Happenings

I am now living in Daejeon, South Korea! I teach English to elementary and middle school kiddos in a rural town called Yeongdong, commuting 1 hour each way.

Today marks the end of my first month in South Korea. What have I learned? Let me share my findings.

Korea is cold. Really, really cold. It's snowed a fair bit, but the daily temperatures are the far bigger annoyance of winter. Sand or salts aren't used to melt ice on walkways, so sidewalks can sometimes be coated in a half-inch bed of pure ice for blocks.

Korean drivers park wherever they damn well please. In the middle of a designated crosswalk? Yep. Right in the middle of a crowded sidewalk? Uh-huh. In the middle of the street, making a 2-lane road into a 1-lane traffic jammer? Yessir, you better believe it. Korea should look into something called a traffic warden. If they knew they could be driving these neat little things around, I'm sure they wouldn't hesitate (Korea loves cute little gadgets).

Korean food is freaking awesome. It's cheap, delicious, seemingly healthy, and almost always at least a little spicy. I've enjoyed just about every bite of every type of food I've had here (yes, even the doenjang jigae, the smelly soybean soup). Korean beer I've slowly come to accept, even with its inadequacies. Most are weak lagers like Budweiser or Coors. In fact, Bud is a pricey import that's pretty easy to find here. You can find some Euro beer when you go to bars, but I haven't seen a single American craft ale. In Edinburgh, I could find Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (and of course the Scottish 'American-style' Brew Dog Brewery). I'm hoping to eventually become that lucky here, too.

Koreans are very fashion-conscious. It seems like they spend a lot of time and money buying the newest fashions. Even the elderly are usually dressed up in nice digs like they pay attention to the latest trends. However, I've noticed everyone dresses very much the same. Nike or New Balance sneakers, skinny jeans, puffy down jacket, and thick rimmed glasses seem to be standard attire here. It's like the Pacific Northwest is sending them fashion advice from across the Pacific. North Face is huge here, too, as are many other outdoorsy brands. There doesn't seem to be many "styles" of dress like the United States -- preppy, indie, punk, jock, gangster, etc., but that could just be a sign of my ignorance of Korean fashion trends. Looking at fashion seems like a superficial way of exploring a culture, but I promise it isn't as shallow as you might first think. Many values can be represented via clothing. It's symbolic of how a person wishes to imagine themselves from the outside, how they want to be perceived, which directly evidences their mental life. It shows how they relate to others, how they feel about themselves, which social groups they identify with, how they feel about the past and future, their socioeconomic status, and many other items regarding an individuals psychological and social lives. It's something I'll keep thinking about as I weave my way through public spaces, surrounded by Korean people decked out in Korean fashion.

Yes, it is indeed cheap to live in Korea, if you go about it the right way. After first arriving in Korea, I gravitated to the 7-11 and McDonalds like a gnat to a lightbulb, captivated by its non-Korean characters and familiar qualities. These are not the places where cheap living happens. In recent weeks, I've found Korean grocery stores that sell cheap Korean food (as well as expensive American items... bad, Will) and I've taken advantage of the free food and drinks that my work offers every day. Yes, it means navigating the rough seas of the language barrier, staring blankly whenever a kind Korean person tries to help, but it's all for the betterment of my experience here.

The Korean language has proven to be both easy and very difficult to learn at the same time. It's a bit mysterious to me, actually. The easy part was hard, and the hard part was easy. I learned the hangul alphabet in about two hours of study with a flash card software on my phone, when I expected that process to take weeks. The teacher I replaced never learned the alphabet in his year living here, so I was expecting to start a heck of a endeavor... and two hours later I was finished. That part was easy. The easy part that was hard for me, was to learn the first few basic words. "Thank you" in Korean is kamsahamnida ("kahm-sahm-nee-da"). It took me about a week to learn this one word. Kamsa... kamsaham... kamsahamnodo? Kamsihadmida? There were no phonetic or morphemic references for me to go off of, so it was starting from absolute zero. Most foreign languages Americans learn are related to English in some way by being both based in the latin family of languages. Even Japanese seemed easier to learn because all the Japanese syllables are easily recognized and pronounceable to English speakers. "Do-mo a-ri-ga-to" is thank you in Japanese. That one was even made into a catchy tune about being extra appreciative of our mechanical friend, Mr. Robot. Thanks to Styx, that Japanese phrase is part of collective cultural consciousness and found its way into our recognizable phonemes. I think someone needs to step it up to help out all our future ex-pats in Korea by making the hit song Kamsamnida Cheesy Velveeta (I think several people in my family that would appreciate this song idea). Anyway, I continue to progress in my Korean, very slowly, but steadily.

