First Day in Korea and Ramblings

          I learned that the man and woman at the airport who were holding the name card with “Chadwick” on it were named Doug and Ray.  Doug is the maintenance man/computer network administrator at Paju Hope School, and Ray is the director.  They both speak English very well.  I was surprised that they were both there to pick me up.  I’d heard that some teachers get Google Map directions (in Korean hangul) from their schools and are left to fend for themselves with taxis and buses. As we greeted each other, I was anxious that I would make some sort of cultural faux pas and that the dozen uniformed Korean soldiers with assault rifles marching around in the airport would open fire.  This worry turned out to be unfounded. 

Ray and Doug walked me to the parking lot.  I was in a daze.  It was 6PM local time, I hadn’t slept for about 36 hours, and I WAS IN KOREA!

Everything was alien, and everything was familiar.  Yeah, I recognize that Hyundai car from back home, but why are there fifty identical models in this one parking lot?  And why is every single car black, grey, or white?  (I learned later that only “country bumpkins” drive colorful cars.)  We loaded up my two 60 pound bags and hopped on the expressway.  Alien and familiar: Highway signs in English and Korean.  The cars swerved without signaling, missing each other by inches (or centimeters, I suppose). The drivers honked for reasons I couldn’t decipher.  Doug and Ray bickered like an old married couple over the directions, though they aren't married (and, in hindsight, I don’t think it was bickering; Korean just sounds like that.)

The Reality of Korea

The landscape was unlike anything I’d seen in the States, and I’ve driven from North Carolina to Utah, from northern Michigan to Florida.  The highway followed the Han River system, which was on the left.  To the right, there were pockets of shiny skyscrapers next to grimy one story buildings.  The rest was rolling hills and the occasional mountain.  The Han River was lined with lit lampposts along the bank on the other side.  I wondered why they would need lighting over there, considering that there weren’t any buildings or towns that I could see, when Ray mentioned nonchalantly, “That’s the DMZ. And that island in the river is where the South Korean and United States armies do their live fire exercises.”   You know: the same live fire exercises that the North had just issued a threat against about a week before, saying that if the South went through with it, there would be retaliation.  My stomach dropped. 

That's North Korea in the distance.

All the things I had read about were slowly becoming real.  I could have studied a thousand books, and it wouldn’t have been the same feeling as simply being there.  “There’s the DMZ,” I thought.  “At least I get to see where the invasion will come from before it happens.”

That would be the last time that I'd be that nervous about living so close to North Korea.  I liken being near the Korean border to working the job I had installing warehouse storage racking.  With racking, you’re free climbing 30’ above a concrete floor, and jump-stepping over gaps.  Each passing jump that doesn’t end with you falling to your death makes you more confident that you’ll live through the next one.  (Statistically, that makes no sense at all, since with each step, your odds reset. But us human folk are great at making illogical rationalizations.)  That’s how it feels to live in Paju-si, South Korea; each day in which I don’t wake up to mortar fire or tanks in the streets makes me more confident that it won’t happen tomorrow.  Now, take my line of thinking from the two months I’ve been here and apply that to the fifty years or so that people in South Korea have dealt with the North-South tension, and it makes sense that no one here bothers worrying about it.

Pictured: The real reason Kim Jong-un wants to invade. 

But I digress.  Now we’re back in the car driving towards what will be my home for at least the next year.  I was taking everything in that I could.  I suppose now would be a good time to mention that one of my initial reactions to being in Korea is something that makes me feel a bit ashamed of myself.

I realized that the people here are real people.

I mean, I didn’t intentionally reduce my archetype for a “Korean” down to the dimensionality of a cartoon character.  But, when I was back home in the States, there was simply no way to fathom that these 22 million people across the world can each have individual personalities and appearances.  Our minds (or, my mind, at least) cannot make room for that many people, so we generalize until it becomes necessary to remember the specifics.  Before, Korea was just little a peninsula nation with a bunch of people living on it.  Quiet, Asian, short, highly traditional people.   Being here made me realize that the world isn’t just a map.  It’s filled with people who have their own thoughts, desires, and attitudes.  It’s filled with people who, in the grand scheme of things, are just as important to the world as I think I am.  And here’s another digression…

Koreans aren’t just taciturn, respectful people, and whether I meant to or not, that’s how I had thought of them before coming.  I was wrong.  There are stone-faced soldiers, publicly affectionate teenage couples, stumbling drunks, bored toll booth workers, racist taxi drivers, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, friendly convenience store clerks, pushy old women, a LOT of drunk middle-aged businessmen on the subways after work, mothers, children, single women in their 30s terrified they’ll never get married, excitable kindergartners, university-aged women in short skirts and high heels, and university-aged men in classy suits.  There are groups of elderly folks who can keep up with me while hiking up the mountain near my apartment.  Not only that, but when I reach the top and I'm puffing and hydrating with the Gatorade I brought along, they're sitting at the picnic tables getting drunk on makkeoli and soju  (rice beer and rice liquor). You’ll find every combination of adjective, gender (transgendered included), and age here, just like you would anywhere else.  They’re as different from each other as I am from them.  We’re all the heroes in our own stories, and I guess I’m just more aware that OTHER people in every country across the world think the same way.  It’s a simple thought, right? One that I should have already had long ago.  Hence the shame in only grasping it once I came here. 

Oh, and they aren’t nearly short as I thought.

Except these guys. They're pretty short.

