winter

this angle makes our tree look more heroic.
in fact it is one foot tall, sits on the table,
and has a star made from an envelope.

Winter is here!
Look, we decorated...

the view from the loft. watch yr vertigo.

in-season handbags/our stockings.

Christmas jazz nightclub.

making French toast with big ol' slabs of bread.
will repeat for Christmas brunchtime.

recent acquisition: toaster oven.
new bff: see above.

KM expertly maneuvers through the installation.

KM: "Are you prepared to toast?"
Toaster: "Sure, where's the champagne?"

KM falls asleep from all the hard work,
while I struggle to keep the peace.

a Christmas card outtake.

first snow of the season!
outside the lobby of Good Morning Officetel,
our apartment building.

our street. come visit.
you've seen that we can feed you.

Biennale (Gwangju is neat)

Hi Readers,

Yes, that was a mighty long break from blogging. We’re first-time bloggers here, though. I don’t even like the word, or the infinitive, ’to blog’, but we won’t harp on this. You want to know how we’re doing, what we’ve been up to, and that makes us feel good, that’s for certain (also it makes us feel guilty for not writing on this thing, but many of you are literally family so there’s a certain small amount of built-in guilt the way we figure things, especially on the keeping in touch front).

It’s Sunday night, 9pm, and we just got back from a night and day in Gwangju, a city one hour north east of our home in Mokpo. (One quick language side note: because there aren’t always precise English translations of Hangeul, the Korean language, you’ll see alternate spellings for the same word, like how Gwangju is sometimes spelled Kwangju. It’s because the sound one makes to say this name is a cross between ’g’ and ’k’.) Gwangju is punk, and, if you don’t know KM and I, then I’ll let you know that I mean that as a compliment. At the very least, Gwangju is more punk than Mokpo. One thing that makes Gwangju punk and beautiful is that it supports the arts in a big way. They hold countless art festivals and work hard to make them accessible to the community.

Recently, the city held it’s yearly Biennale from September 1 to November 11. We saw posters for it on our first trip to Gwangju, and then our boss told us we should go, so we were definitely planning on making a trip up to see the festival. One day in mid-October, I went to the New York Times website and above the fold on the homepage was an editorial about opera by their opera/classical critic Alex Ross. I checked out the editorial, which was a spirited defense of federal funding for opera. Ross was writing this because recently musicians like David Byrne have been calling for more funding for music education in public school and perhaps less for subsidizing opera.

Anyway, the story had a link to Byrne’s blog, which I hadn’t checked out in awhile. Byrne, former singer of the Talking Heads, solo artist, arts booster, city re-design and biking enthusiast, has a fascinating blog you should check out sometime. I clicked over there, and, scrolling through a few posts, I saw that David had recently been to Gwangju and Jeju Island, South Korea! He traveled to Gwangju specifically to take in the Biennale. We were really excited at this point, so we went one weekend a few weeks back and checked it out.

Byrne does a good job describing the show at the Biennale, a fascinating mix of performance, video, photography, painting, drawing, collage, and more. To make it better, we just happened to go during the opening weekend of the Kimchi Festival, which was held in the park connecting Biennale Hall, the Korean Folk Museum, and the Gwangju Museum of Art. Tons of kimchi booths, offering free samples, various delicious food vendors. Despite the recent months’ news of the abysmal cabbage crop, kimchi culture seems to be thriving in Jeollanam-do province.

I’m beat, so check back soon for more. I’ll try to get a bloody regular bloggin’ schedule.

We ain't blowed up

Hi readers,
Around dinner time at school we got word that North Korea, tricksters they are, shot up Yeonpyeong Island on the border of South Korea and received fire back. This happened about as far away from us as you can get and still be in South Korea.
Here's a couple links to some hard news stories about the attacks:
New York Times
Guardian UK

Talking to our co-workers and middle school students , they didn't seem phased by this. They said it happens once or twice a year. Usually western media outlets make the biggest deal about it.
So, we're safe and sound. Just look at us!