On a work related note, it has come to my attention that some children that reside in rural areas are as wild as the animals that stalk the forested hills overlooking my school. There are a few that seem outright indignant that I exist at all, so they see my attempts to instruct them in English and assign them homework as audacious and enraging. There have been a few open rebellions in my classes so far, but I'm learning how to quell them quickly by shouting at the top of my lungs "HAJIMA!" (STOP THAT!) and slamming a book down on the desk. William Teacher is a revolution that Korea is constructing. I will return to the USA next year a much more assertive and decisive person.

I've also learned the hard way sick days don't really exist in tiny rural private academies. You don't miss your classes unless there's an absolute emergency. If you do, all the other teachers have to double up and crowd their tiny classrooms, make extra lessons from the ground up to accommodate multiple speaking levels, and put their term syllabus on hold. One Korean teacher missed a day of work due to the death of a parent (very sad), and I had one of the absolute worst teaching days of the past month. It was chaotic, sloppy, and exhausting. So even though I had a terrible cold this week, I fought my way through the fever, light headedness, phlegmy cough, loss of voice, and constant runny nose to prevent the rest of my school from being turned upside down. I'm going to be a little more vigilant about my health from here on out.

On a more lighthearted note, I live in a crazy part of town filled with neon lights, street food vendors, arcades, bars, cheap restaurants, fashionable kids with colored hair, public markets, and a kick-butt 5-story stationary store with all of the coolest things. Sometimes I resent my 'hood for being so goofy and weird, but I think it suits me pretty well. I'm slowly coming to embrace the neon-zoo I live within.

I could go on and on, but this is where I'll stop. It's been an eye-opening month, that's to be sure, but the learning won't stop here. Maybe a month from now I'll look back and tell you how little I really knew. That would be a good thing. Progress.

Until then, take care.

Notes from Underground

"I will go quietly on about the people with strong nerves, who don't understand certain refinements of pleasure. These gentlemen, although they roar full-throatedly like bulls, and I suppose it does them the greatest credit, will on some occasions, as i have already said, calm down at once when they are faced with an impossibility. Impossibility is a stone wall. What do I mean by a stone wall? Well, of course, the laws of nature or the conclusions of the natural sciences or of mathematics. When it is proved, for example, that you are descended from an ape, it's no use scowling about it -- accept it as a fact. Or if it is demonstrated that half an ounce of your own fat ought essentially to be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this demonstration finally disposes of all so-called good deeds, duties, and other lunacies and prejudices, simply accept it; there's nothing to be done about it, because twice two is mathematics. Just try to argue!

'Excuse me,' they cry, 'you can't fight it; twice two is four! Nature doesn't ask you about it; she's not concerned with your wishes or with whether you like her laws or not. You must take her as she is, and consequently all her results as well. I mean to say, a wall is a wall,' etc., etc. But good God! what have the laws of nature and arithmetic to do with me, when for some reason  I don't like those laws or twice two? Naturally I shan't break through the wall with my head, if I'm really not strong enough, but I won't be reconciled to it simply because it's a stone wall and I haven't enough strength to break it down.

