First Weekend in Korea

Flying from Yonago airport was like flying from Toronto to Detroit. We were really only up in the air long enough to have lunch. Not the best airline lunch I've ever had though. Takeoff is my favourite part of flying, but I loath the landings... something about that point just before the wheels touch down where you know you're about 1 meter above the tarmac just makes me feel queezy. Incheon airport is about an hours drive from where we were heading in Seoul, the bus taking us along a highway through an estuary full of birds of all shapes and sizes. Pretty neat looking, but I couldn't help feeling that having the highway running through it had to have some pretty significant effects. I was talking to someone a while ago about Asia not really having much in the way of environmentalism. I couldn't help but wonder about that, seeing all the construction in places that my instincts, training and experience tell me are sensitive. Not a thing I could really do about it, but it still makes me think. That's probably the important thing, but I wish I could do something when I see things like that.

Anyway, Seoul is a pretty amazing city. It feels a bit like Rome in that it's built all over a bunch of hills. It's one hell of a lot more colourful than any city I've seen in Japan and there are more people out and about doing healthy activities like jogging, cycling, inline skating etc. Actually there are more people out "taking exercise" than in any other city I've ever seen. Neither are there many obese people here. Quite remarkable really.

The city's pretty smoggy. The traffic is terrifying (if you're a pedestrian, anyway). The city is also tremendously varied. There is one area called Itaewon that's an absolute haven for foreigners. Walking around there, I feel like I'm in Toronto. It's really quite a neat place.

Our accomodation on the first evening was supposed to be at the Windroad hostel near a couple of the universities and some palaces. We dropped in, left our stuff, the attendant saying that our rooms were just being fixed up. I figured they were being cleaned or something. Nigel and I went off to get some food, finding a bunch of hot rice stuff like bibimbap but different. Very tasty. However, upon getting back to the hostel to meet Nigel's friend Steve, who's studying Mandarin in Beijing, we found that our rooms weren't being cleaned, they were being renovated. "Done by 10" they kept saying, "Done by 10, no problems". It being 6 and they being in the process of installing the lights into a room with a concrete floor and no paint, we were perhaps rightly skeptical. We complained and argued and haggled over a price for these non-existent rooms before deciding that Nigel's other friend Victoria probably wouldn't go for the place, even if they did somehow manage to get beds with clean sheets into the rooms by 10 at night. Nigel, Steve and I figured we'd stay if we could get the rooms for 5000 won each, but our standards simply required beds, sheets and a door to keep out the dogs. Anyway, it didn't go well, so we hit an internet cafe, where to our surprise easily 50 kids our age (all male) were glued to 19 inch screens, playing video games. We managed to snag a couple of computers and set about finding somewhere in this overbooked city to set up kip. We found a place somewhere on the south side of the Han river at a guy's apartment. He was renting out his extra rooms as a guesthouse. It was actually pretty super. Cheep, super clean, homey, had a giant television playing terrible programming, and four decent, clean beds, all for 10000 won each. Which is about 10 bucks.

Anyway, I'm off to do some more stuff... as that's what I'm here to do...

Hanami-Ho!

When I came to Japan, I think I was caught somewhere in a paradoxical state of knowledge about the real-life modern Japan and the fictions of life we construct for other people. I knew a lot about different traditional activities, foods, and attitudes, but I hadn't really reconciled in my conception of the place the time demands of reality with how "culture" fits into the modern Japanese consumer lifestyle.

Imagine my surprise when life here was pretty much the same kind of getting by, human experience as living in Canada. Anyway, in Canada, we do the Christmas/Easter/Thanksgiving dinner thing... here, they do several similarly historic things the most recent of which I've experienced being Hanami.

