my new place

So I just got my new apartment settled, and the location, setup and price are an absolute dream. A 10 to 15 minute walk to downtown/work (I had thought I would have to commute in), or if the weather's bad, it's two to five minutes to get to the subway and then one stop away and all indoors. And that subway stop next to my place is also one of the major train stations of the city, as well as a giant luxury department store with a basement grocery store, and there's tons of other shopping, eateries and cafes in the immediate area. And I'm paying only about 50 bucks a month - just over a fourth of what I'd expected to pitch in - to upgrade to a full one-bedroom, instead of a studio, where it would have been difficult to host the many local and perhaps couple international visitors I expect in the next year.

But that dream I'm getting is a pretty colorful one, including giant psychadelic pink flowers on the living room wall and other decor no less than three tones of orange, plus one of red. I'm finding the cheese factor and artistic challenge quite entertaining - a great trade for a one-year stint of otherwise great conditions ... thought you all would get a kick out of seeing the pictures (click here), too.

I move in late this week - new mailing address to come.

... and we're back

Hi, everyone. I got beyond behind in posting here over the past couple months, but back now. The short of it is that I've been too self-absorbed to write anything of note - been trying to figure out job changes and life plans in general, and there was a really exciting period in which I thought I might have to leave the country and teach in Japan for the next year because of visa issues. But after considering many options, the final plan is to stay here in Daegu at a position teaching adults downtown, starting May 26.

I'm really excited to move back into civilization, and have another year here to enjoy this place and people I feel like I'm just starting to know. Not to mention work more on Korean. The next couple weeks will be a whirlwind, but it's a good thing and I'm on the countdown.

I'm planning a trip back to the States sometime this winter, and then I'll probably be coming back for grad school in fall of 2009, as I'm pretty sure I want to do this teaching thing for real - college-level languages/culture something. There won't be a whole lot of traveling this side of the world in the next year because of limited time off and budgeting priorities, but if I'm lucky I'll be able to swing a big trip next summer between work and school.

That's about the wrap right now. Thanks for all your well-wishes and I'll keep you (more frequently) posted. :)

a glimpse of Africa, and other travels

So I'm a bit behind the times, but my friend Jimmie has finally updated his blog with some images from Sudan, and I wanted to put a link here for anyone interested in seeing some great photos. Jimmie, a college buddy and photographer extraordinare, is documenting church construction in Sudan for Samaritan's Purse. Read more about his work on his blog.

In other news, I'm heading for Beijing next week for the Chinese New Year ... but also now skipping over to Japan for a few days this weekend. Most of our vacation falls around the winter sessions, so I'm cramming a lot of my travel into these couple months. Pictures and posts to come.

Meanwhile it's been back to the routines of teaching and living in the Village, wrangling with Korean studies and boisterous kids, and the exquisite torture of making Asian children say "parallelogram" (I've been teaching math this session).

On Sunday I helped chaperone a field trip to an indoor amusement park of blow-up slides, playgrounds and obstacle courses, and then to ice skate, with meals and other logistics throughout. It was enjoyable - if not easy - extra money, but also a case study in how kid-oriented this country is. Being out in public with 37 random children, it's really clear how much people here seem to view child-rearing as a collective endeavor. Any child is everybody's child - and people go out of their way to talk with, comfort or chastise any little one in their vicinity as they see fit. In our case, many of them did their best to do all that in English, which really is a heroic effort.

It's a marked difference from the States, where many people do their best to avoid public interaction with unknown children - not without reason.

For one thing, Americans have many more fears of pedophilia and other improprieties involving children and strangers. No one knows the actual rates of such crimes in either country, but (like most crimes) it's reported far more in the United States, and people are generally less worried about it in Korea.

For another thing, Americans tend to more support the right of parents to choose how their children are raised, and to criticize anyone who would interfere that. In Korea, people may have just as strong opinions about the way things should be done - though I'd doubt it - but they will rarely contradict a senior person (in rank or age) about anything, and group harmony is far more important than individual freedoms.

And in a less concrete influence, but perhaps the greatest one, Korean culture seems to prize childhood more as a golden era, and Korean people tend to go to far greater lengths to ensure their children the most opportunities and enjoyment. It's not uncommon for parents here to work dawn to dusk to afford to send their children to the best private institutes for English and other skills. They push their children hard, but they also devote a lot of energy to making sure the kids have fun and are happy, both in daily life and weekend activities.

But I don't think this group effort to raise children happens only here (though I imagine Koreans have their own brand of it). I remember a story one of my friends told me about being on a bus in Latin America somewhere, and a woman who got on just handed her a baby to hold while the woman fished change out of her purse - and no one looked twice. And I remember children playing in the streets of Madrid becoming collective charges. And from anecdotes and writings about even other places, I think maybe this is the way most of the world works, to some degree.

There's good and bad to all these things, which you could argue forever, like most points of any culture. But everything else aside, it is extremely refreshing to feel so supported in doing your job - especially when it involves taking care of children.

and we have visuals

So, at last, here are my first pictures from Asia - and some lifted from my friends - showing some of the highlights of our holiday trip to Bali. (Click the link above to get to the gallery of all the images, or to see them one by one as a slideshow, click the picture of the tree at right. You can change the speed of the slideshow at the bottom of the screen.)

My Christmas present to myself this year was breaking down and buying a point-and-shoot camera. It did a pretty good job, for what it is, and the fumblings of the person behind it. I swear manual settings are easier to do than programs, even though people get impressed by folks lugging around manual cameras.

I kept the pictures small and put credits on a lot of them because I have a paranoia of the images turning up as postcards somewhere and then wanting to do something with them later down the line ... hope y'all can still make out enough to keep you entertained.

so this is economics

Just a few hours remain of my three weeks in Indonesia. Having signed away my rights to a shower, and with a day's journey ahead, I'm hiding away from the tropical sun in an Internet cafe in Bali touristville, aka the Kuta beach area.

Two J-school friends and I met here for the holidays and spent the many sun and rain-filled days sampling the sites, tastes, hobbies and escape of Indonesia's Number 1 island for tourism - in fact, one of the top tourism destinations in the world. This little island - about 90 miles wide by 55 miles deep - and other neighboring locales (we stayed three nights at the Gili Islands, off the west coast of Bali's neighboring island, Lombok) house all the classic tropical-island attractions: reefs, volcanoes, beaches (black and white), famed surfing waves, ancient artforms, teeming markets, legions of resident artisans, lush vegetation, exotic animals, and that relaxed island culture.