 As if a stone wall really was a soothing influence and really did carry a message of peace, simply because it is twice two! That's utterly absurd! The point is to understand everything, to realize everything, every impossibility, every stone wall; not to reconcile yourself to a single one of the impossibilities and stone walls if the thought of reconciliation sickens you; to arrive by way of the strictest logical syllogisms at the most repulsive conclusions on the eternal theme of how you are somehow to blame for the stone wall itself, even though once again it is abundantly clear that you are not to blame at all, and in consequence of all this to sink voluptuously into inertia, silently and impotently gnashing your teeth and reflecting that there isn't even anybody for you to be angry with, that an object for your anger can't even be found, and perhaps never will be, that  this is all a fake, a conjuring trick, a piece of sharp practice, and there is nothing there but a morass; nobody knows what, nobody knows who, but in spite of all the mysteries and illusions, you ache with it all, and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache."

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

Weather Machines, Time-Consciousness, and Basketball

Now for a smaller update...

It's snowing.

This is odd because just 7 days ago, Edinburgh was graced with one of the warmest Marches on record -- day after day of 70 degree weather, sunshine, and the faintest wind-setting Scotland's weather machine knows. Now we have an arctic weather system wreaking havoc in the form of snow, hail, high winds, and temperatures dipping to -5C. It feels like it's December again. This weather is as fickle as I am.

I attended my last lecture of my MSc yesterday. I'm done with all classes for my masters degree, save the assessments. That feels pretty weird to say. I have two weeks to finish up four essays, which isn't going to be fun, but at least I've given myself much more breathing room than I did last semester.

My dissertation topic was approved by my advisor yesterday as well, which is very exciting. I've decided to write about the phenomenology of time and the cultural differences of historical-consciousness. This means basically that I'll be looking at how different cultures feel the passing of time and how they feel connected to history. There's still a lot of literature I need to read to generate ideas, but I think I'll try to focus on comparing two or three cases, possibly the Navajo Indian's concept of cyclical time, the European conception of historical consciousness pre-1400, and possibly an African oral tradition as well. I haven't yet nailed down what my argument will be, but I'm interested in exploring how materiality impacts our cosmology, how the things we surround ourselves with shapes how we feel the most basic and overlooked aspects of human consciousness. Europeans didn't have an idea of where they fit into historical time before the Gutenberg Press and widespread literacy emerged after 1436; it was common in the 12th century to believe the death of Jesus Christ may have taken place just a few years before one's birth. In the same vein, our modern material reminders of the past such as memorials, monuments, books, even natural preservations and national parks simultaneously freezes history in the present and draws our consciousness into the matrix of time. The old log house off of State Street in Boise gives us a timeline on how long people have lived in the area; the Roman Colosseum reminds us of past empires and cultural lineage; even the Palouse reminds us of geological time, formed by ice ages before mankind's migration into North America. All of these are particular ways that we impact our historical cosmology and force a consciousness of the past. Oral societies without these material reminders feel time and history very differently. That's the very rough beginning; it will no doubt go through many revisions before the finished product emerges. I have to write up a formal proposal within the next two weeks to get started.

I have a hefty load of work to do in the next few weeks, but that hasn't stopped me from having some fun.  I participated in an NCAA March Madness bracket competition through blazersedge.com, a Portland Trail Blazer blog and I actually did really well. It was set up on Yahoo.com's bracket system, and I actually finished in second place out of 500 participants. I was shocked, not having watched an actual college basketball game in recent memory. I got pretty lucky, I had a perfect East division bracket and guessed 3 of the 4 finalists, and the NCAA champion. The guy that beat me had all four finalists correct. Darn, I just barely missed out on some first place reward. I also finished ranked in the top 10,000 out of all 3.5 million Yahoo brackets for this season. That's in the 99th percentile. Hey I guess that makes me a natural genius of bracketology. My bracket was titled Potato Fight and can be viewed here, the blazersedge.com competition rankings can be viewed here.