In Japan, the end of the school year is in March. Everyone wraps up their year in early to mid-March, with final tests, graduation ceremonies and the like taking every second day out of your teaching regimen. Anyway, one of my classes from last year were pretty extraordinary kids. They were in the "math and science" class here at Kita and so were pretty book smart kids. What really set them apart though was their energy and enthusiasm for learning. They participated in every class as if it was the most fun thing they could possibly be doing. Their interest translated into some pretty huge gains in English competence and by the end of their first year at high-school, there were few things that I could say to them that they didn't understand. Those things that they didn't understand, they could identify immediately. These kids were always surprising me with phrases like "Hirose cut the cheese". Teaching them was always a bright spot in my week. I miss them now that we don't have Oral Communication class anymore, however, they invited me to go with them to Tamayu, a little town just on the edge of the now enlarged Matsue City. It's famous for two things, its onsens and it's sakura river. In the spring, when the cherry-blossoms are blooming away in their brief affair with our senses, the entire river that runs through Tamayu is flanked by a startling display of pink and white.

We took the train from Matsue station and then walked from Tamayu station along some quiet backroads, past people's gardens and yet unplanted rice-fields. Once we got there, we held the obligatory photo session as everyone captured the moment for their box of memories. As you can see, I was among those covetous souls. I have two blades of grass in my mouth like fangs... but you can't see them very well, so I just look silly... er, right, yes, because... you can't see the grass... blades...


Me and many of my favourite (yes, I know I'm not supposed to have favourites) students.

Anyway, we had a super time having a bit of a picnic on the banks of that placid stream, surrounded by countless cherry blossoms, the fresh spring grass that always looks greener than it should and bustling old folks, starting their gardens for the year. Amazingly relaxing really.


Tamayu-cho's blossomed creek be dammed, yar.

I'm gradually getting used to having infrastructure as part of the scenery. Not all of it's an eyesore, though the wires everywhere really give your aesthetic sense a real run for it's money.

I go before you always...

I arrived late to school today, it being Spring Break, I come in to do few work related items each day. I did a bit of tidying at home and then pedaled my way across the city. Getting to school, I greeted some tentative looking new first year students, come to collect their schedules and slippers. I greeted them in English and they looked like I just told them I was going to eat their pet kittens, take pictures and torment them throughout their entire first year. Now, I know sometimes look like a brute of a person sometimes, what with my balding buzz cut coif and my heavy set and grizzled good looks, but I haven’t been in the business of tormenting children since I was a child… and even then, I don’t recall tormenting many kids… I was too often on the receiving end to inflict that kind of misery on anyone else. So, I switched into Japanese and said a few things that in their English translation would have sounded friendly and reassuring to kids, coming from someone who’s obviously going to be one of their teachers. However, it too seemed to unnerve them… It occurred to me that none of the other adults I know says things like “that’s an awfully big hill eh?” to… well, anyone. Ah well, that’s part of internationalization and as such, part of their official education, even though it’s not officially during school hours. I often accost my students with English out and about in the city. I think it’s good for them. Keeps them on their toes and able to use what they learn in real contexts.

Anyway, new students aside, I was expecting changes today, but I was wholly unprepared for the kind of unimagined distressful circumstances that awaited me in the office. I expected there to be a new computer in the English room and that the network would be accessible from all of the desks. Nope. The room isn’t even clean yet. The messy teacher who just left, who makes me look like a neat freak, left reams of his crap behind. Unreal. The coffee maker’s on the fritz and made a mess all over the table, which I found inordinately frustrating, upsetting even. There are boxes and books piled all around my desk and I don’t know whose they are. And, I read on the BBC website that the Pope’s finally bought the farm.

It’s strange. I missed mass yesterday because I wasn’t able to haul my carcass out of bed because I was unable to get to sleep on Saturday night. I might have heard about it there. I went out to a movie in Yonago, a neighbouring city with a real movie theatre with some friends, ate some real buttered popcorn and drank beer whilst watching The Aviator, that new(ish) flick about Howard Hughs. Creepy, but very interesting, it was. I guess he didn’t know much about the power of a human immune system. Anyway, the whole day we were out and about and there was not a whisper to be heard of the J2P2’s passing. It was just like Easter last week. Not a peep. Not a single indication that it was a Sunday unlike any other.

