Korean BBQ and Market

Sept 26th and 27th 2009

Let me say first off that I love going to any country and getting jet lag but I especially love getting jet lag in Korea.  The Koreans never sleep.  They go to school from seven in the morning till ten o'clock at night.  They also rarely get any kind of vacation.  I remember having to be carried home by my father if I ever even stayed up past eight.  If I drank milk it was like taking narcotics at the age of seven and there was no way I was making it past six.  These kids are dancing the macarana at nine o'clock and getting amped up to get off school.  It doesn't change as they get older too, most of the Koreans that party till sunrise with you have work the next day in the AM.  Meanwhile us Americans that are slightly cross eyed from binge drinking and slurring every word to the point that the language barrier has doubled rest easy knowing that we are going home to go sleep soundly till our 4 o'clock job starts.  I understand why Koreans love robots because their work schedules are slightly similar.  I know one thing though I enjoy bathing and basking in my free time and so being raised in Korea would not be ideal.  My point is that when it hits 10 o'clock in every other country around the world life as they know it shuts down.  In Korea 10 o'clock is when humanity begins to crawl out from dark alleys.  Lights begin to illuminate the now busy streets, music begins bellowing out of random street corners, the joggers and bikers start their nightly journey, and Korea as a whole awakens.  This means that my jet lag kept me on the Koreans regular vampire like schedule.  During the day they are at work and at night they party.  Catching a Korean sleeping is like catching a Leprechaun and I have yet to do so.  Anyways Saturday started off slow because I spent a lot of the day shopping for food and the bare necessities.  Luckily my apartment that seems as though it has housed every esl teacher and there mother had almost everything I needed to begin with.  I napped during the day because my body was screaming at me.  I woke up at around eight o'clock and went to my first Korean bbq experience with two friends and also teachers named Molly and Hillary.  The bbq was everything I had dreamed it would be.  It was like experiencing an orgasm in my mouth for the next hour.  It is the closest thing I can compare it to.  After finishing the bbq we went to a foreigner bar...I like how they call the american bars foreigner bars.  In Korea the local korean bars are not for drinking in fact you must order food to drink at most of them.  So the foreigner bars mean bars where they serve blackouts in bulk.  People that enjoy traveling to the abyss and beyond enjoy these places.  We had a good time and challenged a bunch of people to pool.  I met a group of girls that were teachers in Seoul but after finding that one suffered from the bird flu I began watching my beer around them.  I felt like they all needed to be quarantined and maybe even killed and I really wished that I was wearing one of those dust masks that every Korean wears daily walking the streets.  I survived through the night and decided on Sunday I was going to explore the area a little more in depth.  I began walking through the area that I partied in the night before but seeing it in the light gave it a whole new feel.    