I've also been closely following the Portland Trail Blazers. I can stream their games online, though at 3am. My sleep schedule the past few months has been a little odd as a result. I'm not sure it's been worth it, because they're terrible. They've held off no-good rotten bad luck unreasonably well the past few years, but this season finally broke the camel's back. This is the season: Twenty-seven year old Superstar Brandon Roy retires out of the blue. Prolific big man Greg Oden, selected with the #1 lottery pick in 2007, cut from the team after yet another season ending injury. Exciting fan-favorite rookie Elliott Williams goes down with season ending shoulder injury. Raymond Felton, the younger, quicker, flashier point guard that replaced hardened veteran Andre Miller turns out to be an absolute disaster and is nicknamed "Total Feltdown" and "Ray Turnover." Head coach Nate McMillian, Mr. Sonic himself and one of the longest tenured head coaches in the NBA, fired after a horrible string of road losses. Marcus Camby and Gerald Wallace traded for nothing but a lottery pick and some cheap bench warmers after the front office decides to throw up their hands in defeat. The team now consists of an interim-GM, an interim-head coach, a decimated starting 5, and a sinking feeling of regret and confusion as to where it all went so wrong. Failure, however, brings with it the hope of starting over with a solid Felton-less core. With a deep draft coming this summer, it's not a bad time for the wheels to finally fall off.

Also, in food related news, I ate grilled halloumi for the first time yesterday. My eyes almost popped out of my head from the deliciousness. I've been lucky with food recently.

That's all for now. I'll leave you with my newfound study-bro, Chopin. He helps my essays write themselves.

Chopin's "Raindrops"

Backlog: Holiday edition

Will checking in. It's been quite a while since my last post. I was brewing one for the holidays back in the day, but it slipped through the cracks and was never published. Too bad. Let's turn back the clocks and I'll show you what the past three and a half months were like. Holidays first.

Note: this has nothing to do with April Fools Day. Maybe in an ironical I-never-update-except-on-the-day-that's-for-jokes-and-pranks way, but it wasn't intentional. Mostly just procrastination.

Christmas 2011

Although this was probably the quietest and most relaxing Christmas I've ever had, it was also pretty lonely. Anyone that knows me at all knows I prefer to stay away from large social gatherings as they make me feel incredibly uncomfortable. For me growing up, social gatherings and discomfort became synonymous with Christmas. Yes, I missed all of you individually, but escaping the giant family Christmas party two years in a row is something that I'm not exactly depressed about. That said, there were some depressing moments feeling far away from home, like when I explored the Christmas Market only to see families enjoying each other's company and couples holding hands. Yep, I missed you all and I felt a little homesick.

Many of my friends had gone home for the holidays, but a few were still in town. We tried our best to make our own fun on Christmas Day, resulting in the purchase of several batches of mulled wine. On Christmas Eve, I attended a service at St Gile's Cathedral on the Royal Mile, mostly as a symbolic Christmas-y gesture, also partly because Anthropology has made me see religion very differently. It was fascinating to see these rituals as an anthropologist, studying the carefully crafted version of Christian world history and seeing all of the material reminders religion uses to evoke experience. I also heard some cool Christmas carols.

After the St Gile's Cathedral Christmas Service

Princess Street Christmas Market

December rain

Rain on the Royal Mile

New Years Eve 2012

This holiday was a little more eventful than Christmas, as Edinburgh is world renown for their New Years Eve party. Hogmany is the name, it's a 3 day celebration beginning with a torchlight parade, including a massive midnight party, and ending with a jump into the ice cold Firth of Forth. I attended the amazing torchlight parade, led by 100 pipers and drummers and followed by possibly 2,000 marchers holding torches, all making their way throughout the city in an enormous march. It was very impressive; you could hear the pipers in any section of the city and see the torches lined up for a mile. Aaand of course, although I brought my camera, I forgot to load it with a memory card, so I failed to capture the most amazing imagery I've seen in this city since I arrived. Good job, Will. 

The next night, New Years Eve, almost made up for it with more amazing visuals -- an incredible firework show showering the city in light. The midnight party was great, jam packed full of travelers and Scots alike, surrounded by music venues playing every genre of music imaginable. At midnight, fireworks lit up the city from two different points, surrounding the crowd with explosions of color. It's something I'm not going to forget about anytime soon.