Last Sunday, I missed Easter mass but had a conversation in Japanese with one of the deacons and the Philippino priest. They explained to me that the English mass was on the second Sunday of each month and that there would be no English Easter mass. They suggested I feel free to go pray in the church as the building would remain open all day. I took them up on their offer and went in to pray. It felt strange and lonely in there though. After maybe 15 minutes, a pair of (gorgeous) young Philippino women came in, arm in arm, to do their Easter make-up prayer stint. The direction they left in made me wonder if they were hostesses in one of the dozen or so Philippino bars in town. That would explain their inability to make mass in the morning. What I don’t get though, is, given the number of peeps from the Philippines why aren’t there masses in Tagalog? Anyway, I digress. The Polish Pope is dead and I feel my family is somehow diminished for it. Knowledge of his passing was really the crowning glory of a frustrating and uncomfortable morning but I’m at a loss to explain why it made me cry. I seem to be crying a lot this year, not from arguments or movies or disturbing documentaries, but because there are peeps I can’t see at times that are important to me. There are peeps whom I will never again see as they’ve died while I was away. I feel that even as I wrack my brains, trying to get Japanese into my head and make it mine, I’m being somehow diminished in other ways. It’s as if there’s only so much room in my head and my heart. I think, as much as I love being in Japan, it will be an error to stay more than 2 years. It may be a wonderful place, but it’s probably not a place with which I should try to cultivate strong ties. That’s just how I’m feeling this morning, though I feel like there’s a part of my life that’s inaccessible to me here. Which, of course should be obvious to anyone taking a quick look at my circumstances. So with that feeling of inaccessibility, I feel in a way, that with the Pope passing, I’ve lost a friend from home. I always seem to be absent when people die, and I feel, rightly or wrongly, a right shit for it. The Pope, for me, was one of those people who is like a grandfatherly figure, yet another person to whom I looked up to who has gone on. It seems that as these giants of life pass on, I, in a way become a more senior figure. I feel grossly ill sized to the shoes the Pope has left behind, but of course, it won’t be me filling them, so my worries and feelings are really only internal fictions. Which is precisely the problem this morning. My attachment to the Pope is really only one based on shared faith and maybe my own feelings of need for people to look up to. John Paul 2 was a giant of a man. Whatever people’s criticisms of his autocratic, conservative nature, he was a profoundly caring, disciplined, brilliant and powerful man who spent his days in faithful service to his tour group. He did everything he could to seek the true paths by which we should hike. And he did it in sneakers, always respectful of the people he visited, Catholic or not. We’ve lost a powerful philosopher, a shining mind and a heart of mythic proportions. Going on to greener pastures, of course, but still… it’s something we always find difficult. There’s something about not interacting physically with people anymore that is profoundly disturbing for us.
I think it’s probably attachment to the static appearance of life. The Pope was never a static figure really. Whatever he was, and he was, and is a lot of things, he is a process. Even from a strictly physical perspective, all people, things and relationships are processes, or flows. The change though, is something that really gets to us. It picks the scabs of our heart wounds, it scratches itches on our skin to the point of pain. Change, however, is as much a part of the process of being as the natural feelings of relationship we have for each other, the events we experience, and the things we interact with and the places we visit. The problem is that we grow attached to the physical existence of particular processes in particular states, heedless of the knowledge that they cannot remain in that state. As such, attachment to my relationships to the people and the things by which I define my life is really the problem as far as my frustration and discomfort are concerned. As is the case for everyone I’m sure. I am worried about becoming something I feel should not, about loosing the things and relationships that despite my feelings that they define me do not in the least define me. It’s quite a difficult state of mind to manage, despite my increasing experience with meditation and biofeedback.

I think, I probably just need to go get plastered at my friend Seigi’s bar. Seigi’s a philosophy graduate, a DJ and an English teacher, so our conversations are always grounding for me. They always leave me feeling that even though the world feels like a strange and unwieldy place without meaning or sense, it is in fact simply a metaphysical experience of exploration, an adventure without true physical direction. He’ll be happy enough to toast J2P2 with me as he’s read his early work. Imagine that. Meeting a Japanese DJ who’s read Karol Wojtyla tending bar in a little side street place in a small city in Japan feels like something out of a Robbins novel.

Anyway, all we truly have in the world is our choice of response to the circumstances of our lives. With that, my head comes unraveled and so I will go back to sitting on the windowsill watching the raucous and fascinating white heron colony grow. It will, after a fashion be a prayer for an old man who would have appreciated the sight.