This is the point in the trip where I felt a powerful force so to speak pulling my head upwards to see what kind of strange establishments rested upon these beastly buildings.  That is when I saw A New Hope in Korea.  Shining under the beautiful foreign sun was something universally familiar.  A Darth Vader mask with glowing letters almost jumping off the sign said STAR WARS BAR.  I went off on unimaginable tangents in an instant.  I was wondering what it would be like to have to give Yoda a piggie back ride back to my place because he was to intoxicated to walk and at that moment would I feel like Luke traveling through the swamps on my training to becoming a Jedi...I was thinking he might even say "Throw up we must" as he heaved over my toilet, head wobbling back and forth a bit as he phased in and out of consciousness.....maybe I would make friends with darth vador and after buying him a strong shot he would say "the force is strong with this one" and then we would all take turns mocking him with his mask on until he got upset and left.  I even thought of me and Luke playing beer pong against unsuspecting challengers where we would use the force to make every shot and become world champions.  I can tell you that Korea in one moment became complete.  I have not yet gone because this was the morning after a long drinking binge but I promise it is the next place I will go with my camera to document for you guys.  The whole city reminds me of the movie blade runner.  It is the most cyber punk city I have ever seen in person.  Neon lights litter the urban city, LCD screens boast for attention at every establishment, and the smells fluctuate from corner to corner.  For those of you who don't know what cyber punk is, it is a futuristic reality with high technology and low morality.  I wrote a line about it in a book that I will share with you now that kind of describes the idea of it.  "Tranispa was one of many planets owned and maintained by the Yupian Government.  Their reaches expanded out so far that some even said it was beyond what your imagination could create.  Unfortunately with so many planets the forms of government became more intergalactic caring more about planet to planet relations than their own.  With so many planets and so many governments and leaders one had rarely enough time to come back and visit the planet they were put into office on.  The one downfall of universal government is that their focus is elsewhere leaving some cities and towns left to rot.  Vextrobs town although cleaner than most was still a complete outcast from society.  They had been abandoned years ago and now the community like many others turn inwards creating black markets and drawing from the community itself for stabilization to survive." I love seeing cities like this in movies because living in those areas is like living in a lawless society again.  At this point in "OUR" society we have so many laws and regulations that I enjoy seeing the other radical end of the spectrum.  This reality portrays the underbelly of society and the bottom dwellers.  The inhabitants of these cities are usually the drones that maintain and operate all the service positions in the civilized "utopian world" that has been created.  They are more slaves than free men at this point but in this area where life has been forgotten it seems that life still beats on.  There is a beauty in this type of reality.  I guess one way to describe the beauty is by quoting Kris Kristofferson in his song Me and Bobby McGee when he says "freedoms just another word for nothing left to lose."  Well if anyone had nothing it is the people that live in these societies.  I think I also enjoy this idea because I feel deep down that I was given so much opportunity and with all that opportunity you have so much more pressure on you to succeed.  I maybe envy the people that have nothing and everything taken from them...wow alright Im going doctor Phil on myself anyways on with the journey.   

After seeing the star wars bar I decided that I wanted to see the Korean street market.  There are no words to describe how unbelievable this market is so I took pictures.  

Live Octopus
Crabs
giant apples and peaches
honey combs in a bag with bees still working on them
Some kind of fish in a bucket

Tons of dead sting rays
Squid and octopus

Pigs head and me
Mm Mm Chicken
Amazing

One image that I didn't take because I felt bad taking the picture was an 80 year old Korean woman with a broken arm and a hunch back carrying a wagon full of crates one handed like she had been doing it for the last 2000 years.  I have never wanted to help someone more in my life.  God only in Korea.  Anyways my next entry will be on my first day of class.  I welcome everyone who is following.  I hope everyone enjoys my journeys.

