Third Time's the Charm?

I did it again. Two strikes in the plant killing department. Well, four if you count the individual plants I've offed. Turns out forgetting to open my exterior sliding door when the air conditioning unit (atop of which my plants reside) is running does not create a homey, greenhouse-like atmosphere. Rather, it creates an excruciatingly hot death zone. Sorry about that, plants. But an April - July run wasn't too bad! Off to a fresh start; maybe I  can keep these two kicking until November.

Just Kidding

Remember when I thought the rain had subsided? I was VERY WRONG. The rain returned with a vengeance this week and went so far as to kill 60 people and submerge over 6,000 cars. A Korean friend told me this is the most rain Korea has seen in 100 years. In just three days, 26 inches fell. And it wasn't a gentle rain. This is the heaviest rain I've ever seen - even with an umbrella, most of my clothing was quickly soaked, and often I couldn't even see outside my apartment window because of the torrential downpour.

I'm pretty sure the creek rose to the level of the blue arrows; my students were prepared for it.

I am fortunate to be away from the intense flooding in parts of southern Seoul and the devastating mudslides north and east of Seoul, but things still got ugly in Incheon. The chocolate river decided to make its way onto roads between my house and my school - the bus had to plow through a foot of muddy water and we drove past a tiny car stranded in the high waters. It was so surreal that I was too shocked to snag a photo. One student couldn't make it to summer English camp because a tunnel between her home and the school was filled with water.

Though I'm safe and sound (and dry), I didn't come out of the stormy patch totally unscathed. On Wednesday afternoon, a wind gust got the best of me and my $3 umbrella. RIP, cute pink polkadot umbrella (I had named her Janet). The friend I was on my way to meet for dinner graciously helped out by giving me a replacement: a pink Winnie the Pooh number. Can't really be picky when 26 inches of rain are falling.

Wind: 1, Lindsay: 0

Gettin' Dirrrrrrty

My hands are clean because I had to get the camera.

There's mud between my teeth. My hair is caked with it. Wiping it off my eyelids is difficult because my hands are covered with the slippery stuff. There are grayish-green splatter patterns decorating my arms and legs. Ooh just felt some slide down my butt crack. You can no longer tell what color my clothes used to be. And I paid for all of this. It's day two of the 14th Annual Boryeong Mud Festival and I am having more fun playing in the mud than I ever could have anticipated.

Day one began with a seven a.m. departure by charter bus from Seoul. Korean buses are comfy and often have delightful interior decor, but lack a vital feature: a bathroom. This means frequent stops at rest areas. At our second stop on the roughly 3.5 hour journey, we were instructed to change into swimsuits or clothes we wouldn't mind getting dirty during our "marine-type silt basic training."

For some reason, "marine" always registered with me as "water-related," rather than how it was actually meant in this situation: "related to a branch of the Korean military." Upon arriving at the coastline on the Yellow Sea with sprawling mud flats, we were given long-sleeved t-shirts and camouflage pants. I was tempted to stay on dry land and have a beer (as many people chose to do), but I mustered up some confidence (in this case, literally, by drinking a weird Korean Red Bull-esque drink called "Confidence," acquired at a rest stop) and soon the mud was oozing between my bare toes.

The first activity was mud soccer. Even though some middle-aged Korean ladies were tending the net, I still couldn't get one in. My passes (and everyone's) went about two feet, and dribbling was next to impossible. At least I didn't get an unexpected airborne ball to the face like a poor glasses-wearing guy on the other team.

Next was a sort of chicken fight on one leg, and then came the drills with an actual drill sergeant from the Korean Marines. His muscles were big and his voice was loud and his English was good enough to tell us to jump up faster from our push ups. We crawled, we rolled, we did ab work. After that warmup, he divided us into teams for a mud-throwing fight, a crab-walking wrestling contest, and full-out mud wrestling. Here's a visual aid from the event a few years ago:



Quick (and frigid) showers were taken, the camo pants returned, and we were back on the bus to the main site of one of Korea's biggest yearly festivals: Daecheon swimming beach in Boryeong City. It's to this lovely shell-covered sandy beach where mud from the flats is shipped (and purified) and used for several purposes during the nine-day festival: mud slides, mud obstacle courses, mud tug-of-war, mud wrestling and a station to just paint mud (plain or colored) onto one's body.

