38 Things Other Than the 38th Parallel

So this a Part II of sorts, since the honorable author wanted to split up the post and if you haven’t read the post previous then you should go do that at a point before you, a reader feared and respected by other readers of blogs for how passionate you are for checking this, your favorite blog, forget about it. Follow? Good. The author, other than liking to refer to himself in the third person, likes commas, which separate his thoughts, sometimes his thoughts from his thoughts, and then allow you to reenter the normal stream of continuity that you were really hoping for, and making any English teacher the author ever had, assuming they read this, cringe at his willfully, flaunting disregard for the proper usage of punctuation. Now on to the excitement of Filipinos, fish, and Pepero!

So post DMZ, on 11/11, as a nation, South Korea celebrated a holiday more corporate, capitalist and frivolous than Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and yes, Valentine’s Day combined: Pepero Day. Pepero, also known as Poki in Japan I believe, are kind of bread stick lightly coated in chocolate. Well on 11/11 every year since whenever someone had some sort of mad-genius epiphany, little old South Korea has been celebrating a holiday in which you go buy one brand of candy and exchange it with friends (and teachers) just because 11/11 looks kind of like 4 Pepero sticks (or one could argue 4 sticks of dynamite, or 4 buildings, or mathematically the number 1 since 11 by 11 is 1.) and somehow this god amongst men was able to sell the idea to an entire nation so now every November the stockholders of Pepero Inc. do very, very well. One of the boxes I received, under the name of Danny Teacher, is featured as a photo in the photos on the right. ----------->

I still go to Korean class and to do so I must take the subway to get to class and I have to transfer in Dongdaemun which is a fairly large station. Rushing through the station is akin to being in Logan’s Run, underground running to see Carnival, while dangerous ajuma, little old Korean ladies, elbow you and ride the trains for free so you’re like, “Yo lady! What’s your problem? I had to pay to get on this train and you ride for free so stop giving me death stares after bruising my rib cage, what did I do to you!?!?” At least that’s what goes through my mind.

So today, today today, not a day from two weeks ago, which means this entertainment is more current than movies at the North Bend Theater growing up, I went to the No Rayng Jin fish market in Seoul with my buddy Minha. Pike Place in Seattle: Get a life, you ain’t a market or if you are you’re a mere child. I have been to several major world markets and Seattle is hurting for something so wonderful as this temple, this Costco of seafood. I want my readers to think of ANYTHNG from the ocean and that, whatever you’re thinking of, is something you can get and eat at the market. King crabs, lobster from Maine, sting rays, clams, mussels, tunas, salmon, and virtually anything that isn’t a mermaid and edible is available at the market. I even saw two fish chosen by a consumer and then beaten on the head with a pokey stick on the ground by a helpful fish vendor. Not for the animal activists out there. Unfortunately I didn’t get video of this.

Minha and I wandered around taking photos, avoiding the aggressive fish hawkers, and eventually decided to buy a whole halibut to eat raw. As shown in videos on the photo link, they killed it—more humanely than the other vendor, and cut it up right in front of us. They then put it on a plate of radish shavings that soak up the toxins that may be in the fish and wrap it in plastic. This plate, along with a baggie of the skin and bones, is then brought up to a restaurant of your choosing where they compliment your fresh, fresh fish with kimchi and side dishes and make a spicy fish soup from the non-sushi parts. We ate the fish raw, known as hwea in Korea—crazy delicious and if you haven’t had just-live halibut raw you haven’t had one of the top ten best dishes or fishes I have had the pleasure of consuming. I can still feel the texture in my teeth and it is good. Other dishes in the top ten in case you’re wondering are tacos in Mexico, baguettes in France, fried clams on Cape Cod, steak in Argentina, and empanadas in Chile. Admittedly, I gets [sic] around.

Last and probably least on this epically proportioned blog entry times 2. I went to Hyewa to get coffee with Minha after the fish and visited a Filipino market on the sidewalk which had sausages, pork rinds and people who spoke very good English and said excuse me!—which is kind of a big thing here in South Korea since the Koreas don’t seem to have a word for it. I enjoyed it and will be going back. Also to the fish market if you can’t tell that I was in love with that place.

Anyway, again the photos I took can’t in anyway make you seem like you were there with me but the videos might do a little better job. Last I leave you with a question: Have I been here 3 months already?

Please drop me off at 38th and N. Korea

This humble raconteur has let another week go by without updating you, the loyal reader, to his whereabouts and otherabouts that have been going on here in east Asia; this of course is all you, the loyal reader, have been thinking about since you remembered that the author had a blog and you should probably check it but then when you finally got there, there was nothing to see. The author offers an apology and will not waste more text in third person as so that he might get to the meat of the entry, known in literary terms, as the “body.”

This body will be filled with tales of excitement, intrigue, and awesomeness and will no doubt be knee deep in extraneous commas, to boot. To start things off, I went to the 38^th parallel last weekend! I went with two coworkers and met up with David and Abby and some friends of theirs for the tour. While the tour is entirely worth doing and one of the most bizarre and surreal places I have even been, it was just plain odd to be frank.