It's a beautiful place, undoubtedly a little oversold as a tropical paradise, but still fascinating and multifaceted. Known for its tolerance in oft-militant Indonesia, Bali has the country's most diverse religious climate (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity), and the tourist machine there represents Indonesia's main outreach to the Western world. The Dutch have been regularly visiting for centuries - one of which they owned the place - and it's a major Aussie holiday destination. Several Japanese frequent the island; Koreans, South Africans, Russians, Brits and other Europeans come in lower numbers; and you can even find the occasional odd American. Estimates vary, but some say tourism makes up as much as 80 percent of Bali's economy, which makes the island - in the middle of an impoverished nation and region of the world - extremely vulnerable to threats to that industry, such as the terrorist bombings here in 2002 and 2005. Each shopkeeper, each cabdriver has a before and after story, particularly about the 2002 blast, which killed an estimated 200 people in a nightclub. Twenty were killed in 2005.

Since the blasts, tourism has slowly regained steam, with an estimated 5 million people visiting the island each year (statistics from the Indonesia's bureau of statistics). Bali is once again claiming its place as one of the wealthiest territories in the country. But it's still an island where poverty and luxury intertwine in an uneasy co-dependence.

And I find I am still a naive traveler.

In American eyes, I'm working-class, earning my own living in the lower white-collar trades. In European and Korean eyes, it's something at least similar. I travel, edging me into the realm of elite, but on my own it's mostly a no-frills style ... staying at budget hotels, navigating public transport and schlepping my own bags. It's a role I've felt mostly comfortable with, smugly self-righteous and benignly ignorant in. But this world is brown and (almost entirely) white, and coming here marked the first time I independently, irrevocably found myself part of the part of the rich, Western world. The served. The employers. The ones who buy adventure, who purchase culture. Who have more in their wallet than their waiter makes in a month.

I'm not sure how I imagined it would be ... can't say with any certainty that I thought about it at all, short of anticipating some sun, beautiful sights and good social time. But it definitely was a jolt upon arrival to find myself so classed for the first time of my adult, independent life. It's something that makes me uncomfortable, and yet right or wrong (some of both, I think) won't stop me from traveling, from spending, from hiring. I understand the business aspect of things, the fact I bring valuable cash and other benefits to struggling people. I just don't want to entirely lose that shock, to expect to live in this role. I don't want to relish my happenstance boon in social order, or to forget it. Mostly that.

It's a world of gray, this tourism business, especially to impoverished regions, but one I want now more than ever to explore. And I will bring my dollars, my camera, my glasses and my empathy.

back on the road again

It's been a whirlwind of a week, and weekend, but here I am in the Incheon (Seoul) airport on Christmas Eve, waiting for my flight to Bali. There's been a 7-hour delay, and I'm missing the two books that didn't make the packing cut something fierce, but honestly I can't remember being more content in months.

It was a sprint to the finish at work, a week of both angelic and hellion children ... and not much in between. Getting through it - especially Saturday school with the little ones - is something of a blur, but by 6:30 Saturday I was scrunched into the Village shuttle amid animated Tagalag (Filipino) conversation, headed toward civilization and adventure. Spent a fabulous night on the town - my first since moving to the mountain - in the company of the best tour guide/translator/cultural ambassador, aka a native friend, and caught a few hours of remarkably comfortable sleep on the overnight commuter train to Seoul. (Tourist note: in Daegu, saw a great jazz/blues band of young Korean guys at a fun club called "That," then hit an upscale bar called "AU.") Then I rambled around in the big city for a few hours, sweet-talking my way into the newsroom of one of the major dailies (which ended up being dead, being as it was Sunday), hit the Namdaemun market and ended up walking in dress boots from there to the Seoul Tower (a mostly vertical jaunt), which wasn't my brightest idea ever, but definitely memorable. Finally dragged myself over to the hostel I'd booked near the airport and found a fairly ramshackle building but clean, comfortable, private rooms/bathrooms, a kind couple running the place, and a value that absolutely can't be beat - I definitely recommend the Incheon Airport Backpackers Hostel.

Then this morning I met a fellow passenger for my Bali flight on the shuttle over to the airport, a worldly Korean doctor from the Gwang-ju area, and the airport time has been pleasant enough, chatting away for the past few hours about language, food, culture and travel.

It's the first big trip I've done, and it's great feeling like I'm finally getting to what I came abroad for ... or at least one of the major reasons - travel. But being out and about has also made me realize I'm feeling more at home in Korea - that comfortable sense of knowing transit lines, landmarks, enough phrases to get around, good friends, and the revelation that I'll miss those Korean staples kimbap and kimchi a little in the next three weeks. Even the markets don't overwhelm me the way they used to. Plus it reminds me of all the things I love about this country - mostly the kind and friendly people, and the perks of being American here (though there's baggage with that, too, but I'll save all that for another post).

And it's vacation, one in which I'll be seeing old friends at the day's end and heading to holidays on the beach. So call me Pollyanna, but I swear life couldn't be better. How did I get lucky enough to be born where I did, when I did, to whom I did, to afford me the opportunity to do this? Thinking on it too much puts me dangerously close to guilt-trip territory, especially the more I see all the lifestyles in the world, but today I feel like it's the best Christmas present ever.

it doesn't get any better than this

OK, so I just hit the high point of teacherdom: my first letter from a former student. Probably my only one, being as we are now subject teachers and I only see the students for 90 minutes a week each, rather than having them all week long, so not much time to form any sort of bond. (Not that I'm complaining - subject teaching makes far more sense with our constantly changing schedule, and is much more manageable.)

So this letter is on the traditional cutesy Korean paper decorated with flowers and hearts and nonsequitor, nongrammatical English ("Today is happy day." "Good things might come to those who wait." "Welcome to Flower garden"). Korean products, including clothes and stationary and mugs, tend to use English letters/words as decor rather than for meaning, and some of it is pretty funny.

The letter is from my one student, probably about 12 years old, who cut her finger in art class (no more big scissors). Her English name is Tracy, and she plays a traditional double-reed Korean instrument sometimes written as "piri." Apparently her brother plays it, too. It should give you some insight into how fantastic and cute the kids can be, and how they tend to talk very dramatically for humor and emphasis. I've tried to preserve the spellings, capitalization and spacing in typing it here.

