A correction on Dok Po Ki, the world's coolest bathroom, and other miscellany

Hello. It's been a while, hasn't it? I did mean to post earlier, but as usual, I didn't. "Stop procrastinating...tomorrow" - isn't that what they say? Ah well.

First, I would like to correct an error I made in my last post. You may remember that I warned readers of the dangers of a spicy dished called Dok Po Ki, pictured here:

However, the other day, my students informed me that this is not, in fact, Dok Po Ki. It is actually something along the lines of "eomook." Dok Po Ki, in fact, looks more like this:

As you can see, the two dishes are quite different. My students openly wondered how I had managed to get them confused.

"I just told people that I'd gotten the noodle things in hot soupy stuff from Jaws, you know, that place that sells spicy food through a window," I explained, thoroughly embarrassed. "As you can see, both yuckmuck and -- "

No, no. Eomook. Eo-MOOK.

"Yes, that stuff, and Dok Po Ki can both be ordered at Jaws, and people assumed that I'd gotten Dok Po Ki, since it's noodle things in hot soupy stuff. But either way, what I had was REALLY spicy."

Was it? my students said. How strange. Eomook is not spicy at all. At least, it is nothing compared to Dok Po Ki. We must fix this immediately. Tomorrow, you will have Dok Po Ki. Only then will you know the meaning of the word "spicy."

And so, in the middle of next class, we had Dok Po Ki. I did eat it, and I managed to smile through it even though it felt like my stomach lining was disintegrating. Meanwhile, the inside of my mouth felt something like this:

So THAT, my friends, is Dok Po Ki.

Onto other things. I have been in Seoul for four weeks now, but it feels like no more than a day. I have fallen into a somewhat regular routine. I sleep, I wake, I teach, I eat, I make "lesson plans," then sleep again. I subsist mainly on Special K, plums, and ramen noodles. My roommate has moved to cheaper lodgings, so I spend my free time shopping instead of socializing. I buy kitschy stereotypical Asian souvenirs, like silk fans, jade bracelets, and teddy bears in traditional Korean robes. I also spend atrocious amounts of money on clothes I do not need, such as this raincoat slash dress thing:

Note the general mess and my ex-roommate's bed, which is now my "jewelry bed." The dorm office informed me that they may be giving me a new roommate soon. This is probably for the better.

When I am not languishing in the swirling pit of filth that is my room, I wander Seoul, sucking down lattes and taking sub-par pictures with my phone. Here are the fruits of some of those wanderings.

First of all, I went to a palace. It looked kind of like this.

On the inside, it smelled very calm, like dust and old wood. And it looked something like this.

I also saw a centuries-old contraption that could fire 100 flaming arrows simultaneously. Here is photographic evidence that yes, it actually exists:

It evokes both horror and admiration. One has to wonder, what must have inspired someone to create this dastardly weapon? Desperation in the face of a formidable enemy? Sadomasochistic tendencies? A truly intense bout of boredom? Either way, I thought it looked like something a villain from The Powerpuff Girls might use, and since I have a rather sick sense of humor, I spent the next few hours entertaining myself with thoughts of tiny cartoon armies running in circles, trying to dodge the rain of death that fell flaming upon them.

I also went to Seoul Tower, which is exactly what it sounds like - a tower, in Seoul.

Perhaps "went" isn't quite the right word. For some reason, I thought it might be a good idea to walk there, rather than taking the subway. After all, I could see it from my dorm. It couldn't be that far.

And it wasn't, really. Maybe just a mile or three. But I failed to realize that since the tower is on top of a hill, I would have to (obviously) go up a hill to get there. I also disregarded that I have not so much as done crunches in over a month, and am thus in no shape to trek to a distant tower in 90-degree weather, let alone in $15 sandals with all the arch support of a ballet slipper.

On my sweaty way there, I walked along the top edge of the US Military base, which looks something like this:

As you can see, it is very welcoming. Good ol' fashioned American hospitality. I have my own opinions about this, but I won't taint my wide-eyed wanderings with half-baked political grumbling. I will save my opinions for another, more cynical post.

Around mile two of my journey, my lungs shriveled in protest. I started to get tunnel vision. All I could see was the road, the hill, and the tower that grew ever-so-slowly closer.

In the end, I made it, although it felt a little like scaling Mount Doom. By the time I arrived, I was dripping sweat onto the pavement.

When I got to the top, the view looked like this.

As you can see, visibility is not so good. Seoul is quite smoggy, after all. But I hope you get the general idea. Anyway. Seoul Tower is also home to one of the coolest bathrooms on the planet, which looks like this:

And when you wash your hands, you can admire the view below. So maybe you will understand why I stood there washing my hands for ten minutes. Or maybe it was because my brain had short-circuited from heat exhaustion, and I could do no more than mindlessly run cold water over my hands while staring vacantly into space.

