the wife told everyone about my plight and I got a lot of sympathy from a large number of British people, as well as offers of rooms, couches, and the like for the night. Five hours after we were supposed to meet, Erika and I finally found each other. She had been waiting at Dongzhimen the whole time, but I missed her somehow.


The picture is of Oven Mitt chilling at the hostel. Or more specifically, hanging out in front of the free toothbrushes/shampoo that the hostel provided.

After that odyssey, Erika and I were tired (She was really worried about me. This was fair because after it got dark I started to worry about me a little). We were couch surfing (I don't feel like explaining it right now, but you can look it up), with a lady who worked for the U.N. Or the embassy. I forget. Anyway, she took us to an IRISH PUB. I couldn't get over it. I arrived in Beijing, got really lost, finally found my friend, and the first place we went was AN IRISH PUB.

In all fairness Erika felt the same. But as I mentioned, it was National Day . It wasn't just National Day, it was the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. There was a big ceremony at Tiananmen square (think larger than the opening ceremonies at the olympics), and couch sitting lady wanted to watch it. Erika and I chatted and watched the ceremonies; it lasted for a few hours. We didn't eat much because we didn't want to spend vacation money on pub food.

Anyway, the lady kept us up pretty late that night, and we had to get up at 5:30 in the morning the next day. This was because we were GOING TO THE GREAT WALL!!!!!

We were both pretty tired when we rose, but we walked to the place the van was picking us up. For breakfast we got some food at 7Eleven. I got a pre-packaged croissant. We rode with a group of Americans and two British guys in fluorescent shorts. It turns out I was the oldest person in the car (except the driver, who was kind of cute but didn't speak much English). While we were on the road (it was about a two hour drive) I started feeling queasy. Erika and I were talking, then I started concentrating on not getting sick.

I failed.

About an hour into the drive, I threw up. This was ridiculous in several ways. Just before it happened, I grabbed a small wooden bowl that sat in front of me. So I didn't get anything on anyone (including me) or the van (which would have been awful). After it happened, I sat for a minute, clutching/balancing the bowl, uncertain of what to do. NO ONE NOTICED. Erika, who was talking to me, stared at me a minute and then asked the driver to pull over. But when he did, everyone wanted to know why we pulled over. Then I had to balance the bowl with the care of a scientist removing plutonium from a nuclear bomb as I shuffled out (three people trundled out in front of me because I was seated back in the van). At least nuclear scientists don't have to dodge backpacks and car seats. The most ludicrous part was the fact that I got food poisoning from a pre-packaged croissant. It wasn't even something cool like sketchy street meat.

I don't want to end the blog on a food poisoning note, but the story of the Great Wall is epic in nature, and will require a lot more time than I have. So let me just give you a small taste (unfortunate choice of words) of how I felt when we got there.

I was tired from traveling and getting only one or two hours of sleep.
I was hungry, but too nauseous to eat anything.
I was dehydrated from losing everything from my stomach.
I felt sick and had a headache.

None of those things mattered, though, because I was at THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA!!

(That's a map of the trails around the Great Wall. I'll explain more later.)
Tune in next time for "Lost on the Great Wall!", or, "Why didn't we read the pamphlet before we signed up for this freaking hike?"

Beijing Pics

I put photos from Beijing on Facebook, so if you're interested in seeing those, check it out. Otherwise, there will be an abbreviated version on this blog some time in the near future.

Chew Sock

Okay, so I was going to update and discuss Korean television.

That didn't happen. Obviously.

However, we'll table that topic, because the reason I didn't blog about Korean tv was that last week was Chuseok (Chew-sock). Chuseok is kind of like a Korean Thanksgiving. It's a harvest festival (ish) and we had Thursday and Friday off. Wednesday was fascinating, because we had our own little Chuseok celebration at my school.

I went to Beijing for the holiday and it was incredible. It's an epic tale of intrigue, food poisoning, silk kimonos, Finnish people, the Great Wall of China, Mongolian farmers, scorpians on a stick, getting lost all alone, and much, much more. However, today I'd like to talk a little about Chuseok because: A. It was really fun. B. I am living in Korea, and I'd be remiss if I didn't discuss it at all. C. I don't want to forget to talk about it. Beijing can wait.

Chuseok is one of the occasions where Koreans wear Hanbok. Hanbok is the traditional dress of Korea, and it's pretty cool looking. Here's a picture that I found online so you can get an idea.


Since I work for a hagwon they made all the teachers wear hanbok. Our bosses provided them, but most of us looked rather ridiculous. Scratch that; all of us looked ridiculous. One of the guys looked like a mix between Aladdin and Jasmine. Most of the women at our school looked kind of, well, fat in the dresses. Meanwhile, the Koreans were beautiful. The children all came to school in their hanbok outfits, and they looked adorable. Naturally I forgot my camera, but I'll be getting pictures and posting them online eventually. Someone told me I looked like an adjuma in my dress. Adjuma is originally a term of respect for a Korean woman who's older than you. However, it has negative connotations. Specifically, an adjuma is often used to describe a "squat, tight haired, steely eyed, brightly dressed woman ready to bowl over, elbow, and gouge their way to a better place in line." (I looked up the word online, and I couldn't really come up with a more accurate description of the stereotype.)

During the morning, the children were taught etiquette. On Chuseok, young children ask their grandparents for money. There's a certain way you're supposed to bow and everything for it. Mostly what I got from it is that when a male sits, he puts his left hand over his right, and females put right over left.

After that, we made songpyeon. Songpyeon are Korean rice cakes. When I heard rice cakes, I pictured the Styrofoam rice cakes we have in the states. That's a whole different ball game. These are of a smooth, kind of cooled pudding texture. It’s sort of like biting into a wet, springy ball of clay. In the center, they put something like sesame seeds or bean paste. Apparently you can make all manner of shapes around the center. For the kids, we mostly stuck to the traditional shell shape. It’s not an unpleasant food, but it wasn’t really for me. Of course, I’m not necessarily a sweets person. Side note: if you have songpyeon, don’t try to bite it in half. Pop the whole thing in your mouth or you’ll end up squirting sweet rice juice all over yourself and/or others. Oops.


There's a picture of songpyeon so you can imagine the flavors a bit.

A little later, we played games. There was jegichagi, a Korean hacky sack style game. Instead of a ball, they use coins wrapped in paper with feathers attached. Being that the girls were wearing really long dresses, they weren't able to play very well. I hiked up my skirt because I was wearing pants underneath, but I had to stop because that encouraged the little girls to do so. They weren't wearing pants underneath.

We also played tug of war, and the kids got pretty into it. We did a tug of war with the teachers, guys against girls. The girls lost, but in our defense we were wearing long dresses and everyone but me slipped on their hems. When they went down, our kids swarmed the rope and pretty soon everyone was tugging. We still lost, but as you might imagine it was an adorable and sickeningly heartwarming time.

There are plenty of other aspects of Chuseok that I didn’t participate in, but this gives you a little taste of what it’s like. Apparently it’s quite the family holiday, much like Thanksgiving. Though, as far as I can tell, they don’t have a Chuseok parade or a football game.