Hello, Kristin marsh teacher?
I'm Tracy. How are you? I'm fine.
I want to see you. My finger is ok. Teacher, thank you. I'm crying. And I'm sad. Because, I miss you. I'm crying every day. I miss you, teacher!
Oh, dear. Soon, my brother's concert. It's the Pili. There is Donga shaping [shopping] 10thfloor.
Good, bye - Kristin marsh teacher!

- Tracy -

I'm prety. You are prety.
I'm kind. But. You are very kind.
I miss you.

Isn't that the best thing ever? :)

the holidays a la Asia

I'm sitting in my dorm room on a cold December night, looking out on our resident fuselage, listening to some mellow blockbusters on MySpace music, thinking about careers and tomorrow's lesson plans, and trying corn ice cream. It's not as weird as you'd think - kinda like frozen creamed corn.

We've got our first official batch of five-day kids - about 45 from a private school or schools in a more rural region northeast of Daegu. That's 4 or 5 kids per class. Last week it was 18 in each class, and we've had all manner of daycamps, overnights, half-days and three-day sessions, so we've really seen the gamut. They're all awesome, though, and what makes everything worth it. Tensions have been high recently over various things, but these kids are the best part of everything, and what make me thankful every day, if not quite every class (We are considering getting "I Survived Group 12" T-shirts after one particular crew), that I took this job. They're just fun and creative and goofy and crack themselves up with these jokes that aren't even funny, but it totally cracks me up that they find them so hysterical.

The holiday season has fallen here, too, which I'm coming to find means giant anime-style Santas and who knows what other Christmas creations parading the streets, a plethora of cooked-batter streetfoods, and the traditional merchandise explosion you find back home. Oh and the karaoke version of "White Christmas" is about the best thing I've seen yet - one long string of pictures of Korea's verdant hills and Buddhist temples. Not one flake of snow.

Mostly it's been cold and dry and rather sunny, but this weekend was one miserable long drizzle ... the perfect kind for curling up in a downtown coffeehouse with a new book (or three) and watching civilization scuttle by outside, and I definitely indulged. It's strange finding myself reading again - entranced by the bookstore and perpetually in the middle of about six books, just like when I was a kid. I guess that lifestyle of eight-hour days of staring at words is finally relaxing its grip. Now I've just got to figure out what to do with the library I'm amassing.

I get pangs for American holidays and family time every so often - like the other day when I saw pictures of the Iowa Mills' Thanksgiving, or tonight when I told a Korean friend about last year's holiday outing to Kansas City's jazz district. But I'm also looking forward to trying out this whole island holiday thing this year, spending Christmas and New Years on the shores of Bali with good friends from college, now spread around the world.

Oh but I never did quite get my Thanksgiving story put up here ... so the 20 of us Americans at the Village (with the very important help of certain Korean staff) coordinated as traditional a dinner as we could muster the Sunday after the holiday, and I volunteered to do the last-minute shopping, thinking I was being smart to avoid the chaos of climbing over everyone else in the kitchens with all their Korean machinery. Well, the short of it is that I ended up being very much the turkey and having my most fabulous "weird foreigner" moment yet in this country, loaded down with a ridiculous amount of food, answering relentless phone calls and trying to navigate Korean public transportation.

With considerable effort, I had dragged my overladen bags down to the bus stop near the local Costco (a Sam's Club-style warehouse of mostly Western things), but the bus pulled up before I was quite ready with my fare. But I leaped on anyway with all my cargo, much to the amusement of the onlooking passengers and the bemusement of the surly driver. The next bit all sort of happened at once - me fishing for change, one of my bulging bags tumbling down and various Thanksgiving offerings rolling out across the floor of the 739, the bus jolting forward and my shoe sliding off my foot into the stairwell and just barely slipping out the closing door. I don't think anyone else saw the shoe go, and I was quite the wild-haired freakshow there, still digging for a darned 100 won piece and debating the worth of a Size 12 shoe, laden down as I was and sock-footed, two busrides and one walk from home in Asia. To top it all off, my phone started ringing again.

The shoe won out.

Seven blocks later, I had found the coin, collected my things and finally managed to hit the stop button, and all the wide-eyed Korean "aunties" watched me clamber off the bus. I then hobbled back the direction I came, at one particularly poignant moment passing a true bag lady (a rare sight here, but you just can't make up the stuff that happens in real life - no one would believe you). And even in the middle of my "I am ridiculous" haze, I did realize that my lot even at that moment was something to be thankful for, because I was strong enough to huff and puff it back, rich enough to afford a taxi for the last leg of the journey when I had missed the right shuttle, and lucky enough to have an amazing, nostalgic feast waiting for me when I got there.

And I got my shoe, dadgumit.

changes, chicken feet and cute children

No time for a full-on post, but a few notes from Daegu:

1) In the lastest string of changes, we are not, in fact, getting our public school kids until at least March. Classes between then and now will be on a week-by-week or day-by-day basis depending on which schools we can schedule, and will probably be entirely daycamps. We start this week with 4 days of different grades from a prestigious private school in Daegu and one day of a kindergarten class from Yeungjin's academy. Definitely keeps us on our our toes, but we're also getting pretty good about adapting to curveballs.

2) I've realized that my friend in Sudan, where people live in huts and goats wander around in the streets, is eating less exotic food than I do. I'm pretty sure I had chicken feet tonight in town.

3) I hung out with the first- and second-grade classes yesterday to prepare for this Wednesday and Saturday when I'll be teaching youngsters, and they sure are cutie little bundles. Cutie little bundles who speak about 10 words of English. And apparently not all of their parents have impressed on them why they go to this place with the strange people who babble nonsense, because some of them feel it's their duty to teach us to speak properly. One little girl resolutely repeated "Han bon do" each time I said "Another one, please," and one of the boys had the following conversation with me:

[6-year-old scribbles what appear to be a boy monster and girl monster on his paper.]
Me: Oh wow! Two people - one, two.
6-year-old [pointing to each in turn]: Namja, yoja.
Me [pointing to each one]: Yes ... "man," "woman."
6-year-old [pointing]: Nam-ja ... yo-ja.
Me [pointing, nodding]: Yes ... "ma-an," "wo-man."
6-year-old [perplexed ... decides to take a different tack, points to a boy across the table, then a girl next to him]: NAM ... JA ... YO ... JA.
[We go a few more rounds of pointing at different people and pictures, with him first getting more emphatic, then patiently slowing down for this simpleton who just can't get it, and finally giving up to go bang on the drums.]

I HAVE RENTERS!!!!