The festival originated in 1998 to bring attention to cosmetics produced from the mineral-rich mud (development started in 1994), but its present-day focus is a combination of live entertainment, beautiful scenery (and weather), fireworks, the aforementioned mud attractions, and a big excuse for foreigners to do some heavy day drinking. I was very relieved to find that the event was really popular with Korean young people and families, not just foreigners getting away for the weekend.

The remainder of the first day was spent wandering along the coast, taking in the fresh sea air, laughing at a dance competition, watching fireworks and bragging about the marine experience from earlier. The second day was clear, hot, and full of potential. My friends and I took the plunge and bought our $5 wristbands to enter the official mud area. We had to delicately tiptoe between attractions, as the mud-covered ground was ridiculously slippery. Also ridiculous was the number of self-photos taken by a Korean couple ahead of us in line for the Mud Super Slide Bounce. I'm glad they can rest assured that their Mud Fest experience was thoroughly documented from numerous angles and places in line during the 40-minute-long wait.

The glorious water, islands in the distance. The backside of the Mud Super Slide Bounce.

At last we arrived at the front of the line to wash off our feet and await the "GO" command at the foot of the Mud Super Slide Bounce's vertical climbing wall. The sign had promised to provide "a thrilling journey of speed" so I was eager to climb onto its brightly-colored inflated plasticity.  Marcy and I scrambled up the wall and fended off a water hose-wielding worker at the top. One, two, three and we jumped onto the slide, slipping thrillingly fast (not an empty promise) to the landing pad below. Forty minutes of waiting, but a full minute of exhilaration. 아싸!! (Asa! AKA awesome, as our Korean-speaking friends would say). And then my friend Maggie slid down so far and fast she knocked over the worker positioned at the bottom. Amazing.

Spent some time behind bars in the "jail" where workers would simply throw mud at us, tried out a mud pool and another slide, then decided to call it a day. Upon turning in my wristband I was rewarded with a bar of mud soap (current favorite oxymoron) whose box proudly pronounced, "Natural mud from boryeong-city hall is helpful in calming & smoothing & water balancing." We cleaned up and got back on the bus, thoroughly exhausted, sunburned, and quite happy to escape the legion of photographers trolling the event, hoping to capture the shot that would win the (approximately/according to 2010 Facebook information) $4000 first prize. Please let me know if you see my muddy likeness somewhere on the Interwebs? Thanks.

Duh

Today I had an epiphany.

In my time here, I have largely found Koreans to be very kind, welcoming and friendly people even if they are gawking at me, an out-of-place waygookin (foreigner). But today a simple interaction with a coworker helped me to realize that I have been making the same mistake EVERY DAY when interacting with my lovely hosts.

Stella and I went to lunch together, and upon returning to the school I said hello to some kids milling around. "Don't say hi to them first," she scolded. "Whyyyyy?" I asked. "They are younger, so they should say hi to you first." OHHHHHHH.

So when middle-aged or elderly people have given me the stink eye, it was because I didn't say hello and give a simple nod of the head. Way to miss something huge in a very hierarchical country, Lindsay. All this time I thought they didn't like me being on their turf. Why didn't I take a hint from the times I have said hello and was met with a wide, warm smile? Now if only the women didn't always look so young, it would be much easier to tell who's older than I am. It's probably better to risk saying hi to a younger person than missing a chance to greet an elder.

I greeted this lady and she talked my ear off AND let me take a  picture.

The Can

It didn't take much time in Korea to realize many things I'd long taken for granted: not usually being the tallest person in the room, knowing how to count money, the ability to talk to children anyone. But then there was a whole separate set of things I realized I had taken for granted when it comes to the bathroom. First, finding one. Second, differentiating between men's and women's (often they both have at least one urinal visible from the usually wide-open door). Then there's the question of whether there will be toilet paper. Or soap.

Why I didn't learn the words for man and woman at the same time I learned "bathroom" (pronounced qwah jahng sheel), I don't know. Which would you choose when faced with these options?