Touchdown In Korea

September 24th 2009 through September 25th 2009  Touchdown In Korea

I left my house at four in the morning to tired for the benign conversation that I knew lay in store for me.  The trip to the airport was a blur along with the first length of the trip to San Francisco.  I really only fully came to as I stepped onto the plane going to Korea.  I walked calmly and collectively toward my seat 22F.  In my head though I was thinking that if there is no screen on the back of each seat Im going to lose it.  I was comparable to a ticking time bomb but as I passed the first row of coach my whole body felt at ease seeing the perfectly placed screen on the back of everyones seat.  Most people enjoy reading on planes and Im sure I sound sick to everyone reading this blog but try waking up at three thirty in the morning to start traveling.  I'd been imagining that my brain was closely resembling oatmeal and the only way to entertain my brain in this delicate state is to flip back and forth between all asinine movies of this summer, mainly the chick flicks and eye candy films that whipped boyfriends review as "it was entertaining."  Suprisingly they were playing the Mike Tyson documentary which has probably one of my all time favorite movie lines in it.  In Mike Tyson's high pitched soft lisped voice he tells the interviewer "I performed fellatio on her."  Speaking of a girl he followed into the bathroom.  After watching the Tyson documentary though I still knew that I hadn't even managed to put a dent into the 12 hour flight.  This is about the point in the flight when the allergy fairy decided to pay a visit...I didn't actually know that she enjoyed flying United overseas but she managed to get a first class seat right in my freaking nostrils.  I felt really bad for the kid sitting next to me because he not only had to endure me sneezing on anything and everything but also I was a bit gassy.  He kept acting like he had to scratch his nose but was keeping his fingers there for far to long to relieve an itch.  I didn't blame him though I was surprised myself by the potency.  Even with my stuffy nose I could smell the atrocity that I had just released into the pressurized environment.  Needless to say I didn't make an airplane friend on this trip, but Im sure I made a impression and also a good story.  The terrible part about the plane ride is that my girlfriend Lauren decided to tell me about how many people die from blood clots every year.  Oh "hey Zach did you also know that two twins flew from London to the States and both dropped dead upon exiting the aircraft because of blood clots."  No I didn't know that my loving and thoughtful girlfriend but did you know that Im deathly scared of flying? but if you want we could talk about overseas plane crashes and maybe other inflight fatalities."  So for the entire plane ride anything that felt strange with pressure made me freak out.  So I basically freaked out for twelve hours and Im pretty sure everyone knew me on the plane because I was standing in the center of the aisle every ten minutes leading a jazzer-size routine to try and save everyones life... that or I was running laps.  On top of that the food was pretty bad (which is not surprising) but one of my favorite meals was when they gave me a cup of ramen noodles.  It was like the airline had just given up all together on trying to make your flight enjoyable, meanwhile first class is laying out in their beds being spoon fed lobster while the flight attendant makes airplane noises.  Finally after what seemed to me to be a millennium we touched down in Korea.  As I scanned my eyes over the Korean landscape the song California Dreaming happens to come on by the beach boys over the loud speaker.  It made me smile.  I got off the plane and headed straight to customs.  I did not have a valid work visa to get into Korea but I did have a visa.  It was a long story but the idea here was that i was pretending to be visiting Korea for sight seeing but of course when they saw my visa that was void they were wondering what was going on.  They sent me to the office where I was repetitively asked why do you have an invalid work visa here but you are trying to sight see only?  Why would you get a visa if you want to just visit?  I just kept saying well I couldn't work here so I at least wanted to visit and i didn't want to use that visa.  They bought it after a lot of questioning and finally let me in for ninety days on a visitors visa.  I got my bags and met up with a man holding my name on a sign.  Oh and what do you know look who happened to be going with me to my school the same poor bastard that I had set next to me on the plane.  One word for the conversation leading to the school Avalon "Awkward" oh and there were lots of apologies.  I arrived at Avalon at about 8:00 PM with about two more hours left of teaching so I was dragged around to meet all the teachers and also to see an old friend who I knew before arriving in Korea.  I sat in on one of her classes and watched while the students tried to impress me by clowning around.  They all said that I looked like a wrestler and they were asking if I could choke slam them.  The children were all very vocal and a lot smarter than I ever imagined.  They all spoke better english than I did which isn't very hard.  The girls were surprisingly abusive towards one another.  They played simple games like rock paper scissors but with one major difference the girl that lost got hit or slapped with every ounce of the other girls being.  I thought it was so funny watching the children at this age because when they get older they become much more shy around the opposite sex and women become very sweet and innocent.  The roll change with age is very interesting.  Anyways everyone seemed very nice and eager to meet the new teacher as if they had all been on an island for years and were now met with a new face.  They all invited me out to eat afterwards and I had a good time.  We ate ribs and drank a beer called Cass and then I went back to see my place.  It was a three room apartment that had a thin layer of dust over everything.  There was a christmas tree in the living room and it smelt as if santa and all of his reindeer decided to take a potty break all over the floor.  The urine stench was incredible, but I am starting to think it is the smell of Kimchi being made.  Either or the apartment was a big let down.  Not caring because I was to tired to I went to sleep on my rock hard bed.  I will write more later but the journey has begun.  I hope everyone enjoys these updates.  I will try and at least post once a week and I will start taking as many pictures as possible.