Five months later, I finally have income back at the condo in the Springs. Whew - major relief! The new renters move in on Tuesday, even. I'll still be paying a little each month, but I can finally start getting to some of those financial goals - fun and boring - I came over here with instead of just scraping by. Here's to renters!

where I live

I'm finally getting together at least some pictures of campus ... check out my web album by clicking here (click the "Slideshow" button for the best way to see them all big one after another). It will probably be updated somewhat over the next couple months, and this just covers some of the areas, but you'll get the idea of what an amazing facility it is.

Week 2 down

Our second batch of kiddos has just left and I'm finally getting to that "I haven't written in awhile ..." post.

Life here is divided between the chaos of herding 200 children and the quiet of rural isolation - it's really an odd deal. For the past three days I've been going nonstop from the wee hours to the wee hours, and now I'm sitting here wondering what to do with myself for the rest of the week. It's like in three days I've forgotten how to have hobbies. Never fear, I'm sure I'll remember by tomorrow. :)

I've now taught two three-day weeks and one Saturday session, and although we still have all those startup fiascos popping up, it seems like we've been here forever.

Last week's class of 11- and 12-year-olds (Korean age) was wonderful - full of sweet, fun kids and eager students, and even the rapscallion boys' ringleader was nothing more than a minor discipline problem who responded really well to direct commands. I was sad to see them go.

I figured I couldn't possibly be so lucky with this week's group, and when I walked in and saw it was a group of 13-year-olds, I braced for a tough session. Just in the year's difference, you can see the kids slipping into teenage diffidence - guarded eyes, self-conscious shrugs, baggy clothes, dramatic eye rolls ... and that one kid in every group who always slouches under a black hood.

But then lo and behold, by some cosmic fluke these kids were even more amazing and full of surprises - in fact, the one with the hood turned out to be my most interactive and helpful student. And their grasp of English was incredible, which meant we got to move past basic vocabulary into more fun cultural lessons (they were perplexed that adults don't ask each other their ages within minutes of meeting, for example, because in Korean that's mandatory to know what form of language to use). To a kid, they were earnest participants and really put themselves out there. The weirdest part was that although all my girls were great, it was the boys who were the ones first in line, volunteering the most answers and helping turn out lights and close doors. Like I said, cosmic fluke. But I'll take it.

These first two groups were a PR move - free for 200 selected from hundreds of participants, I think largely because they scored well on a test, and a lot of them were from well-off families who invest in private English academies. Next up (and from here on out) we get general public school kids for weeklong sessions, which will undoubtedly be an entirely different ballgame.

Now back to remembering how to read, run, study Korean ...

the plane has landed

We're here ... whew. At the Village finally, and the first round of kids come Monday. In the meantime, another set of Korean machines and panels to learn, another round of faces to meet, another room to unpack. Our time here has been like three jobs, three homes, so it's nice to finally be able to live out of furniture instead of a suitcase and really be getting on with the job we were hired for.

The past week has been a flurry of moving and shaking hands - Tuesday was the big opening ceremony, and all the local politicians were there plus UCCS and Yeungjin representation and a slew of reporters. (Sidenote: The mayor of Daegu speaks great English and even in Korean proved that charisma is a major political selling point worldwide; also, Korean journalists are quite snappy dressers, contrary to their American counterparts.) The thing was broadcast on all three national news networks and it was quite the affair. And everyone was appropriately wowed by the grandiose architecture including the major selling point - a retired jetliner suspended 20 feet in the air, used to simulate the flight experience for students - so it appears to be a promising start. Now comes our part ... wish me luck! :)

Oh and belated happy Halloween, everyone. Hope y'all enjoyed my favorite holiday back there for me - they don't celebrate it on this side of the world, and what with everything else happening, our crew didn't do anything to mark it, either.

digital supernova

Going abroad this time around is an entirely different experience than my first venture - in many many ways, but particularly because the world is so much more wired now ... or at least I am more hip to it.

In Spain, six years ago, I spent cold hours at telephone booths, fumbling through a flip book of numbers and punching in phone-card codes about as long as pi. I occasionally sent mass e-mail updates, but my regular contacts back home dwindled to the handful of folks who were willing to correspond in lengthy e-mails or phone conversations. I found my housing and language buddies off bulletin boards, and hoped to make friends off of chance and dicey Spanish skills in buses or classes or bars ... which didn't work very well. I spent many an hour and peseta - then Euro - in Internet cafes and on phone cards. And it seemed like I spent even more time in transit to get to those cafes and phone cards.

Before going to Spain, I scoured my music collection for the precious couple dozen CDs that would remind me of home, I lived in silence for the few weeks before splurging on a small boombox, and I listened to those songs - even the dubious ones - so many times that I can't hear them now without being whisked back to Madrid. Any television I watched was Spanish, and although I found some information about events and such online, I seemed to spend most of my life there tracking down details. (Though that could be more of a cultural thing ...)

In Korea, I now have an Internet connection in my bedroom AND office AND classroom ... and go a little crazy when it goes out. I have two computers and ridiculously cheap phone service right from one - though I don't tend to use it much (sorry!) because I'm generally chatting online with folks back home at both ends of the day and occasionally in between. Subsequently, I've (thusfar) kept a far wider net of regular contacts than last time around.

And let's not forget this blog, which lets me post any old thing without cluttering your mailboxes, and services like Blogarithm, which let you clutter your mailboxes all you like. Plus there are blog readers that help me keep up on the latest from my blogging friends and other news and newsy sites ... not to mention that now there's just a ridiculous amount of information out there. I'm not sure how people lived before they could look any old thing up on Google. I mean, really, how did we survive without being able to instantly figure out:

• the Billboard Top Ten,
• how long pi really is,
• how the Korean pension system works,
• the lyrics to Dar Williams' "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono,"
• a map of the Korean rail system,
• the name of that artist who makes the hyper-real human sculptures,
• how to create a "tornado" in a bottle,
• whether there really are flesh-eating amoebas,
• the Korean word(s) for "older brother,"
• where Arkansas City is in Kansas,
• rapper Mos Def's biography,
• who's behind that silly "I've got a crush on Obama" video,
• that silly "I've got a crush on Obama" video,
• the spelling of the new French president's name

... to name a few of dozens of searches I've done in the past couple days. Such info was around six years ago, but it was nowhere near as cataloged or accessible. Plus I had to make lists of things to look up at my next Internet cafe outing, rather than just walking into the next room to check ... so I think most of my wonderings tended to go unresearched.