            First impressions of Paju

            Anyway, we were getting close to Paju Hope School, and I was eager to see where I’d be living.  We pulled off the interstate and Ray said, “Here it is!”  I looked out excitedly, and it was--with an optimistic mindset--incredibly discouraging.

This kind of stuff.

              We drove by shacks with broken pallets leaning up against the walls, abandoned shopping malls, winding roads with dirt sidewalks.  I tried to stay upbeat.  Surely Hope School hadn’t lied when they sent me those pictures of a modern, clean downtown shopping center along with the recruiting material.  I decided to convince myself that I didn’t get a good look at the area because it was dark out.  The next morning I would be better able to see, and then it wouldn’t be so bad…right?  Yeah, turns out that was the right thing to do.

That's more like it.

           While much of the town is old farm shacks, shoddy rice fields, and empty storefronts, it also has a bustling downtown area, a view of a mountain in the background, plenty of places to eat, and Family Marts on every corner. (Family Marts are like 7-11s but even more prevalent.  I’m not exaggerating when I say they're on every corner. And you can buy liquor there. Comes in handy when you can walk out of a bar, grab a beer from the Family Mart for 1400won [about $1.30] and then head back inside. Or sneak soju into a noraebang [karaoke room]. So many digressions in this post, huh?) 

            The first night I got in, we went out to dinner with some of the teachers, even though all I wanted was to go to bed.  We went to a little café that’s actually only a few steps away from where I live now (though I didn’t know it at the time).  Going to sit down, I banged my knees on the table.  That’s something I hadn’t anticipated: it’s very hard to find a table that you can fit your knees under.  Whoda thunk it?

            I ate the weirdest thing I could find on the menu, which actually wasn’t that strange: squid, rice, egg, and kimchi.  Cost 6000won, which is about $5.25.  I’ve learned that it’s much cheaper to eat out than to cook for yourself.  It’s counter-intuitive and goes against every survival instinct I learned in college, but that’s how it works over here.

Fish heads and ramen = more expensive than a three course meal at a Korean diner.

            After dinner, Ray took me to my hotel, since the teacher I would be replacing hadn’t moved out yet.  On the entire drive from the airport, Ray had been apologizing for the hotel I was being put up in.  She said, “Outside, it does not look nice, but the inside is... (slight pause) nice.  And it’s only for a few days until we can get your apartment ready.”  I told her I was sure it would be fine.  I later learned why she had been so anxious for me to stay there.  In Korea, newlywed couples often live with their parents until they get their own place, so they need a private place to go to.  They call these places “Love Motels.”  I was staying in one.  Red lights in the hallways, colored lighting above the bed, two-person Jacuzzi, and not much else.  Apparently, last year, Ray had picked up a teacher and put him up in the same hotel.  He looked at the room and the town around it, hailed a taxi, bought a plane ticket, and flew home that night.   There may have been more to the story, but that guy must have thought of himself as royalty.

             Learning Culture from a Hotel Room

            The hotel wasn’t too bad.  Plus, I was excited to see all the little differences in amenities between Korea and home.  First off, even in a hotel room, you have to take your shoes off, even if you’re only going to take three steps into it, like the hotel worker who showed me the room.  Once everyone left, and I was finally able to rest, I tried to stay awake to look around a bit.  First, I turned on the massive TV that was on the wall about two feet away from the foot of the bed.  I couldn’t tell when the TV shows ended and the commercials began; they sort of run together into this epileptic mess of bright flashing lights and dancing, smiling hosts.  Apparently what I was watching was a news show, because in between the "super happy fun time colors to make for better viewing pleasure," one of the people on the program was being carried away in a body bag.  Interesting juxtaposition.  Even though there wasn’t any blood from what I could tell, they censored the image of the bag.  That’s quite a difference from American television where anything goes as long as its violence and not naughty words or nudity. 

            I went into the bathroom to do some ‘splorin’.  Korean bathrooms, at least in apartments and hotels, don’t have shower stalls.  The entire bathroom is the stall.  The showerhead hangs on the wall and can detach.  There’s a drain in the floor and a metal flap that covers the toilet paper to keep it from getting soggy.  In the hotel, there was a toilet from the future.  It was western style, so it wasn’t just a hole in the ground. On the left-hand side, there was a remote control with ten different buttons—none of which were marked in English.  I did my business and was weighing my options.  I looked and looked for a label that might be the flush button.  Eventually, I found it; it was just a metal push button on the side of the toilet.  The remote control was for the bidet.  I didn’t have the courage to try it.  It had options for temperature settings, massage cycles, and brushing. I didn't even know there were that many ways you could spray water up your ass.

Not worth it.

            After forty hours of traveling, I was finally able to go to sleep.  I turned on the AC, which stayed on all night.  Apparently the AC doesn’t count as a real fan, because I was alive the next morning (Close Call).  I lay down on the bed that was so hard my back cracked four times.  I’ve since gotten used to the hard mattresses they have here, but that’s mostly because I forget what an American one feels like.  The next time I go back home to Indiana, I might not be able to leave the bed. 

I slept like a baby brick from 9 at night until 4am, when the jet lag told me it was time to get up and at 'em.  I checked out the Korean computer in the hotel room and accidentally, serendipitously discovered that pressing Shift and one of the random Korean keys will switch from Korean hangul to good ol' English. I wrote my family to tell them I had made it and got ready for Hope School orientation...

PS: Thanks for reading through this, if you got this far.  I apologize for the meandering nature of the post, but there was just so much to take in on the first few days.  If the blog reads like a big hodgepodge of half-formed ideas, that’s because that was how my mind felt when I first got here.