Weirdos, but safe weirdos.

new teacher confession

As teachers, we have a lot of competition for the attention of each student in the classroom. Our main obstacle in achieving a secure hold on the attention of a student is the student himself and his cohort of six or seven classmates. In an English school classroom, we’ve learned to expect to hear quite a bit of Korean spoken. And for some reason, this surprised us, it took some getting used to. We’d heard that Korean students have high respect for the teacher, and so we made the assumption that they wouldn’t take advantage of the fact that we know no Korean.

It is hard to expell the native language from your four classroom walls, because it’s a safe out for the students. We don’t know more than ten words of Korean, so the kids confidently get around us by saying who knows what--most likely cursing us to the core--or seeking a translation from a friend, a piece of gossip, a little joke here and there. When it becomes an issue is when they respond in Korean to an inquiry from us, their teachers, in English. Some students, even in advanced middle school classes, beg for me to ask the question or reread the last sentence in Korean. “Even if I could, I wouldn’t,” I say, “this is English school!”

There’s another thing pulling at the attention of these students as we pull back in the direction of learning English. It’s a sweet, or savory, or at times strange mix of the two, in the form of candy, chips, crunchy things, etc, snacks in other words. Now, for many of these students, they’ve already been in school all day, some will be going to another specialized hagwan for math or music or Chinese characters after English class, so as long as they don’t go overboard, I permit some light snaking in my classroom.

Sometimes, however, it does create a big distraction, as it did a few days ago, in one of my first sessions with a class I have twice per week. After a steady grinding downward progression, students were interrupting quite often, only about a third were paying attention, and shrimp-flavoured chipesque-doodles and dayglo candies were being handed around like currency. I stopped the lesson and declared an end to the class’ candy trade. I walked around, singling out kids, having them put snacks in their bags. 

Thinking I’d restored order, I began the lesson again. But I could hardly understand the next student I called on, and it seemed like the reason was he was either chewing gum or he was sucking on a hard candy. I was furious, at the end of my rope. I grabbed a disgarded piece of paper from the stack I use as scrap, walked over to the student, a shy looking kid who I don’t know well, hardly the worst of the bunch, held the paper under him, and asked him to spit out the candy. He looked up at me, blinked rapidly. There was quiet in the room followed by murmurs. The students were baffled as to what I was doing; I wasn’t sure either at this point. I asked him again and again to spit out the candy. Again, confused looks around the class. I soon realized that the kid wasn’t eating candy at all, he had some serious braces, which made it difficult for the words to come out clearly.

I could’ve died. I shuffled back to my desk and resumed the lesson, hoping that the kids just assumed I’d had a little mental attack, and now their teacher was back on track.

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Speaking of getting back on track, we promise to start updating a bit more regularly. Hopefully you can empathize, it's our first month in a brand new world. We're taking it all in, feeling out what it means to us, what kind of home it will be, etc. 

And photos next time! We have scores.

 

Recycling content: cute Korea car chronicle

At First She Didn’t Succeed, but She Tried and Tried Again (960 Times)

By CHOE SANG-HUN

Published: September 3, 2010

Cha Sa-soon, 69, has become a national symbol for perseverance in South Korea — and she can legally hit the road.

 
from the New York Times website:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/04/world/asia/04driver.html


and soon: photographic treasures from our recent month on the east coast
stay tuned, beautiful & brilliant readers...

‘We do not write to recapture an experience; we write to come to as close to it as we can’

A note: Dear readers, we do apologize for the delay, but it was much needed on our part, as we began to acclimate ourselves to the new environs of South Korea. We’ve found it surprisingly easy to slide into a basic routine here, and we’ve not yet felt the expected the much dreaded Culture Shock (it could be our trip together to Mexico last year prepared us for this journey; in the last week of that trip the swine flu outbreak was the big news and it was questionable what would happen when we tried to leave the country. As you might've guessed, we made out were fine and didn't experience quarantine jail in Mexico or the U.S.). We’ll keep you posted of course, as events continue to unfold. For now, enjoy these fragments collected over the last week…more to come! 
with much love, j


Yes, we are quite far from you now, unless you are one of our new friends in Korea, and we have a couple already. We consider ourselves lucky to have Roger  and Jo as our tour guides, trainers, and allies during the first couple days here in Mokpo.