Forums for expats here offer a scattershot of advice (or misadvice), how-to's (or how-not-to's), insight (or lack thereof), happenings and other information for the hapless foreigner (that is, me). More and more academic studies are going up online all the time, and news sources are getting better systems to deliver targeted news to those who go searching for it, so it's now easier to back or kill some theory I've formed about the culture.

I pick up bits of Korean for free through a particularly great podcast on Apple's iTunes, and I brought over something close to my entire music collection without adding an ounce to my luggage. Not only do I have all my tunes at home, I can take them out and about for runs, long bus rides or any other time I'd rather keep the world at a distance. Occasional NPR podcasts keep me somewhat up to date on U.S. politics and culture of the day, and YouTube and other video-sharing programs keep me abreast of the latest pop culture phenomenons. Some of my TV-phile co-workers have hookups to get American television delivered to their computers (or scour the Net for illegal streams), and good old iTunes dishes up a smorgasboard of shows to buy by episode or season - I've caught an episode of one of my old standbys and one of the promising newbies. There's also the photo-sharing programs that I haven't made much use of yet, but eventually I'll get there.

But perhaps the biggest benefit to this digital age: making connections in the real world. The majority of my non-work friends here are from that whole social networking phenomenon - MySpace and Facebook and others - or connections of people I met that way. I know this idea probably freaks some of you out a little, but the Net can be a fabulous tool for someone as persnickety about friends as I am because it gives you a chance to survey all sorts of folks at a deeper level than seeing someone sitting across the way and guessing (1) that they speak English, (2) are even remotely compatible with me and (3) are open to making a new friend. I've definitely been off the mark a time or two, but mostly it's worked out really well.
(And don't worry, I have no intentions of ending up in someone's freezer, so I take all the usual precautions of limiting personal info, meeting in public places with friends, etc.)

Each generation has its defining things: wars, protests, big hair ... I'd say my generation's defining characteristic is that we were those who grew up with the Internet. We're old enough to remember a time without it (foggily) and are now its main consumers - young enough to have adapted fairly wholesale, old enough to have freedom and buying power to use it relatively unhampered. (These are of course generalizations.) Tomorrow my little cousins will be calling us old fogies as they pass us up on those virtual highways, but we will have been the forefront, and it's an interesting position, no doubt. I wonder what it says about us.

status update

So, as expected in any new program and definitely when being abroad just about anywhere, we've had nothing but changes since our arrival, and the latest is that our moving and teaching dates have rolled back another week - to November. This is definitely a good set of changes, though - things were getting pretty harried just trying to adjust plans to all the recent curveballs, so it's a welcome few more days to organize logistics.

Meanwhile, personally, it's another week to enjoy the conveniences and easy social outlets of being in the city.

It's one of the strangest things I've ever done ... moving to an architectural marvel of an isolated mountain campus with 20 other Americans (19 teachers, 1 administrator), 39 Filipino aides, 8 Romanian aides, a handful of Korean staff and a rotation of hundreds of Korean students coming through every week. It'll be a happening spot, no doubt, and should be an awesome place to teach ... but it's also an utterly bizarre social experiment, being as it will be tough (though not impossible) to get down to the city more than one day a week. No trips to the store, no street food, no errands at the bank, no outside expat culture, no chance to meet new (non-student) people, no post office runs and - the biggie - no face time with non-work friends. It will just be part of the adventure and something I've been braced for since the beginning, but suffice to say I'm trying to savor my more traditional urban lifestyle, especially after having three months to settle into city life.

Meanwhile I'm trying to wait a couple more months to really think about out what I'm doing next year (let alone with the rest of my life), but being the obsessive planner I am, it's hard. The good news is that there are a ton of options. The bad news is that there are a ton of options. And all I can say is that I'll keep ya posted.

Where do monks learn to drive?

By coincidence, I followed up my metropolitan whirl with something close to Korea's other extreme: a templestay. Monday, some friends and I spent a couple hours on a couple buses to head due east to Golgulsa Temple to check out the Buddhist way of life. Twenty-four hours of meditation, martial arts, yoga, vegetarian meals, hiking, chanting, and way more floor-sitting than my body's equipped to gracefully do at the moment. All this in a pristine mountainside temple dating to the 6th century. Pretty amazing.

We almost got on the wrong bus to Gyeong-ju (yes, it's a theme - part being a unknowing foreigner, part just being myself in any country) but managed to get thing straightened out before actually boarding. From Gyeong-ju, the directions say to take a city bus another 40 minutes to a certain stop - but if you're going, best enlist a local's help. The bus announcement for the place is decidedly different, they don't stop unless you ask, and you'll never see the stop marked on the road. If you successfully make it off the bus (we were only 50 meters or so past the place when the bus screeched to a halt as our helper shouted down the driver), you'll find yourself in the middle of the country at a random road with no clear signs for this historic spot, your only directions to "walk 15 minutes."

Those were 15 long minutes, lemme tell ya, trudging single-file along the road (which we hoped was the right direction), past fields and a small town and countryfolk giving us quizzical stares. But we finally spotted some signs for the temple (only in Korean though ... the temple's tourist-friendly reach is pretty much confined to its grounds) and knew we had arrived.

Despite the lack of worldly announcement, the temple is quite a grand place - maybe a couple dozen buildings ancient and new scattered along a gorgeous and quite vertical mountainside. I'd guess there were maybe 25 monks and monks-in-training in residence (a couple of them Western) plus a handful of Western twenty-somethings living there in a two-year training course for sunmudo - a form of martial arts. Monk fashion includes natural-dyed grey and brown robes, shaved heads and accessories of simple glasses and watches. The sunmudo trainees wear a certain loose-fitting pant and regular T-shirts. Then there were maybe 20 of us there for the templestay, and upon arriving, we were given orange vests - kind of like a Buddhist take on prison garb.

The templestay program goes on daily, with visitors staying anywhere from hours to days, and the schedule changing a bit from day to day. The time is basically broken into regular strenuous or culturally interesting activities separated by fairly long stretches of free time to rest, hike, meditate or just contemplate the beautiful surrounds. here typically is a service element to every day - cleaning or weeding or building, for example - but I think that since we were there for Chusok, the schedule was devoted more to holiday ceremonies instead.

In the evening we ate dinner a la Korean Buddhist custom - men and women sitting separately, quietly. Nothing can be thrown out, but you can get seconds. I definitely don't have a handle on the Buddhist approach to food, however: According to Buddhism, you're supposed to focus on your food and be grateful for it, yet eat for sustenance rather than pleasure. As everything's vegetarian and simple, yet fresh and delicious - it was some of the best Korean food I've eaten, and I had a hard time with the not-enjoying-it-too-much concept. I definitely could stand to eat less food mindlessly, but I think that tenant alone could keep me from converting - not to mention the whole Buddha business - the world is just too full of delicious things to savor.

