The Fifth Airport

When I booked my flight back from Seoul to Los Angeles, I paid little note to the stopover in Singapore. Only much later did I learn that Singapore is no closer to Korea than Los Angeles is to New York City--and that it's in the opposite direction from both of them.

Then, as soon as I boarded my flight in Singapore, the pilot announced we weren't headed straight back for Los Angeles, but for Tokyo. It was the first time I ever boarded a flight not knowing where it was going. This also meant that I flew six hours southwest from Seoul to Singapore to catch a connection six hours northeast back to Tokyo. Er. My flight path looked like a noose.

I'm still in a state of bliss from the Singaporean night markets. I wandered up and down the streets, first of Chinatown, then of Little India, stuffing myself with as many treats as possible and forgetting, bite by bite, a month of spicy pickled things.

Now I'm in LA for two full days of pupsitting while my family is away before begining my journey back to Boston (not, thankfully, via Midway Island.) So far, LA's included a concert (Josh Rouse), two maverick Israelis (www.trustedopinion.com) and a DHL man delivering my own puppy back to me.

Stopover

Writing this in the lounge on the second floor of the airport in Singapore. Eating tiny bits of ham and cheese while sipping coffee and green tea at the same time.

Fragments of a journey thus far:

My shopping marathon ran out of steam circa 3:30 am, when I abandoned Mustafa's and checked into a "napping center" at the airport. Windowless little chambers without doors, separated by shoulder-height wooden partitions. Blanket and extraordinarily effective air conditioning provided. I bought three hours of time; exactly at the three hour mark, a woman tapped my foot to wake me up. Definitely more effective than an alarm clock: I experienced a momentary adrenaline surge and prepared to defend my bunk.

Such yummy food. The approach of Chinese New Year meant that the streets of Singapore were crammed with people and booths even at midnight. Somehow, before I knew it, I was the proud owner of a red pillow displaying a happy dog. And after weeks of Korean cuisine, I was a veritable glutton--sipping from a coconut while eating dried fruits, tea-soaked eggs, mooncake, mushrooms and something not unlike mu shu pork. Also spicy Indian pancakes. Mmm. Street stalls.

I think my copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special--which I hoped would supply entertainment on the flight--lacks subtitles. Who in their right mind would broadcast a movie 90% in the Wookie language? Eeew. I counted. Ten minutes of mewling noises between lines of English dialogue that make Revenge of the Sith a veritable work of Shakespeare--most of that time filled with Chewie's little son snatching cookies, then courting death upon a balcony. The existence of Wookies would discredit intelligent design in a heartbeat.

Time to board. Farewell to the tropics--fifteen hours of seatbelt fastening and unfastening ahead...

Epiphany

I discovered tonight that when students appear to be looking up
words on their little electronic dictionaries, as often as not they're
actually playing Tetris.

Human Rights Violations

Yesterday night, three Koreans at a bar asked me if I realized what Hollywood movie star I looked like. "Here we go again," I thought. Their verdict: Ed Norton. My inner penguin was nonplussed.

Speaking of movies, I'll admit a little bashfully that I've consumed about two seasons of The West Wing since leaving London. I tend to read, and watch things, in bursts; I love seeing story arcs unfold.

Debating what to teach tonight... I'm thinking of doing "bad" leaders for a change: "Bin Laden and Buddies." Or maybe fan campaigns to revive TV shows (Star Trek, Firefly, Family Guy) as (rare?) examples of successful popular movements in modern-day America. Fictional leaders could be fun. Ooh, Ammar versus Rodrigo (from The Lions of Al-Rassan, perhaps my favorite novel.) I'm going to miss this job.

In Boston, I frequented a Korean tea shop, called Dado. So I came to Korea expecting bountiful and delicious tea. Alas, tea isn't as easy to find as I had hoped; there are coffee vending machines at every corner, and more Starbucks clones than you can shake a fist at, but tea seems to be the choice of a past generation. And not a single tapioca shop. It's clearly not Taiwan.

When I was little, I was so addicted to teatime on my family's visits to Chile that once, when we had skipped it, I was inconsolable until my grandparents agreed to serve teatime as the first course of dinner. Me, spoiled? Absolutely.

The number of camp casualties continues to increase, a fact little-noted in the Korean media. Yesterday, one girl broke a finger playing basketball during the obligatory PE hour, and another chipped a tooth running down the hall and tripping over an object (she's exercised her fifth amendment right, or the Korean equivalent, not to identify what the object was.)