For one, Koreans aren’t allowed to go on any tours that get all that close to the actual middle of the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, which just in case you haven’t kept up with major world events from the 20^th century or watched an episode of MASH on the Hallmark channel with my mom… then you should know that the 38^th parallel is where the Korean war came to a ceasefire and a truce is held between UN forces and North Korea. Set against this backdrop tours of westerners and Chinese come through every weekend and take photos. Photos have been uploaded and they have promised to try and can’t quite do it justice.

We were led around very quickly and the whole thing was only a couple of hours long. We got to go to a stone’s throw of the actual line between the divided nation, though I wouldn’t recommend throwing any stones near the line. There we saw UN soldiers half-hiding behind UN buildings staring down one or two North Korean soldiers who would come and look at us through binoculars and then hide behind pillars on their building, repeat. After this we were led to a see a video with the most stereotypical, shop class safety video of a narrator telling us of the importance of the DMZ, least of which is the fact that it is a default nature preserve (filled with landmines…).

All in all I don’t know what to really say. It was filled with soldiers and tourists who outnumbered the combined armies of North and South Korea and I thought a lot about Alan Alda, whose show ran for longer than the war it portrays. It was a weird contrast from the UN Memorial Cemetery in Busan. There we surrounded by the ghosts of the past and in the DMZ we were surrounded by a weird commercialization of a conflict over 50 years old now defended by the grandchildren of that war. Besides the CCTV which is everywhere in South Korea and watching your every move, you couldn’t ask for a more perfect, living example of Orwell’s 1984 in which the 3 nations of Earth are constantly at war with each other.

More updates with a more cheery tone above to break this up and for gettin’ ya down, up top.

3 Weeks Late/ 2 Rag

Illness, lethargy, and toil are possibilities that the author would possibly proffer for why neither he nor a suitable ghost writer has been able to recount the accounts of late, lately. It has been a long few weeks but the man behind the keys has now finally gotten around to tapping them for you once more and will do his best to tell at least one anecdote of note that he finally got around to and wrote.  So coughing and waiting to go to the doctor at least one more time, this sophisticated, soju drinking Seoulite will get scribbling so that you can be finally up-to-date with his fate.

So about two weeks ago I had acquired bronchitis from some unknown entity which left me coughing and hacking like an 80 year old smoker. The doctor was great apart from having the thickest accent in English imaginable—at least he spoke and understood English. He prescribed some medicine which I picked up at the pharmacy downstairs. The whole process (from the check-in at the doctor to the pharmacy) took 30 minutes and cost $6.50. If that is considered socialized medicine then I want it! They didn’t need to know a extensive history of all the medical problems of my entire family. They just prescribed medicine and it works. I wish I had that in the US. I really do.

In school news I had my open class—which promised to be scarier and more dramatic than a Twilight novel. It wasn’t. Open classes are times for the parents to come see what we are doing in the kinder program to see if they wish to continue to send their children to our school, basically a commercial for the school. My bosses were terrified and very nervous for especially for me since I seemed to not feel the same sense of fear that they did. It went very well however; I made jokes, the kids did good and the parents seemed to enjoy it. I ended up getting high fives from one boss afterwards and all smiles from the other one—so I think it went okay enough. Highlights included playing “red light, green light” and making jokes about how one kid was on his cell phone texting which is why he wasn’t moving during the “green light” portion of the game.

Since then I have gotten sick again and had monthly evaluations due for the majority of my kids. This has also kept me from writing you, my adoring fans who don’t leave enough comments for needy blogger in me. Halloween was fun. I dressed as Zorro, using a du-rag I picked up in Itaewon for the mask and a plastic sword I acquired in Sadang.  I was a really cool Zorro—though I wish I had had a hat or a cape to go with the outfit because as you can see from the photos I could have been the “Dread Pirate Roberts” from “The Princess Bride” just as easily. The kinder kids did a good job dressing up considering there are almost no costume shops in the Republic of Korea. We went trick-or-treating as several of their houses which was fun. I’ve never had fruit and cake while trick-or-treating before…  I was also the host for the costume fashion show which primarily consisted of me talking gibberish while the kids posed for a photo. I earned my pay that day.

Halloween weekend we went out and had a lot of fun which was nice but didn’t exactly improve my health. My friend Colm, who I hear is an avid reader of the blog, was a horse and quite popular with the kids as well as the bar crowd. To paraphrase one of his stories: one fellow bar guest was not surprised to find out that indeed the horse was Irish. I want what he was drinking, seems to have been working.

Since then I have gotten more medicine and felt better but not perfect, contemplating going again. They will only give you three days of medicine. All of which is divided into individual servings in little easy to open plastic baggies making it ludicrously easy to figure out what you need to take. I feel bad for my grandmother and anyone else who has to take quantities of pills and the real trick is dividing them up yourself.

I promise I will write more soon. I will try and not have any more lapses.  For I am but a man.

Anyoung he kay seo.