After dinner was an couple hours of chanting (always accompanied by plenty of full-bodied bowing), a brief meditation (as in sitting straight-backed in the lotus-position, hands encircled in front of your navel, eyes closed, "ohm"ing and hissing), sunmudo training (ouch, ouch and double-ouch - those monks are amazingly fit people) and a demonstration of traditional Korean dance by a local university professor. This was all supposed to be an outdoor moonlit ceremony to observe the holiday, but drizzly weather unfortunately moved it indoors. Then to bed to prepare for an early morning - the men were divided into a few rooms and women all shared a large common room, everyone sleeping Korean style (with mats on the floor), but the mats here were more like a folded-over blanket.

Korean Buddhists believe that the karmatic power of the universe begins to awaken around 4 a.m. and that the morning is a particularly potent time for reflection, so chanting and meditation was slated for 5 a.m. Apparently some of the Korean women in our room believe that 4 a.m. is a particularly potent time for fixing their hair, because they started rustling around 3:45. Not having a clock at my bedside, I was up and dressed before I realized the hour, so I slipped out into the dark for a quiet starlit stroll, or so I thought.

Unfortunately one of the many temple dogs - kept to ward off evil spirits - apparently decided I was a demon on the loose, and the two of us managed to rouse an even larger crowd. A sleepy-eyed German (or something like that) emerged on the scene of me standing petrified in front of the snarling mutt, and we had a most delightful conversation something like this:

(German speaks to dog, who lowers volume of growl.)
Me: I'm sorry! I just wanted to take a walk.
German: Don't be afraid! She senses your fear. DON'T BE AFRAID!
Me: Um ... okay. (Thinking: Yeah right. You come down here and stare down this ferocious thing and DON'T BE AFRAID!)
(German speaks again to dog, who finally goes silent.)
German: It is early.
Me: I know.
German: 5 o'clock. You come here.
Me: I know. I just wanted to take a walk. (pointing to trail)
German: On mountain?
Me: Yes.
German: It is early.
Me: I know.
German: (stares at me for a moment, then finally shrugs shoulders at the weird American) Be careful.
Me: I will.

(German goes back inside and I start up the path, walking away from the dog I'll note. But as soon as I take a few steps the dog breaks into snarls and growls again and starts tearing after me.)
Me: Okay! Okay! I give up already!

I edged back around the building and down the mountain, muttering all the way about stupid dogs.

Turns out that maybe that dog was good karma though in disguise, because instead of stumbling around on a dark hiking trail with little to see except some burial mounds, I headed over to the other side of the mountain (assiduously watching for signs of any other spirit-keeping dogs) for a closer look at the ancient Buddha carved into a rockface above the main temple. It may not have been the smartest thing I've ever done, creeping up crumbling footholds in a dewy rock wall in the pre-dawn, but the payoff was worth it - stupid dog and all. The monks had started their morning chants and a soft light pulsed out from the elaborate temple below; hushed droning and percussion wafted up with a hint of incense on the cool breeze. A star-studded sky sprawled above, and the verdant Korean mountains were spread out before me, occasional lights illuminating a misty valley here and there. And at my back, a 4-meter serene-faced sculpture - pounded into a mountainside by Indian Buddhists who had migrated to Korea about the time the Dark Ages were setting in upon Europe. This is traveling.

I had to book it down to morning chanting, then we had an elaborate yet pious breakfast ceremony for the holiday. Awhile later was tea with the grandmaster, a warm and graceful man with a deep-belly laugh that reminded me of the way one of those jovial Buddha statues might laugh if it came to life (though the grandmaster had none of those statues' girth). In my limited experience with Buddhist culture, it seems to me that the faith tends to emphasize a docile sort of humor - kind of like how Christianity has its own version of standup-style jokes, I suppose. Later was more chanting and then a Chusok ceremony celebrating growth and life and the lives gone before us, which basically involved a lot more bowing and some chanting and a table full of harvest goods. People come to the table two by two to symbolically empty cups of water into a communal bowl, then hold the cups as monks pour them full anew.

Then another tasty meal. And for our final adventure, the couple of my group who remained crammed into a small, rickety van with a questionable clutch and an even more eye-raising driver - a monk. I haven't even seen taxis here pull some of the stunts this guy managed ... and I had to wonder where monks learn to drive. Or maybe because they're religious, Korea just gives them a free pass to the road. Anyway, our fabulous guide (in full monk attire, of course) successfully shuttled 12 of us tourists to several other historic Buddhist sites in the area and explained the culture and history in broken but extremely animated English. A Brit in the group bought everyone ice cream at the journey's end, including one for our monk, of course. I'm not sure where ice cream fits in with the whole take on food, but our guide gratefully accepted, and it was really heartwarming to see someone's eyes light up that much at what seems such a little thing.

The trip home took an extra hour because of holiday traffic, and seemed even longer for the lack of sleep and soreness of body, but there's no question it was worth it. Templestay: $40. Bus fares: $11. Incidental tourism costs: $3. Experiences ... well, you know.

Korea's got Seoul

Belated Chuseok (also spelled Chusok) greetings - Korea's rough equivalent to Thanksgiving. We had six days off, including the weekend, and I spent a good chunk of that time traversing the Korean capital and remembering what it is to be a tourist.

Thankfully my cohorts for the trip like playing tour guide, so they did most of the footwork and I just got to go along for the ride - one of my favorite ways to travel. Through trial and error, and probably just the virtue of getting older and more cantankerous, I'm finding that there are two ways I like to travel: solo and largely by the seat of my pants, or tagging along on others' agendas. I'm just not a natural organizer, nor do I like to be responsible for other people's happiness - especially in situations/places I don't know intimately. Thankfully there are some of you out there who don't get stressed out by that sort of thing - who actually enjoy travel planning for groups or do it as a career - or I'd never travel with anyone.

Anyway, two co-workers were bound for the big city this weekend with a priority set in line with mine: finding cheap accommodations, good ethnic food (not Korean or Western, the two types readily available in Daegu), doing some shopping, some sightseeing, and checking out the nightlife and foreigner districts. All with the understanding that we're here for at least a year and will almost certainly be in the city again, so no need to rush any of it.