In creative writing, most of the kids' short stories so far have featured murders and/or love triangles involving Katalina, usually both. (The latter suggests they might be more perceptive than they're sometimes given credit for.) In one story, another TA (the engimatic EJ) got flushed down a toilet, whereupon Katalina turned into King Kong and ravaged the town. For their final story, David and I instructed them not to include any camp personnel as characters, and to secure permission from a teacher before killing anyone. Yes, we're cracking down on free expression. It's fun to be authoritarian, even south of the DMZ.

I shared the opening of The Lovely Bones with them as an example of how to hook a reader. Not everyone knew what a salmon was (oh, how I miss sushi) but they all gasped at "I was murdered on December 6, 1973..." I'm trying to figure out why I found that novel so compuslively readable too. I think it's very much the characters (they're roomy characters; I find a place to fit inside each of them) and the smooth narrative; it's also the unique, understated yet weirdly believable point of view. I think I'm better able to suspend my disbelief regarding an omniscient narrator when that narrator is in a place where she has every right to be a little bit omniscient... yet still very human, and very young. I cringed when her father got his knee bashed in: not moving on literally made it harder for him to move. I loved the flashes of Ray's family (I forget his mother's name--Ruana?) And I was cheerfully surprised when the situation with the despicable yet frail Mr. Harvey was resolved off-stage, or at least out of focus. I wish you all a very good life.

Back at camp, the youngest student, Doyee, set his story on the USS Enterprise. He was captain, of course, implying Picard either met a grisly fate or left the fleet to perform in a Klingon version of the Christmas Carol. It's nice to know Star Trek fans survive--and continue to spawn--abroad.

To my surprise, the girl who got tortured a few days ago now walks arm in arm with her alleged torturers again. I'm not sure if I'm witnessing a great reconciliation, poor short-term memory, or the tip of some sociological iceberg.

Randy and I recently finished downloading the Star Wars Holiday Special. I won't subject the kids to it but I do plan to watch it on the flight home--probably on the Seoul-Singapore leg, as there'll be more cities nearby for an emergency landing should I require defibrillation.

Drama

A new soap opera unfolds: one of the students, a girl named Anne, gossipped about three other girls and they found out. They exacted retribution, first creating disgusting beverages for her to drink (including toothpaste), pouring what she refused to drink down her shirt, and then hitting her, etc. No word on whether they tried to make her faint. The ringleader is the youngest girl in the camp, who seems exceptionally sweet-natured but writes short stories about serial killers. Her name is Jenna. The camp coordinator is holding a summit with the TAs on what to do next.

Of Modes and Medians

I type this quick, quasi-furtive entry as students listen a practice TOEFFL oral response section playing on my laptop. From time to time they present me with their answers, which I then score on a scale of 1 to 5. Average score so far, closer to 2 than to 4. Yep, I've been called to emergency English-testing duty because one of the other teachers (the one who was going to host "Old Boy") was hospitalized for food poisoning after eating raw fish this weekend.

The Korean sashimi experience is a little different than I'm used to. Among other things, you pick your own fish.

Chicken Soup for the Expatriate Soul

Things are fairly quiet over here. I'm getting to know the town, which seems to be of uniform density. Lots of fish for sale, though no giant felines in sight, unless you count Hello Kitty dolls. In fact, several of the students keep inventing things with Hello Kitty themes, such as a Hello Kitty sandcastle mold. David has declared he would marry Hello Kitty if he could.

I'm also getting lots of practice speaking in public (a presentation a day keeps the jitters away) though the public in this case comprises 17 Korean children ages 12-15 and one camp coordinator, Kent, who nods a great deal and occasionally draws inappropriate things on the board.

I arranged to have French fries delivered in the middle of my talk on the history of McDonald's last night: edible multimedia. Every evening is turning into a kind of storytelling hour. Tuesday I did FDR; tonight is the rise and demise of the American department store, and tomorrow, maybe Ronald Reagan and the 1980s.

But--speaking of McDonald's--a quick thought on Korean food. Yesterday, Kyle knocked on my door to wake me up from a morning nap. (Eh, my mornings aren't very hardcore.) He explained that there was a very special meal in the cafeteria that he didn't want me to miss. It turned out to be chicken soup. Only in a country where nearly all the food is pickled and/or spicy would boiled chicken in plain broth be considered remarkable.

Okay, time to hike back from town to campus to prepare for tonight (and for the afternoon invention workshop--hopefully featuring no more Hello Kittiness.) It's a very pleasant n degrees below zero out there. I love my earmuffs.

Campus Store

Randy and I took a day trip there to Taegu yesterday, where our discoveries included giant chestnuts, the cleanest subway stations I've ever seen, and a "campus store" selling exclusively Harvard and Yale merchandise. They really do like Harvard here.

Accidental Daybreak

So I just woke up, showered, put on my teacher costume, and then walked out to have breakfast with the other teachers--only to discover that everyone was still asleep, except for one masked man prowling the corridors with a vacuum cleaner.