Left: Woman (yaw) Right: Man (nahm)

At times I had to lurk outside, waiting for someone to enter or exit. Thankfully, many locations (such as the baseball stadium) skip the Hangeul and use pictures that not only make my life easier, but also are often pretty creative or amusing. So instead of lurking outside to find out which door to enter, now I lurk outside trying not to look creepy while taking pictures of the signs.
Here's a start - my collection is pretty extensive.

At a basketball arena.

At a temple.

At a cultural center.

AKFP 3

This weather-beaten gem's highlights are the shoelessness, the dad's strained hand-on-leg placement and the size of that boy's apple.

Eight Month Miracle

To help celebrate our eight-month-long relationship, Korea showed me things I hadn't seen in a long time. Sunshine! Blue skies! My shadow! We are now up to FOUR consecutive rainless days; maybe the umbrella-toting times are behind me. Of course, I bought a new one right before the sun came out.

Though I no longer show up soggy for school, I now glisten with perspiration. Somehow my Korean co-workers always look perfect, but I spend frantic minutes before my first class drying off with Kleenexes and reapplying deodorant. To my knowledge, there have not (yet) been any complaints about my appearance and/or scent.

The blazing sun and significant sweating are perfect justification for increasing my ice cream intake and trying to keep up with the Kims. There are days when I swear everyone I pass on the street is eating ice cream in some shape or size. One treat that's pretty popular with kids is a fantastic invention that trades the sometimes awkward licking of an ice cream cone – or the painful biting of an ice cream bar or the hassle of having a cup and spoon – for the slightly less awkward motion of sucking ice cream from a nozzle in a pouch. Ice cream in a bag is amazing.

And so begins the final third of my Korean teaching career. Saw a few things today that made me happy to be here:

T-shirt of the day -  On a fourth-grade girl: "Hello Boys!"

Awww moment of the day - A brother and sister, maybe 13 and 11 years old, were riding the bus. The girl was leaning her head on his shoulder for a nap, and he took off her little red glasses, gently replaced her head in a better position, then carefully folded the glasses and held them in his lap.

Hard to understand sign of the day - At a coffee and gelato shop inexplicably called Salpresso (exactly as it appeared):

  SALPRESSO

  Enjoy The Life

  Enjoy The Best Coffee

  savoring a smell of

  life as treating one

  -'s life. coffee at yo

  -ung days. there is

  a time when you n

  -eed coffee.

  how about having a 

  fascination of mind

Rain, rain, go away

And the rainy season is here. Other than the water falling incessantly from the sky, you can tell because of the abundance of adorable galoshes, colorful umbrellas, vibrant greenery everywhere, buckets of umbrellas in every classroom and a Lindsay Teacher with frizzy hair and soggy pants.

At first it was soothing to fall asleep to the sound of the rain. Then I just wanted to sleep all the time. Then it started interrupting my running plans - as in, flooding the path I usually run on. And making the path far too slippery for an already accident-prone person. I'll have to suck it up and brave the elements and the mud sooner or later, because I'm thinking of doing two more 10K races - one where each runner receives a free watermelon after the race, and one which draws over 20,000 participants and meanders around Seoul's Olympics facilities from the 1988 Games. I am quite sure neither one is anywhere near the bad Korea.

Mother Nature has not just been messing with my fitness plans. Two baseball games I wanted to attend were cancelled because of the rain. However, inclement weather didn't keep professional soccer players from doing what they do (though I'm kind of a baby and it did keep me from heading out for my usual Thursday night six-on-six game). On June 25 I attended a match between FC Seoul and FC Incheon at Seoul's World Cup Stadium. Attendance was pretty sparse, but the die-hard Seoul fans didn't shy away from dancing, singing and taking off their shirts in the chilly rain. Things got scrappy toward the end and more than one red card was handed out, but FC Seoul came out on top 2-0.

As someone who would typically be caught without an umbrella, it's exciting to have turned over a new leaf - I've been prepared for the showers all but once, and that time I was lucky enough that the storm subsided before I left the coffee shop where I was hanging out. Everyone else is prepared, too. Outside of nearly every store you can find disposable plastic umbrella bags - in not just one, but two sizes. And in the entrance of my apartment building they spread out blankets or cardboard boxes to keep people like me from slipping and cracking our heads open. Not exactly classy, but practical.

On the bright side, the creek in my neighborhood looks like a chocolate river! Hope the sun comes back soon.