Once we finally got to Seoul - another adventure on mass transit, where we managed to get on the slow train instead of the bullet train (so maybe I shouldn't have been following so blindly right then) - we found a vastly different world from Daegu. So many of the things I'd thought were probably just very Korean - the stares you get as a foreigner, the loud ads plastered haphazardly everywhere, the non-discriminatory palates - I now think are more a product of a slower-developing economy in my "small town" of 2.5 million. Although still of course quite Korean, Seoul feels more like a big city anywhere else in the world - quaint shopping areas, more homelessness (though nothing compared to the average U.S. city), hopping nightlife, polished entertainment, and just a cosmopolitan sensibility pervading the whole place. And far more international. There was one particularly poignant moment when we were eating Italian food, listening to American pop music and swapping Spain experiences in Spanish with our South American waitress ... of course in Korea.

And it was super strange feeling like I didn't have to acknowledge every Westerner who crossed my path. Here in Daegu, it's a fairly odd occurrence to see someone who looks like me, and I always find myself staring just as the Koreans do, then smiling and nodding hello. In Seoul, nearly every subway car you catch will have at least one or two others. (Funny note: Today back in Daegu, a little girl shouted to her parents "Chinese people!" when another American and I entered their elevator.)

On the tourist front, we had a highly successful stay - hitting a couple palaces, a changing-of-the-guard ceremony, the foreigner district, the kitschy shopping area, a traditional market, a gargantuan mall, and a bar that seemed to be the Korean male version of "Coyote Ugly" with pyrotechnics. We also had Indian cuisine, Italian, Egyptian, Chinese dumplings and plenty of street yummies.

We also found an awesome hostel, Stay Korea (www.staykorea.co.kr), run by a Korean woman who's fluent in French and English and her Korean husband. A double room was about $50 a night, and a spot in the dorm was about $15. For those not acquainted with the hostel system, they come in all sorts, but the basic idea is that they are cheap places to sleep - often in a common room with bunkbeds. You never really know what you're getting, because the crowd can be vastly different day to day even if the place checks out OK, but in general I've found them one of the best parts of traveling, both for the cost and the chance to meet interesting people.

This time, we found ourselves in a remarkably clean, quiet house four minutes' walk from a subway and a few blocks from the happening university district of restaurants, shops and bars. The owners actually pick you up from the subway stop on your arrival and offer all sorts of sightseeing advice - not to mention friendly conversation. The dorm was silent and dark, the double room was basic but quite sufficient, there was a lovely patio and roof deck perfect for drinking tea and watching the neighborhood - a friend and I stayed there up into the wee hours one night talking politics and religion with a globe-trotting French pharmacist.

All in all, a fabulous trip. Never did find the"Korea's got Seoul" T-shirt, though - a friend in Colorado has one from the year she taught here, and pun-loving copy editor that I am, I rather liked it ... wonder if it was some sort of tourism-department slogan that's fallen by the wayside. Oh well, maybe next trip I'll find one.

Soon to come: a Buddhist templestay.

So what have you learned about your travel style, dear readers? Feel free to post your answer in the "Comments" section below.

new digs and other mundane updates

Whew! Finally have my own Internet connection again. We rather suddenly moved into dorms at the end of last week, and it's been a bit like starting over again: new digs, new roommates, new part of town, new transportation lines, new set of shopkeepers ... but the biggest challenge - no personal line to the Net again for a few days. I am a part of the wired generation, no doubt about it.

But anyway, I'm now happily settled - Web and all - in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom suite on the top floor of a four-story brand new dorm building about 10 minutes' walk from the college. My roommates are fabulous folk: a chill couple from Ohio - new grads from an ESL master's program - and a former junior high math teacher from Colorado Springs. I have a Western-style bed again, and out my window is an undeveloped plot of tiny, haphazard houses and squash blossoms. The rooms are actually built for two each, which I can hardly imagine, but the place is grand for our setup of four people. And we only share a washer among 12 people now, and it's on our balcony, rather than down five flights in a dingy basement of a busy hotel.

As of now, we're supposed to be here another six weeks or so before moving up to the Village, but I'll find shoes in Asia if that deadline actually holds. We're taking another trip up there tomorrow and we'll see how much closer the crews are to the lavish architects' drawings ... it will be an amazing place if it turns out anything close to that, but it's obviously got a lot yet to get there.

Meahwhile it's an adventure navigating the neighborhood's maze of tiny alleyways and major "a la NASCAR" streets. We're also within minutes of another, large university, and there's a cool area closeby teeming with cosmopolitan restaurants, shops and nightlife. Downtown is now a bus- or cabride away, instead of mere stops on the convenient subway, but the sense of local community is captivating.

Amid trips to E-mart this weekend, the country's semi-equivalent to Wal-Mart/Target, a group of us squeezed in a full day touring the coastal part of this region by bus - stopping at a park, a temple, an arboretum and a windmill field. Nothing jaw-dropping, but fun nonetheless, and for $25 bucks for the day (sans lunch), the price was definitely right. Plus it was nice to be out in the countryside for a bit and also more along the tourist routes, where English signs at least are more plentiful. Thankfully fall appears to have finally hit, and ever since the days of rain it's been mild and breezy - hopefully we've got a couple months of this weather before winter rolls in, because it's fantastic. I'm planning an overnight to Seoul and a templestay for a break later this month, and we're hitting two cultural expos this weekend - one on the college's tab as "cultural training" and a thank-you from the dean for teaching summer camp.

Speaking of work, we've finally gotten to the point of breaking down a lot of our planning into task forces, and it's nice to get our hands on tasks and see measurable progress. Plus we've been rethinking some of the curriculum and coming up with really cool activities and projects ... I can hardly wait to get into the Village and put it into practice. I feel so spoiled, getting into the cool part of education by skipping all the typical bureaucracy and limited school systems. Granted, we'll have our limits, too, but the support and materials we have to work with are AMAZING, and there's no need to teach for any standardized test - the only test is whether students enjoy themselves and get a little more comfortable with English.

That's about the wrap for now, I think. Love from Korea! :)

Thursday reflections

A couple days ago I got news of a great-uncle's death back in the States. It wasn't someone I was particularly close with, but it's still sad tidings and a stark reminder of how disconnected I am from the everyday lives of family and friends back there, and how much will have changed by the time I get back. Sometimes it seems so selfish to live a world away, adventuring for the heck of it, spending money on travel and a degree I'm not even sure I'll truly use. And it is - selfish - but it also seems the right thing to do, all things considered.

