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korean sun visor chronicles

[warning: due to having spent the last month or so either not speaking at all (vipassana meditation retreat) or speaking 90% of the time to korean students and/or co-workers, my english skills (grammar and syntax especially) have taken a true digger. in the spirit of non-perfectionism, i lay forth the follwing flawed-but true account from the future-era time zone of korea]

fig. a (not me)

today my downstairs neighbor (and landlord), this nice korean woman with a little daughter and a husband who drives a taxi, took me hiking up this peak nearby. let me state here and now that it was about 90 degrees out and sunny with likely 90 percent humidity (or more). also let me state that this woman, er, she speaks almost zero english, and i speak almost zero korean, so it was really funny with me fumbling for my phrase book futilely and both of us just smiling and shrugging our shoulders a lot in mutual we-can't-communicate fashion. before we went she fed me some soup and rice (it was 9 am-ish--koreans eat the same sort of food for all 3 meals). the soup had seaweed and ambiguous grisly-looking seafood chunks in it (i think i saw some suction-cups on one nugget, another bore resemblance to an eel maybe? did i mention--just to make this parenthetical pause even longer--that i've grown to really skeeve out over eels? they are in tanks all over the city for sale (this is the seafood capitol after all) and i witnessed on the street one being sliced up and placed on a grill alive--with blood and squirming of the newly segmented parts? well yep, i swear i will never eat one. they are like snakes but creepier maybe). back to the soup at hand... so i ate out the seaweed and then i waited until she was in the bathroom and fished out some sea-carnage and put in my napkin. then when she came out, i made for the bathroom to flush the seaflesh back into the sea, as it were--a burial most fitting i think. can you see here yet how my ability to form coherent sentence structures has died an untimely death? ah you are bearing with this crazy-train-o-grammar! bless you!

back to the hike... so we were climbing this peak and it was seriously not a gradual meandering ascent ala eastrock paved path or sleeping giant tower trail. nay, this was like the staircase up eastrock or the (was it?) blue trail up s.g.. i was truly drenched in sweat. i think at some point (this just popped into my head) the woman (whose name i still don't know) remarked about my ample and very-un-asian arm hair (i have had korean students do the same *sigh*). but i digress. she had loaned me this visor/mono-sunglasses doohickey to wear (as was she wearing) and it was funny. the koreans are so hyper-obsessed with sun protection. they climb in the summer wearing gloves and long sleeve shirts and long pants and faces entirely covered and heads too. wild i say! so i was sorta-incognito because my face was entirely shielded by this visor, which i quite liked. so picture this, and also me lubed up like a greased pig from head to toe due to the sweat that would not stop flowing as soon as i set foot outside of my air conditioned apt.... oh yes, it was so hot that merely loitering motionless at the curb yields buckets of perspiration and that not-at-all dewy oil slick on my face.... again with digression.... so i was part way up the slope, being hounded by mosquitoes who speak the universal language of "zzzzzzzzzzzzz" and know the boundaryless currency of blood, almost slipping out of my clothes and sneakers because i was so moist and lord knows what i smelled like seeing as mitchim antiperspirant had only been applied to my pits and every sweat gland in my body was rioting in a most odoriferous way... also, i was re-wearing dirty clothes from head-to-toe as our washing machine has been broken since i arrived (btw, i packed a lot of dirty laundry of course, as i ran out of time to launder it pre-flight in the usa). lol. so stinky dripping me, hooded by this sun visor, tries to explain to the kind woman in the long sleeved shirt that i am tired and dizzy and my heart is about to explode (it was hardcore thumping mexican-jumping-bean style) and that i don't know how much further i can make it. i tried to ask how much farther it was to the top. she said 2k(!). i whimpered audibly. she gestured for me to continue. she had me go ahead of her and when i'd change my stuttering gait from a crawl to a stall, she'd push my butt uphill with her hands. i must here note that pushing on my butt at this stage in the hike was likely akin to pressing on a sponge full of water--i can only imagine that she got some moisture on her dainty hairless fingers... *sigh* as we ascended further, i noted the view and despite this felt certain i should not continue upwards, that in fact i should immediately desist and come back in, oh, say october. but she was insistent, so i made it to the top, which was not nearly 2k from where i had begged the question, thank god! the view was all that i had dreamed tongyeong would be--and all that i had until now not seen. it was a 360 degree panorama of sea and islands and i felt, quite suddenly, that i was *really* here in this place so geologically unlike anywhere i'd been before. these islands, this sea, so indescribable here. i wanted at that moment to be able to teleport all of my friends and family (one at a time lest the summit lose its serene sanctuary vibe in the midst of a 40-person impromptu party) so they could experience it because there is no way any photos could do it justice (i didn't have my camera with me, btw). we paused up there and i looked up the word 'beautiful' in my phrase book and butchered it with my accent and she told me in her broken english that she was happy. i agreed and thanked her (kumapsamnida) and then we silently basked. on the descent she went ahead and there was no butt pushing needed.