It turns out I miscalculated the time. It's not 8 am. It's 6 am. The last time I did this I was a freshman in Canaday. Similarly disorienting to realize the sun won't rise for another two hours. I now have all that time to (1) sleep a bit more, which is a more appealing prospect by the minute, and (2) perhaps more pressingly, figure out what I should teach today. There really is no curriculum. In my class, I have three girls, three boys and one TA, Kyle, with a crush on the other TA, Catalina (who helps David next door and claims descent from Confucius.)

In my case, he's not a family relation, but the students think I look like Mr. Bean.

Hello, My Name Is

I'm falling asleep in the "faculty lounge"--really, just a classroom with a chalkboard, two podiums, and a bunch of ethernet cables. Happy to report that my first class was a really good experience (at least for me--I hope for the students too.) We discussed a number of quotes--from Mark Twain to John Keats. I asked students to share personal experiences related to the quotes to break the ice. It turns one lied to his father about comic books and was caught; another poked her cousin in the eye for, er, pooping in the bathtub. One fought a schoolyard bully and lost, but won a moral victory. All talked about their images of love and beauty. Each shared a mistake. They argued the distinction between ignorance and stupidity. Michael Jordan came up (no mention of the Clippers, however.) Most of all, I think they got comfortable with one another. I'm looking forward to the next few weeks.

Heat Pump

Walking back from the welcome party, Randy and I spotted a plate of food in front of David's door.

"Look," I said, "David left pizza in the hallway."

Randy walked toward it, saying that though he wasn't hungry right now, it couldn't hurt to have some extra pizza. Then he stopped and doubled back.

"Wait," he said, "It's probably in the hallway because it's so cold out here that he's using the hallway to refrigerate it."

If Not You'll Go to Liechtenstein

The students arrive in about 3 hours, and then... the fun theoretically begins. But in the meantime, the camp coordinator, Kent, decided that it would be a good night to sneak out of the dorm (which locks up at 11 pm) and check out the night life in our little mountain town.

This translated to a bar, followed by a karaoke place, followed by another bar, where we stayed till the dorm reopened at 6 am. At the karaoke bar one of the TAs announced her boyfriend had just broken up with her, at which point several other guys in the group sought to, ah, comfort her.

While watching the requisite soap opera develop, I also learned a lot about Korean drinking games, at which it turns out I do well enough to avoid drinking. Despite being nominally in charge, Kent drank himself into a stupor, roused enough to reenact the "king of the world" scene from Titanic, then slumped back into his seat and began to snore. He also mentioned his mother a lot.

An update to come on the students and whether, in fact, Kent wakes up in time to host the "opening ceremony." If not, I might volunteer to substitute for him and offer a lyrical verse or two for the occasion. Something like,

"Welcome, students, to the camp,
we'll make you into creative champ!
Just do your work, and you'll be fine,
If not you'll go to Liechtenstein."

Shutruk Nahunte

I'm about to teach my first class. I met my students this morning. There's only six. With any luck, I'll learn all their names in a day and won't confuse them too much. In other news, the camp coordinator drank himself into a stupor last night.

Pink Down Jackets

I'm writing now from Gimpo Airport, near Seoul, at a stand available for public use by passengers on Asiana Airlines. I'm usually an American Airlines kind of guy, but this trip is an exception: Star Alliance all the way. I flew on the top floor of a 747 for the first time from L.A. to Tokyo, writing my application to an MFA program at Columbia and watching West Wing episodes for eleven hours. It was beautiful.

Alas, because I procrastinated on the application, I've only slept about 5 hours since New Year's Eve, but I'm holding up surprisingly well so far. A couple observations before my flight to Taegu boards.

As my bus--a.k.a. "airport limousine"--pulled up to Gimpo Airport, I spotted a woman in a puffy pink down jacket and white skirt standing in the middle of a crosswalk, dancing, smiling and not moving out of our way. Her cheeks were blushed bright red. Just when I was starting to wonder if she was a deranged courtesan waiting for us to run her over, she curtsied and moved aside.

The bus rolled on, and someone dressed exactly like her waited at the next crosswalk.

---

(A little girl in a blue coat just looked at me, then whispered something to her mom. I said, "hello," and she shyly responded, "hello." Her mom laughed.)

---

At the airport cafeteria, I was pressed for time. My flight was about to board on the other side of security. I must have looked hurried, because when I ordered the sushi combination platter, the woman at the counter warned me, "That will be slow. Take ten minutes."

"Ah, I said, "That won't work. How about the kimchi and pork cutlet?"

"Faster," she said, smiling, "Take ten minutes."

I ordered that. Really good. And took only eight.