Meanwhile, life marches on here, too. Tomorrow is the final day of us teaching these summer classes at the college, and it's amazing to see how much the students have progressed - the heartwarming factor of teaching really shows up quickly. Course I still have plenty of heartburn, too (I get ridiculous about any new job - times ten for a major career change), but overall, things are going really well and it's been a great introduction to education. Next week we do sessions more similar to what will be in the Village (basically teaching amid movie-like sets to place kids in situations like they will find in the real world, and using hardly any bookwork), and we also start doing planning of schedules, curricula and logistics for the Village.

Yesterday was a national holiday (one of what I understand to be four Korean independence days), but one without much ceremony aside from flags popping out on shops and in neighborhoods. Four of us hopped a bus to Gyeong-ju, a historic city about an hour east of here, not quite to the Eastern Sea. The place is absolutely packed with sites - we were making plans on the fly and still managed to hit about five places in a few hours - and some of the cooler ones were parks filled with tombs of ancient rulers, like in the (handout) picture below. They're not quite as colossal as Egypt's pyramids, but serve the same function. The biggest one is seven stories tall, and there's one that's been excavated and now houses a display of the tomb structure and artifacts found there.

In the same area are beautiful gardens and other landscapes, a former palace grounds and man-made lake, and a museum housing many of the artifacts found in the area. One display in particular made me smile: Apparently, in the dawn of A.D. as Buddhism spread through the Shilla Kingdom of this region, people began making increasingly artistic and personalized funeral urns to commemorate the dead. Which is all well and good, but it threw a whole new light on this article (click here), which I remember reading a few months ago at The Gazette. There really is nothing new under the sun.

And in other news of the odd, I've become quite the model since arriving in Asia - the whole group has. It seems to be quite the thing to have Americans in your promotional photos, so we get stopped everywhere to get photographed checking out a business or area. In fact, the manager at the local Costco said he'd hold a party for us if we just took a picture at the store. The latest episode was being flagged down at the palace "ruins" at Gyeong-ju for "City Hall propaganda!" as a bespectacled gent put it, emphasizing his point with wild gesticulations at an oversized camera. It's so bizarre that looking like a tourist - an AMERICAN tourist in particular - is actually a good thing. Of course I can't read all this stuff they print with our pictures ... maybe it's more along the lines of "Come see our latest attraction! Buffoons straight from America! You never know what ludicrous stunt they'll pull next!"

I have Skype!

So I finally got set with Skype, meaning that any of y'all with an account, or who get an account (go to Skype.com to check it out - it's free to download, but you'll need to make sure you have a microphone on your computer), can talk to me for free, and that I can call all the rest of you for a couple cents a minute. I've still got to work out some sound quality issues, but it works! My Skype ID is kristinkmarsh - if you have an account, look me up or e-mail me your ID and we'll be in touch. Now if only this fantastic service could do something about that pesky time difference to the States ...

I also have a cell phone number, but I'm not going to post that here - just e-mail me if you want it. It doesn't cost me to receive calls on that phone, but I won't be calling internationally from there short of some emergency.

One more thing down ... on a list of about 100. But life here is finally settling into something of a routine, and it's nice to finally be able to focus on changes in smaller portions, rather than feeling like every moment brings something unexpected. During the week we have long days of classes, meetings, lesson planning and shuttling around to various errands ... at the end of the day there's just time to scratch out an e-mail or two while watching whatever cheesy English-language program might happen to be on TV or scrub a few clothes in the tub if the one washing machine in the basement is taken (it usually is, and apparently there aren't laundromats here like in the States ... some people are checking into a laundry send-out service, but I'll let them be the guinea pigs). During the weekends, we inflict ourselves upon the largely amused and partly annoyed neighborhood, taking over the tiny diner and getting impromptu Korean lessons at the 7-Eleven across the street, and we venture downtown and to various city attractions - which really means wandering around on the hot streets for hours like a herd of lost cattle, following a series of misunderstood or misgiven directions. Evenings - weekends, anyway - may mean a beer in the bar down the street, or a trip downtown to the expat hangouts or clubs.

Even meals don't seem so exotic anymore. It doesn't seem so out of the ordinary to eat french fries with ketchup or salad for breakfast (I think that first dish is some enterprising soul's idea of creating a Western spread at the hotel for us Americans) amid the more traditional hard-boiled eggs, Spam (or something like it), toast and cereal. Lunch and dinner are typically at the college cafeteria, where the staples of rice and kimchi (spicy, pickled cabbage) are accompanied by at least five other dishes, a bowl of soup and a piece of fruit. There are generally no drinks and never any desserts, and everything's eaten with chopsticks and spoons. Lotus roots are a big thing, pickled vegetables are all the rage, and I've quite gotten used to tentacles on my plate or in my bowl. It's hard to generalize the cooking, though, other than to say there's a notable variety of veggies and meats/seafood used in each meal. When I get a camera in a month or two, I'll do a more thorough post on some of the dishes. In the classic "weird stuff I've eaten" list of those traveling abroad, though, I've added tiny octopus, tiny fried crabs (both in entirety) and kelp - "You know, that stuff we feed our fish" as a co-worker put it. There may have been other items of note considering the amount of unknown dishes crossing my plate in recent days. Some of the other teachers were somewhere grubs were served, and another ate dog. Doubt I'll be seeking out either one of those anytime soon.

Friday we had a formal ceremony with the college president to receive our letters of appointment, starting with a half-hour dress rehearsal of how to meet a person of such high status (don't drink until he tells you to!), how to accept the letter (with two hands!) and how to bow (left hand on your stomach or elbow!) and shake hands (the ceremony was somewhat Westernized in an overture by the president, who proved to be a warm, gracious gentleman ... I wouldn't have been surprised by a pompous ogre after all the fuss, but that's the culture). The only people in the room, however, were our group, a handful of Korean academics and staff, and the president, which made me realize that in the States we generally reserve our ceremony for mass gatherings - here there's no need for an audience to make something a sacred event.

Then we spent the evening with the dean (son of the president) at a Western-style restaurant in the mountains - good food but not quite spot-on: The baked potatoes were loaded with whip cream instead of sour cream, for example. The dean was also quite anxious to see our Texans (in suits and boots) two-step, apparently, but the music selection was more of a techno club sort, so there were a couple awkward hours of people standing around, bobbing their heads in a "trying to go with the flow but not bust a move in front of an important boss" sort of way. A good time was had by all, though, a staggering bill tallied and an auspicious start made to a cross-cultural project of mammoth proportions ... which was the point, I think.