Chicagoan & English angels

Yes, the small city keeping us is Mokpo, secret revealed. What we’ve discovered is that our employer is much too busy running our hagwan to care about these scraps of news, bits of memory (see title, courtesy of Norman Mailer). We will hold on to our aliases, partly as tribute to the writer Julio Cortazar, whose ‘Autonauts of the Cosmoroute’ has been influential summer reading.

downtown Mokpo

a kids' park in Mokpo

the other Julio

Can we talk about reading for a second? Traveling overseas, space in your cargo becomes precious. We arrived in Korea with 4 large suitcases, 1 backpack, 1 carry-on mini suitcase, 1 duffel bag, 1 purse. When dealing with this kind of mammoth undertaking (our own personal convoy), does bringing 5 pounds of literature, give or take, signal masochistic behavior? Also, I’m not just inflicting this on myself, but KM, whom I supposedly care for, as well. Why does she have to suffer because I can’t part with a hefty Howard Zinn volume, or a portly Dostoyevsky. Still, I am happy to have a small shelf of books in our studio apartment. There was no choice in the matter. I just wouldn’t feel at home without these friends. In times of great change, books can be solid, calming, just as often stirring ideas and emotions relevant to one’s current itinerant mode.   

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Our first week of work at the English school is complete. It feels good, to work full-time again (I’d previously been working only part-time as the volunteer coordinator at the Olympia Film Society), to have the same hours as K.M., and to assist these kids to learn a language. Sometimes during the week our lack of familiarity with the procedures of the school has felt overwhelming, but the students themselves have actually been our strongest allies. They often, to our great surprise, share when we are supposed to be assigning home work or tests. A few days ago, KM wrapped up a unit with a special class who normally doesn't get homework, so told them there would be no homework except to study for the monthly speaking test next week. She was then deluged with requests for, ’more homework, teacher!’ (How often would we see this work ethic in a typical U.S. school?) Amazed, KM assigned the class some copying exercises and to look at a textbook illustration of a Parisian cafe...and to 'think about it'. Yesterday I had the class next, and we had a great conversation where they shared all the things they had observed about the illustration.

every night, we call some students to chat in English

Roger Teacher w/ pupils

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We arrived in Mokpo about 3 am two Saturdays ago, and, as we expected to be put in a hotel or director’s house while we were being trained, we were happy to learn we would start sleeping in our own apartment that very night. It’s a studio, the first we’ve shared as a couple. Roger claimed it is larger than most studio apartments in the city, which can house families of four, five, or more at times, so I’m considering us lucky. The bedroom area is a low ceiling loft above the kitchen. There is an air conditioner, but it doesn’t seem to reach the loft, and we aren’t ready to pay the exorbitant fan prices quite yet. So I pushed, pulled, and leveraged our bed (really a mattress ) down to the first floor as KM, sleep deprived and exhausted from one of the longest, hottest days in our collective memory, lay passed out on the couch. Now we essentially sleep in the living room, but we’re comfortable.

a bit of clutter at first

Even the nights are humid, evoking childhood southern New Jersey, thus the a.c. is essential. Upstairs in the loft, there is a writing desk and not much else. I try to get in a half hour or more up there with this mini-computer, a very useful item for international travel, borrowed from my mother, but it’s a drag to type on. My fingers are often inadvertently bumping other keys and attempting to dismantle a story or defragment the hard rive or, worse, connect me to the internet. Otherwise, the main function of the loft is to act as the place where we hang and dry our clothes.

lofty goals

We feel lucky to have these quarters, and we’ve already made it a good home. Looking ahead to our first paychecks, we have plans to buy better lighting, floor mats, and some type of curtain to fully separate the loft from the downstairs (and from daylight).

Well, we'll leave you here, dear reader, to contemplate our fate at this junction. Many thanks for your time.

shoes off at the door, please. it is customary.

 prepping our first home-cooked meal, if you think this shot looks phallic, you should see the outtakes

donde?

There was some confusion, and the title of the blog becomes prophesy. We aren't in Korea yet, it's true. We're extremely close now, though. One 12-hour flight kind of close. We take in the sunshine in what appears to be a perfect summer day in San Francisco. We can only guess from our view from the mammoth airport windows. Soon we'll see unknown places, live in the unfamiliar. It is an exciting time.

Thanks to all of you for helping us. Next post will be from our Asian outpost!

photo courtesy of Ida, our new friend in Burlington, VT