during the walk home on the ultra-hot canal-bordering paved streets, she asked (with the help of both of us consulting the phrase book) me if my male canadian co-worker and roommate is my boyfriend. to which i, with both a laugh and an exaggerated shaking of the head and 'x' gesture of my arms (korean way of emphatically stating "no") said "anio" ("no"). she then asked if i had a boyfriend in america. i said "anio". then she asked if i had girlfriends, to which i did not immediately respond. i tried to figure out if she was asking me if i had lesbian-type girlfriendships or if "girlfriend" was just a way of asking if i had female friends. i said "anio" lest she fear i am gay (koreans as a culture are not down with homesexuality). later, my roommate (who has been in korea for a year) told me that they she would've been asking if i had friends-who-are-girls because koreans don't even have a vocabulary for gayness the way we do--it wouldn't be something it would even occur to her to ask. so i basically told her that i have no friends in america. lol!

all-in-all (including the walk through the urban area to reach the mountain's base) the hike took about 2 hours round-trip from home-back-to-home. she (i think) asked me on the way home if i'd like to eat, and i lied and said i was on a diet. 'diet' is a word koreans understand, as many many women engage in this behavior. so luckily this got me out of the uncomfortable situation of being presented with further seafood randomness. i do really love my landlords, though. they are so nice and friendly. her husband saw me waiting for the bus the other day in the rain sans umbrella and came out to investigate brandishing an open slightly busted umbrella over his head. when he ascertained i was in fact in need of shielding from the rain, he went back inside and came out with an un-broken umbrella for me. see, i think i'm nice, right, but what i would've done is given the weird foreigner my broken umbrella, saving the good one for myself. thus i'd rid myself of a dud and also have a feather-in-my-ego-cap of do-gooderness. but no, he gave me the best umbrella. also, when i bailed on hiking two days ago due to a pretty severe case of nausea and diarrhea, she came up stairs with a tray bearing 3 little round smelly mysterious chinese-medicine-pills and a glass of some kind of cold herbal tea/fruit juice (?). very nurturing the both of them!

tonight after work i went to dinner with some of the expats at this german-themed restaurant where everything was like 10,000-20,000 won (10-20 bucks) which is absurdly expensive by korean standards (i can get a hugely portioned meal for 3,000 won at other restaurants). the menu featured things like pasta and pizza and such (with emphasis on cheesecheesecheese), but i opted for the 4,000 won ($4) soup du jour which was a cream of pumpkin that blew me away. also, i ate some of the gratis bread wedges that had been toasted with parmesan cheese. it was the kind of meal my taste buds secretly yearned for (did i mention that the pumpkin soup was to-die-for?) after 2 weeks of rice and cabbage and seaweed. anyhow, it was of course surreal. tomorrow i will go to pusan (2nd biggest city in korea) with jonathon, the canadian guy i met on flickr (backpack boy in my contacts list, fyi), to try and find some darkroom supplies. then sunday day i will go to geoje island with my korean co-worker and her sister. then sunday night there's a housewarming party at jonathon and kate's (nova scotian girl) new digs. whew! i swear if i thought i'd have a moment of boredom in korea it was unfounded.

[epilogue: it might seem that teaching english should make a person, say, better and sharper with their english skills. indeed. but in my case at least i end up having to pare down my speech to the most primitive building blocks imaginable--subject verb object. and even this is often too much for my wee students to handle. verbs must be limited to the one or two in a unit we are studying. words must be spoken slowly to the point of caricature. this creates in my mind a sort of self-inflicted over-pruning of the verbal topiary muscle(to get absurdly flowery here with the metaphor) that results in long-term inability to speak or write with the same ease i used to have. it is fascinating to say the least!]

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