January Highland Trip

With three weeks of winter break still to go, I decided to mosey up north to get a better look at the Highlands and explore the north coast of Scotland. I first took a train to Inverness, enjoying the beautiful sights of Scotland's white wilderness and snowcapped mountains. The city of Inverness turned out to be a bit of a sleepy town without much to do other than see Loch Ness, which I decided not to do because of the hokey feel and expensive fees. Yes, I'm a poor excuse of a tourist. I explored the town and made myself comfortable in cafes and pubs, reading a used Hemingway novel I picked up at a very old bookstore in the downtown square. I also made friends an Australian traveler staying at my hostel by the name of Tim who had been traveling in Europe from hostel to hostel for the past six months -- from Istanbul to Rome to Marrakech to Amsterdam and then to Scotland. When we had both had enough with Inverness, he decided to follow me up north to the town of Thurso, the northernmost city on UK's mainland. I ended up being very glad for this. Who would have thought, a tiny town on the northernmost tip of Scotland would be absolutely dead in mid-January? It was a ghost town. There was only one other person staying in the hostel -- another young guy from Aberdeen, who is absolutely crazy. He was staying in Thurso to surf the north coast. By himself. In January. Insane. He was actually a pretty cool guy; we all hung out and had a few beers, went to their pub and shot some pool. Side note: this pub apparently is well known for breaking out in weekend fist-fights as the locals, who sometimes travel 100 miles from all across Caithness to hear live music and have a pint on Saturdays, fight over the local girls. I guess scarcity of a resource always results in violence.

Anyway, Tim and I took a bus along the coastline, admiring the rocky coast, beautiful rolling hills of grass, lonely stone cottages, and an eery lack of population. We hopped off at the town of John O'Groats, which isn't actually much of a town at all. It's on the eastern-most tip of the north coast, a long ways away from anything. Thurso must be a metropolis to the people living around this area.

Tim and I had heard about a hike to some interesting rock formations along the cliffs, so we wandered off along the coast without having much of a clue as to where exactly we were going or what to expect. We had been incredibly fortunate in that for the first time in weeks, Caithness saw sunlight. The sun, the sea, and the trail were an amazing and enjoyable site. We gained elevation and the cliffs grew taller and taller beneath our feet. Soon we came upon what we were searching for -- Duncansby Stacks -- and it was absolutely beautiful. I'll let the photos below speak for themselves. Soon after our discovery, our good fortune ran out. Black clouds materialized out of nowhere and bellowed hail and high winds. We attempted to wait out the storm, but it was not stopping; in the meantime, we both became soaking wet and felt the wind's cold bite. We decided to turn back, but instead of returning along the trail, we cut across fields, jumping fences and dodging barbed wire, determined to find shelter from the storm as quickly as possible. Upon returning to John O'Groats, we discovered a single business open -- a small gift shop cafe -- why a gift shop cafe was open in that town is beyond understanding, but I'm thankful for it nonetheless. We grabbed a hot drink, tried to dry off, and waited in the gift shop for a few hours until the next Thurso-bound bus arrived. Tim and I both agreed it was a hell of an adventure. We soon parted ways; he continued on his journey, making his way to Northern Ireland, and I headed back to the comfort and warmth of my flat in Edinburgh.

Intercity bus to John O'Groats

This is what the geography of Caithness looks like

I think this is the right way...

Those are some lucky sheep

Scotland's lil' lighthouse

Northern sunlight

Duncansby Stacks sighted

Ducansby Stacks

Getting closer

Storm's a-comin'

Hail

Still pretty

It's not letting up, is it...

Turning back

This is 50% of John O'Groats... I don't understand this town.

On the train back to Edinburgh

Today

Well that gets us through the middle of January. There's still an entire semester to write about, as I'm just weeks away from finishing up Semester 2. Very soon all of my essays will be complete, the proposal for my dissertation will be finalized, and I'll be heading off to Italy and London for a while, but I'll write more about that later. One step at a time. 

I'll leave you with my morning breakfast. It was so tasty.

That would be an egg-bacon-avocado-spinach-jalapeño breakfast sammich on a wholemeal bun with sriracha hot sauce. Easily in the top 5 most delicious things I've ever made.