You will not be surprised to hear that I took the subway home.

At any rate, I am doing well, and I hope you are, too. More posts to come.

-Emily

Smog, Gangnam, and Falling in Like

I meant to have this post written by Friday. But, as you will soon see, I've been rather busy.

In my last post, I mentioned that being Seoul feels rather like a dog flying a helicopter upside-down (in other words, like this dog):

Now I would like to say that my dog-in-helicopter phase has ended. But this is sadly untrue. I would like to say I can navigate Seoul like a native, speak Korean fluently, and inhale the spiciest noodles without weeping in pain. But while I am a long way from doing any of these things, I am a little bit closer to doing them than I was a week ago. Perhaps I am flying my helicopter sideways now.

At first, I was miserable. I spoke no Korean. I had no company. My roommate had yet to appear, and I doubted whether she ever would - whether she even existed at all. I slept, facebooked, and wandered the streets of Seoul for hours on end before retreating to my room to pity myself and sweat profusely. Then, mercifully, my roommate came.

She was Finnish.

She was stylish.

And, thanks be to the Lord and all his angels above, she spoke English.

She had also been in Korea for four months. After I babbled hysterically at her for a while, she kindly showed me the ins and outs of Seoul - how to use the metro, where to buy soap, what to do with the trash that had begun to accumulate in the shadowy corner of our room. Another English-speaking angel - a cousin's friend's brother, if you must know - took me out to get a real Korean dinner, paid for my meal, and gave me a lesson on Korean table manners. I felt bad that such nice people were spending such time and money on me, but both my roommate and my cousin's friend's brother told me not to worry. Their explanations for their graciousness were basically as follows:

"It's okay. I remember my first week here."

For some Westerners, Seoul can initially be confounding. At first, it's hard to say why. The streets are not particularly twisty. The drivers are not particularly crazy. The people are not particularly unfriendly. But there is something unnerving about going from living in a cool, green place where everyone speaks your language to living in a hot, smoggy, endlessly crowded place whose language is unintelligible to you, where you have few acquaintances and no friends, where you cannot, for the love of God, find BREAD.

Now, I have learned to do without the bread. I have acquired a few acquaintances, and maybe even a friend or two. The language is, of course, a barrier - I can't form a sentence in Korean, let alone make small talk - but I can complete simple financial transactions, provided that the cashier doesn't say anything to me. At all. And I have slowly started to like this cloudy, sprawling city.

Seoul is not exactly picturesque. It's not Paris or Venice or Rome. But it has a character of its own. It has vertical street signs, smartphone-addicted citizens, a musical language, questionable odors, countless 7/11's (no joke), a brownish river, crazy old ladies, a haze of smog, uncompleted skyscrapers, and green hills that jut out of the city grid like teeth that grew in crooked. And it's starting to carve out a place in my heart, slowly but surely, with the bored clumsiness of an exhausted, inexpert surgeon.

When I am not wandering around Seoul or blogging about said wanderings, I teach, or try to. Thankfully, my students are wonderful. They are sweet and articulate. They laugh politely at my corny American jokes, and they don't make fun of me when I butcher their names. Although "butcher" is perhaps too light of a word. "Slaughter" is probably more appropriate. Calling attendance is always a linguistic experiment. One student (real name omitted) noticed my plight and offered to go by another name, with considerable sass:

But you don't want to hear any more about me. Get to the good stuff, you say. Tell me about SEOUL. Tell me wonderful exotic things about Korea that I have never heard before in my life.

My friends, I will try.

1. I did visit Gangnam. It looks like this.

As you can see, there are a lot of shops and shiny buildings. But Psy does not gallop around corners or catwalk out of parking garages. It mostly looks like the rest of Seoul, plus a few tourists and minus a few 7/11's. But I am not really a trustworthy source for information on Gangnam. I was deliriously sick when I visited. Seoul is hot, humid, dirty, and home to approximately twenty-five million inhabitants; for me, it is thus a petri dish of disease.

The Friday I visited, I felt like a parasite-riddled zombie. I grabbed lunch, dragged my coughing, oozing body up and down the main street, took pictures, got back on the subway, made it to my room, crawled into bed, and slept for fourteen hours.

So yes, I have been to Gangnam. But I may have hallucinated half of what I saw.

2. Is Korean food spicy? you ask. To answer, I turn to exhibit A: Dok Po Ki.

Hmm. This "Dok Po Ki" looks innocuous enough, you say. Just dumplings bobbing in chicken broth, really. Almost like won ton soup. What's so scary about that?

