time... too fast

'Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen, the days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return more--everything presses on--...' Laurence Sterne

wow, so it's about time for a nice little update, yeah? two weeks have absolutely flown by. my dear friend (chingu in korean-- see, i'm learning!?) chelsea arrived. that was good. it was just before my last blog post. we have been tearing up seoul, to put it lightly. it's an exciting time. to sleep at night does not exist for us. the weekends are sweeter and more precious than they've ever been. and seoul is beautiful.

people are dressed to the nines here. the women wear heels and the men (if not in a suit) look like they thought a lot about what to wear before putting anything on. also, something funny: showing off shoulders and/or cleavage is very frowned upon, but you can wear a mini skirt with stilettos--no problem. i got my first taste of shopping in korea when i was in busan for the film festival last weekend. on breaks between films one day, i wandered around the shopping mall where the theater was located. it was a seven story gallery. plus a basement with the classiest food court i have ever seen.

floor one: expensive (i.e. chloe, miu miu, gucci, bottega veneta, you get the idea) and accessories/make-up.
floor two: still expensive (women's designer fur and gowns).
floor three: women's expensive shoes.
floor four men's expensive clothing.
floor five: men's expensive shoes.
floor six: sort of reasonably priced women's and men's clothes and shoes.
floor seven: kids, home, and movie theater.

obviously, i spent most of my time on floor SIX. except for the wandering around and pausing in longing more than one time outside the Chloe shop. i bought a jacket and a sweater on the sixth floor. good start for a cold winter. then i went to the mall across the street, found a zara, and found the sale rack in the zara.

as for the film fest, it was terrific. i arrived in busan friday night (technically saturday morning) at 1 AM. i ended up couchsurfing at the apartment of an english teacher from chicago. she was really nice, and she let me stay on til sunday even though she left on saturday morning for a camping trip. so i lucked out and had an apartment to myself. it was my first time spending time with myself, by myself, all alone in a new city. i have done plenty of traveling by myself, but it seems i was always going to meet someone at the end of my journey. this time, it was just the films at the other end. and they were perfectly great company. i saw seven films in two days and arrived back in pyeongtaek at about 3.30 AM monday morning.

i am so glad that i ended up staying for that last late film on sunday night. it was one of my favorites. it was called au revoir taipei. it was hilarious and silly and cute. it made me want to visit taipei. the other film that really stood out was an italian film, hai paura del buio (you are afraid of the dark). it is a hard one to explain because it was very sensory and intimate-- silence followed by loud music (mostly the beginnings of joy division songs), close ups of the protagonists' hair or profiles, industrial imagery in bucharest and the italian countryside. it was lovely.

unfortunately, i don't have much to say about the city of busan since i was mostly in the theater, shopping, or eating. i did walk around a bit but not nearly enough to get a good feel of the place. the one thing i did notice right away is that it only has three subway lines. pyeongtaek has none, and seoul has twelve. so it must be something in between, plus the sea. someday i'll actually get down to the beach there.

but now i am back in pyeongtaek and it is friday again, which means i will be back to seoul tonight.

hurrah.

northern treasure

'Every growing thing has received its peculiar impress: the delicately blown breath of the first cold. The stubbles straggle wanly sunwards, and the falling leaves rustle to the earth, with a sound as of errant silkworms. It is the reign of Autumn, the height of the Carnival of Decay, the roses have got inflammation in their blushes, an uncanny hectic tinge, through their soft damask.' -From Hunger by Knut Hamsun

so, my mom lent me her kindle for my time over here, for which i am very grateful. i've been in a scandinavian books phase, since i guess that's what my mom was into and had already downloaded. i read the millennium series (girl with the dragon tattoo, etc.), by swedish author stieg larsson, rather frantically. i couldn't put it down, as the saying goes.

below is an address to an n.p.r. piece about these and other scandinavian books in the same genre, and how "[their aim] was to investigate society ... to use detective fiction to "wield a scalpel" to lay open the soft "belly" of the "morally debatable" bourgeois welfare state, exposing the cancer that was eating away at Swedish society."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129081110

i didn't know a whole lot about how sweden works before reading this, and i'm not sure how much i really understand in the grand scheme now, but i definitely came away from the books rather surprised to have read much more than just a murder mystery/crime novel. what i read covered topics as wide ranging as bsdm, sexual violence against women, government intrigue, mathematics, fantastic sums of money, female heroines, psychology, journalism, and of course, a criticism of swedish society and politics. though the writing is far less poetic than Hamsun's (truthfully, not poetic at all), i do recommend the books highly.

Hunger was as painful as it was beautiful to read. it is a psychological study of a quite literally starving writer in turn of the century oslo (then called christiania), written in first person. it's a short but haunting story with no hopeful end. but intermingled with heartbreaking accounts of poverty, sickness, cold and mental illness, there were exquisite sentences like the example above. it caught me so deeply that i had to reread it several times and just sit and stare at the words for a while before finally writing it down. i think it had something to do with the fact that it is presently season-changing time.

so, now i must be on to some new book on the kindle screen. don't know what, yet. i am contemplating.

home and away

the other day in my 3rd grade class we read about disco fever. some of the shit we read is just ridiculous. i am not even really sure what grammar point it was enforcing. something for past verb forms maybe. we just ended up clarifying who starred in saturday night fever and what 'thriller' meant (both as a word and as an album). apparently thriller overtook the snf soundtrack as highest selling record in history at some point in the 80s? oh, i also had to explain what a soundtrack was. yeah, on top of being ridiculous, the material is very misinterpreted (or not interpreted at all) by the students. and this was an advanced class.

anyway, i did identify with one of the sentences. it was a quote from a reporter at the new york times during the 70s and it went something along the lines of "the current generation graduated, it secured employment, and endures. and every saturday night, it explodes." i feel like my present life is somewhat reflective of that statement. i obviously don't have anything close to a serious corporate style job, nor do i go dance at the discos every weekend. BUT i feel like my new life has fallen into a pattern-- a new pattern-- that i have never really experienced in all the chapters of my life. even though my job is not a really very serious job (after all, i am a teacher without a teaching degree), it is a job with a certain amount of responsibility. i had to take a drug test (first time ever), i have to be present for all my classes everyday (substitutes are very hard to come by), i have to do my own planning no matter how long it takes, and many times i am tired by the end of the day. this leads to a somewhat boring, though not unpleasant, existence.

i have to be at the school by 10 am, which means i have to leave my house to walk to school (which i love) by 9.50. not a bad schedule. i pretty much always get a good night's sleep. i have a two hour break for lunch, one hour of which we have to be at the school for planning and to show our faces for the parents who come by to pick up or drop off their kids. that's why they pay the money for this school after all, because there are white people doing the job. after planning (which might take 20 or 30 minutes.. we follow the books so there isn't much wiggle room), the rest of the time is for reading. classes begin again at 2.30 and i am finished by either 5 or 7. then it's home again. i cook myself dinner-- like, an actual good meal, then i sit on my balcony and read while the sun goes down. i drink some tea, maybe clean for a bit or shower, go online, then bed. i suppose i could go out on the weeknights here in pyeongtaek, but the reality is that i really enjoy the evenings to myself in my apartment. if i need something at the store or feel like a walk, i'll wander around town for a bit. but i can wait for the weekends for the fun stuff... and this is the 'explosion' part i was talking about before.

every weekend (well i guess i have only been here for two weekends), plus one tuesday, i have journeyed up to seoul. it's an amazing, and amazingly HUGE city complete with subway, beautiful wide river, tall buildings for miles, and plenty to see and do. the first weekend was a crazy time in hongdae, which is one of the central club/bar/young people/shopping areas. so much stimulation, so many foreigners, so much music, drink, dance and such late hours, with bars and clubs shutting down at 8 in the morning (or maybe never) in many cases. the next tuesday i journeyed up for a short, mellow goodbye bar run for the departing teachers. this past weekend i met another friend up in seoul yet again, this time in a different neighborhood, and got a whole different experience drinking with students from his school (from everywhere- thailand, china, kasakhstan, u.s.a., and korea) around a back table, with plenty of pitchers and soju.

i feel like i'm leading a sort of double life. one here in pyeongtaek where i am a teacher/worker and homebody/relaxer. then another on the weekends where the far more exciting big city awakens the desire to dance and drink and socialize. my different moods and actions coincide with the the separate places.

maybe as i (or if i) begin to make friends here in pyeongtaek, things may change, but for now the prospects remain bleak. the foreigners consist of military and, well, military. not a bad thing. not the best thing. my fellow teachers are one military and two friends from houston. they are all very nice. but, so far, none of us have really made attempts at including each other. and i'm content to keep my social life within the confines of the big city and enjoy thoroughly my vast amounts of free time to read, cook, relax, and enjoy a balcony.

i like the sky

yes, i live in the sky. it's the highest up i've ever lived and i like it on the 13th floor, which beats my college dorm 12th floor abode. thankfully it's much bigger than a college dorm- 3 bedrooms (albeit one is the size of a large closet-- and also happens to be the only room with a closet), a kitchen, and a living room which looks empty even with a loveseat, a wide flatscreen television occupying a large stand, and a tall freestanding air conditioner (the likes of which i've never seen before).

my apartment is lined by balconies on two sides. the balconies are enclosed by sliding full-wall windows. the warm, breezy, and sometimes humid summer air (depending on how recently the last rain has fallen) moves straight through since i keep all the windows open. i can hear sounds. today there was a lot of yelling in korean coming from a megaphone. i have no idea what sort of announcement it was, but it went on intermittently for hours while i scrubbed every dish in my cabinet. the previous inhabitants cleaned their things out, but they didn't clean. my mom taught me how to clean. how to clean well. so when i moved in, i went about systematically cleaning the refrigerator, the cabinets, the bathroom, etc.

luckily, i had some help. i thought i would be living by myself in this apartment, but one of the other teachers from the school where i work is also living here. well, sleeping here. she goes to her parent's home in seoul every weekend. monday through friday, she teaches from 10 in the morning til dinnertime and tutors til midnight. so really i live by myself with a ghost of a house guest. every time i've seen her at home she has brought me a treat. the first time was boiled corn and yogurt. the second time, a banana and two plums. anyway, when she moved in, her mother came down from seoul and cleaned the apartment. washed all the linens, scrubbed the floors three times. like my mom would do if i needed her help.

now that all is clean and tidy, i spent the rest of my sunday free time in the apartment reading 'the girl who played with fire' with some coffee, relaxing on the balcony, surrounded by my clothes hung out to dry. and of course writing this. i will write more soon because there is much to tell-- about the school, my visits to seoul, and the incredible (in both good and bad ways) food. but for now, must get back to my book.