Road Trip

Mimicking my most recent tweet, Scotland is absolutely beautiful. I don't think there is a superlative fantastic enough to describe how beautiful this country can be, and this is November -- a month on the cusp of winter where parts of the US normally would look desolate, dead or dying. I went with four friends into the southern Highlands this weekend and to two Eastern Scottish cities -- St. Andrews and Dundee. The country that I've seen here, even now, is green, vibrant, and alive. I have a strong urge to see as much as possible of this small nation while I'm here.

Eirik from Norway; Seva from Ukraine; and Nikolai and Paulina -- a married couple from Moscow, Russia were my company on this day trip. We rented a car -- a Vauxhall Insignia -- and drove north, first to Campbell Castle in a small town called Dollar, then to the seaside and home to St Andrews University, the English speaking world's third oldest university (after Cambridge and Oxford), then north to a typical Scottish city of Dundee which is about the population of Boise.

Although I took many photos of this trip, they're all film and they have not yet been developed. I did lend Eirik my camera and he took some photos, so I'll post some of them now, and mine later.

Castle Campbell
This castle was owned by the stinking rich Campbell family from 1500 until it was torched by Scots in mid 1600's for the Campbell clan's support of Oliver Cromwell in the War of the Three Kingdoms. This is set at the base of the Highlands (the "butt of the highlands" as someone so eloquently named it on the trip) and the hillsides are draped with heather and moss. We had a bit of a hike getting up to the castle's elevation but were rewarded with an amazing view of subsiding fog over the small town of Dollar. The castle itself was very impressive, especially with its spiral stone stairway and rooftop access.

St Andrews

A small town on the sea (reminding me a great deal of Whitby in East Yorkshire), St Andrews has charm, beauty, history, and community. We apparently rolled in during some sort of a traditional student weekend, where at 2pm the streets were crawling with Scottish undergrads, completely drunk and covered in face paint. They had to take pictures of themselves doing certain tasks around the town, such as laying on a stack of 5 people, retrieving love letters from baristas, stealing public signs, and finding treasure hunt items hidden in a graveyard. It was confusing for us at first, but became extremely amusing. Being near the sea, it sufficiently satiated my unrelenting desire to stand at a beach and smell fresh ocean air. The town also boasts the impressive St Andrews Cathedral, Scotland's largest church ruins. I really loved this city and may just investigate their available PhD programs.

Dundee

As many consider Edinburgh to be the "least Scottish city in Scotland" (probably due to the global multicultural essence of the city), we decided we wanted to see what a "real" Scottish city looked like, and I think we were all surprised. Dundee is not a large city, its population is only 150,000, but has a structure and architecture comparable to any historic European city. The city is centered around an enormous pedestrian district with pubs, cafes, and shops (Bon Marche still exists??) lined with public art, enormous churches, and beautifully preserved Victorian buildings. If the stones and spires typical of Scottish architecture were to be replaced with the Bavarian gingerbread styled paneling, it would not be difficult to convince someone they'd been transported to Old Town Frankfurt or Budapest. Dundee surprised me in the best of ways.

Home

After a long day (7am to 10pm), we returned home and ate a pizza. We also discovered that snooty pub owners get extremely angry if you try to eat take away at the bar. Jerks. So, we retreated to Eirik's flat, ate our food, and ended our evening.

 On a separate note, I had a funny feeling returning to Edinburgh yesterday after the trip. When I arrived in September, it seemed like it was under such stressful and chaotic conditions, traveling as cheap as humanly possible -- a trillion delayed layovers, an overnight nightmare bus, avoiding taxi fare by hauling 100 pounds of luggage on my back across the city, skipping meals and eating peanuts... I was incapable of enjoying my arrival. This time, I feel like I got to do it over. I entered Edinburgh with my sanity and composure, fully able to appreciate where I had left and what Edinburgh meant. That first day, Edinburgh meant the end to a torturous blur and a space to pass out, but this time it meant something much more. Edinburgh this time meant a sense of security, a comfortable routine, a familiarity of environment, and a group of close friends. It's strange to see a city be transformed right in front of your eyes, but I'm glad it did. Returning to Edinburgh yesterday remade this city into a home.