But what you do not know is that underneath the broth and noodles lies a layer of red chili peppers, so spicy they will make you feel as though your eyeballs are bleeding out of your face.

That, my friend, is my answer to "Is Korean food spicy?"

3. But it can't ALL be spicy, you say.

Okay. Some of it is LESS spicy. For example, this dish will make you only cry water, not blood.

It is rice, chicken, vegetables, and spicy sauce. It is painful to eat, but tasty. I do not know what it is called. A Korean friend ordered it for me in Korean, and to me, Korean sounds mostly like "KoreanKoreanKoreanKoreanKorean," so it could be called "Unicorn Turds" for all I know.

But enough about food. Let's talk about sports.

4. Unbeknownst to me, there is baseball in Korea. And it is kind of a big thing. Although one would think that a country of fifty million could build a bigger stadium than this:

But I digress.

In Korea, teams are mostly named after their sponsoring companies, not their location of origin. I thus saw the LG Twins play the SK Wyverns. But another day, I could have seen the Kia Tigers or the Samsung Lions. I can't decide if this is invasive advertising, brilliant marketing, or both. For what it's worth, the stadium was packed, and the audience was more enthusiastic than anything I've seen on TV or in real life in the US. The crowd chanted, clapped, shouted, and did the wave for nearly four hours straight, with barely a pause for breath. So I now challenge anyone who says that baseball is the "American" pastime.

6. At one park in Korea near where I live, there are playgrounds slash exercise machines for ADULTS.

Okay, so I am no photographer. I was also unwilling to flagrantly take pictures of feeble old men attempting to lift weights in peace. I'm not a douchebag, after all. But I hope this mediocre shot at least proves that this park exists, and that old men use it, sometimes.

Now back to food.

7. I guess Koreans have a thing for French cuisine. If you don't believe me, feast your eyes on this picture of one of the many Paris-themed cafes in Seoul:

And they have food that looks like this:

Was it particularly tasty? No. It was about as good as you might expect of a bunch of Koreans trying to imitate pain-au-chocolat. But my bread-starved body appreciated it, even if it was tasteless and stale. And I'm sure it goes both ways - a Parisian attempt at Dok Po Ki would fail miserably, don't you think?

And with that I end this post. I have not fallen in love with Seoul, but I have certainly fallen in like. I might even fall in love someday, if I survive the smog, parasites, plastic croissants, and Dok Po Ki. Maybe one day, I'll even fly my helicopter right-side up, even if I am still (figuratively) a dog.

Until next time,
-Emily O.

An American in Korea: First Impressions and Dogs in Helicopters

Hello. My name is Emily O. If you do not feel like reading right now, you may consult the easy-to-understand infographic below.

This is me:

This is my country:

This is where I am right now (and will be for the next 6 weeks):

This is how it is going for me so far:

So those are the basics. But for those of you with an attention span of longer than four pictures, here are some details.

I am not actually flying helicopters upside-down in South Korea. Nor am I dog. The comparison was meant to be figurative - I feel how a dog might feel when flying a helicopter upside-down, for several reasons. But I will get to that later.

If I am not flying helicopters upside-down, then what am I doing in Korea, you ask? Well, I have been fortunate enough to obtain an internship there, teaching English to Korean college students in Seoul. I am also a college student. Is a college student technically qualified to teach other college students? I.e. Am I, a 19-year-old with no PhD and no teaching experience qualified to teach other college students? The answer is, I don't know. I begin tomorrow, so I guess I will find out then.

Back to the dog in the helicopter. Now that I am in Korea, I feel like him for several reasons:
1. I do not know Korean.
2. At all.
3. I do not know very much about the actual country of Korea. I am aware that it exists, and that I am currently in it. I am also aware that there was a war that split it into two countries back in the 50's, and that there is a place in Seoul called Gangnam where a man in sunglasses dances with horses, women, and a guy in a yellow tuxedo. And that is the extent of my knowledge.
4. I am jetlagging, so everything is a little surreal.
5. My antidepressants often make me feel woozy and disoriented, much like a dog might feel whilst operating a helicopter upside-down.
6. I'm supposed to be living with two roommates, but they have yet to actually appear in the room, so I feel rather alone and I think I might be going crazy but it's okay I'm fine I swear.
7. Did I mention that I am supposed to teach people and also that I HAVE NEVER DONE THAT BEFORE?

Now you know why I feel like a dog piloting a helicopter. Hopefully, as time goes on, I will feel less like the dog and more like the right-side-up smiling human in the picture above. But that remains to be seen.

I will give more details about Seoul and my mishaps there in the next post. In the meantime, you may content yourself with these pictures of dogs who also do not know what they are doing.

And for the grand finale: