Dear Blogsphere: Miss H has flown home for her brief winter break. I just saw her off at the sparkly, well-lit Incheon Airport. I now have eight lonely days to devour pungent seafood, scratch myself, burp, shower every 72 hours and just generally act like a mangy orangutan an unwed male twentysomething.
This was originally supposed to be a post about what I did during my recent Facebook hiatus, but then I thought I'd go one better and tell you what-all I did during 2013. (It's becoming a tradition.)
So here, as noted in my little black spiral-bound notebook, is what I did during the two-month break from the Book o' Faces:
read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
started reading The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson and Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (which are the reasons I didn't read more during the break)
wrote, printed, administered and graded midterm exams
wrote, printed, administered and graded final exams
bet on the winning horse and scored ₩1,200 at Seoul Racecourse Park (about $1.10)
watched the sunset from Gwangjin Bridge (pictured below)
found and ordered Coleman waterproof matches (for my pipe) on Gmarket
joined a gym
rode a two-person bike with Miss H for the first time (at Ttukseom Resort)
watched Red Dawn (2012), Jeremiah Johnson (1972), Wrath of the Titans (2012), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), Catching Fire (2013), The Edge (2010), and In the Fog (2012)
had the fraying cuffs of my two coats repaired (our tailor's a magician)
assembled a bug-out bag (in case the NoKos invade)
discovered a bitchin' new bar in Cheonho (Heaven's Key)
dumped the red ale down the toilet (suspected bacterial infection)
bought a new backpack for Australia (₩58,000)
went to the Seoul Lantern Festival
took several glorious naps
bought my own set of beer-making supplies
had corned beef hash at Butterfingers in Gangnam
went to Incheon for our customary Thanksgiving dinner at Fog City Diner and bought sourdough bread from the proprietor
had my first halfway-decent conversation with a Korean cabbie
brewed (and drank) a nice chocolate porter with the fellas
finally mailed those souvenirs from China to my parents
rode down to Busan on the KTX for a Christmas party; met up with everyone on Geoje Island; had tapas and wine, watched a football match at an Irish pub, and wound up at a noraebang
watched the sunset from the top of the Lotte Department Store in Nampo-dong, Busan
caught the night train to Seoul
booked my Hokkaido junket
reconnected with an old friend (my illustrator)
came down with rhinitis
went on the Itaewon Foodie Crawl (French, Spanish, Russian and Italian)
picked new names for the fictitious cities, countries and continents in my sci-fi series
brewed a nice ginger IPA with my beer-buddies
did 18 hours of extra classes during finals week
took Novel #3 to 81,000 words and Novel #4 to 38,000 words
And here, included as a...supplement? Addendum? Appendix? Well, whatever. Here's the rest of what I accomplished in 2013:
read Hiroshima by John Hersey, Skybreaker and Starclimber by Kenneth Oppel, Distant Thunders and Rising Tides by Taylor Anderson, Dubliners by James Joyce, The Last Time I Was Me by Cathy Lamb (part of a book-exchange program with Miss H), and five or six other titles I don't recall...far short of my goal of 30
tried and failed to keep a book diary (obviously)
finished my contract at Avalon English in Bucheon
moved to Seoul, the world's most populous city (proper)
got a job at Sejong University (and successfully completed my first year there)
got straight A's on all my teaching evaluations, too
started the semester with tonsillitis, though
attended a family reunion in Iowa in July
swam in a man-made lake
went to see Jesse James's childhood home
finally got to eat (and drink!) at the Yardhouse in Victoria Gardens
bought a Stanwell beechwood pipe and Captain Black tobacco
purchased a bottle of 10-year-old Ardbeg single malt Scotch with spare change
started Novel #4
submitted a dozen or so short sci-fi stories to e-magazines like Space Squid, 3LBE and Daily Science Fiction(publication still eludes me, however)
grew a beard (bucket list!)
received an e-reader (a Nook) from my significant other as a gift; haven't touched it
And that's about all I can think of for now.
Here's the part where I'm supposed to tell you what I've got planned for next year. Alright, here you go: another two semesters at Sejong University, the Sapporo Snow Festival in Hokkaido in February, a summer trip to Alaska and some other destination as-yet-unchosen, e-publishing Novel #2, shopping Novel #1 to publishers, finishing Novels #3, #4 and possibly #5, smoking the dickens out of my pipe, moving out of this hellhole villa, brewing the tastiest beers this side of the East China Sea, planning my wedding, and growing this beard down to my sternum.
You deserve a full update, and you'll get it, but it's just past 7:30 a.m. and I'm still soaking wet from my shower and I have to be out the door by 8:00 or the subways become too crowded to deal with and I'll be late for class. So here you go, bullet time once again:
We got the third snow of the year yesterday, a heavy, wet, sopping sort of snow that fell awkwardly out of the sky and went splat on the ground. The weird thing was that it rained first and then started snowing—accompanied by thunder. "Thundersnow" I thought to myself as I put on my old boots and traipsed out into that soggy mess to get my computer fixed.
Yes, that's the second thing: my computer. The hard drive went belly up last Sunday night. I was just clicking around, minding my own business, adding a few thousand more words to my 35,000-word NaNoWriMo project, when BAM—shutdown. Blue Screen of Death. Fatal error. Crash dump. Restart. Lockup. Force shutdown. No bootable disk. Sigh. I took it to the only Toshiba service center I could find on Google Maps, located in the Gangnam Finance Center building near Yeoksam Station. Once again I felt the unique and exquisitely painful sense of guilt I always get when I'm soliciting some service in Korea without being able to speak Korean. In pidgin (and heartbreakingly apologetic) English, the man behind the counter told me that my hard drive was bad, that he would salvage as much data as he could, replace my hard drive with a new one (albeit a Korean one with an English language pack) and put Humpty-Dumpty all back together again...for 121,000 won. I didn't mind. I was willing to pay any price, as a lot of my notes and pictures—and Novel #4—are completely unsaved and non-backed-up. I guess I got away cheap. I might have lost everything.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Miss H and I are doing our usual thing: throwing a bunch of Thanksgiving-y ingredients into the Crock Pot and turning 'er on. We'll spend the evening nibbling on a delicious amalgam of Thanksgiving dinner, listening to music, sipping Russian champagne and plugging away at our newest jigsaw puzzle.
Good Lord, how did finals come so quickly? I was just coasting along, riding my way through a leisurely November with the students, doing various writing projects, quizzes, and fun activities. Now, suddenly, there's barely two weeks left until finals. Five class-days left, and one of them will be taken up by a standardized writing assessment and the other will need to be set aside for review. YIPE!!
The day after Thanksgiving, the boys (Messrs. JA and BP) are coming over to brew up some more beer. This is the first time we've ever done it at my apartment. I have all the equipment freshly bought and laid by, and am rather excited now that this SNAFU with my computer has been resolved. I'm just going to be running around like a chicken with my head cut off on Friday afternoon after class, picking up my coat from the tailor's (frayed cuffs repaired), my laptop from Gangnam, and a few last-minute supplies from the E-Mart in Cheonho, across the river.
On Saturday, Miss B, our army doctor friend stationed up in Dongducheon, is coming down for a visit. Oh, and that's also the day that Miss H and I are heading over to Incheon to have our other Thanksgiving dinner at the Fog City Diner. I hope we can fit Miss B in there somewhere. It's hard for her to get weekend passes.
And then the weekend after all this, Miss H and I are heading down south to Busan on the KTX (for the first time since spring) to see the gang and have an early Christmas party. Eek.
And I still haven't resolved my V.D.Q., either. No reservations made yet and no concrete decisions in the offing. Argh!
How'd this happen? Everything was going so calmly for a while, and then BOOM. Chaos! Help! SOS! Mayday! Make it stop! I wanna get off!
Hey there, blogsphere. In the next few days I'm going to publish a confessional about the prejudices and preconceived notions I harbor about the People's Republic of China. Might be best to do that before I go there next week, you know?
The weather appears to be turning. The dreadful summer heat has subsided, though the humidity is still sky-high. And speaking of the sky, the heavens have opened: the middle peninsula has been deluged with 120 millimeters (not quite 5 inches) of rain every day for the past three days. I'm surprised the subways haven't flooded yet. The downpour was so heavy yesterday that the lower half of my slacks were soaked through as I made my way from Gangbyeon Station to my final appointment with the ENT specialist. The rain bucketed down so hard that it was finding cracks and chinks in my umbrella, and icy drops were falling on my head at intervals. Yikes. Coupled with the unpleasant humidity (and the insane amount of sweating I do whenever it occurs), the situation has been untenable. I can't wait for fall to properly set in.
In other news, the first two weeks of Sejong University's fall semester are over. Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival (roughly analogous to America's Thanksgiving Day) is coming up next week. It's three days, Wednesday to Friday, and that's when Miss H and I are actually going to China. I think this semester is starting out pretty well, but I feel tired already—the prospect of another four months of teaching is daunting. I think I'm finally starting to be well and truly burned out on education. I wanna go home and fly again. I may have some further news about that in the coming weeks, actually; Miss H is pretty burnt out too, what with her kids being so spoiled and unmanageable and all, so we may decide to go home early. We're going to talk it over.
After many fits and starts, Miss H and I are going to start implementing some healthy habits around here: resuming our evening tea-and-yoga routine, for starters. It really helps us sleep. We've been looking around and garnering information about gyms, and tomorrow we'll probably stop by a few and ask about their rates and facilities. We've made dozens of attempts to get into shape on our own, but we've decided that forking over a membership fee and having personal trainers bark at us would overcome our lack of willpower and provide us with motivation. We have to start getting in shape for the wedding, you know!
I also think I'm going to start keeping a nightly journal again. I keep buying blank journal books, excitingly leather-bound and full of blank college-ruled pages ripe for filling with life's intimate details, but I never write in 'em. It's difficult to get into the habit, for one thing. Our evenings can be so unpredictable. Hectic, too: I cook and wash dishes and plan lessons and so forth. Moreover, since I'm keeping a blog, there hardly seemed to be any point in keeping a journal...but I've realized that this blog is more like a twice-a-month thing (when I don't have travels to report on), while the journal would be every night. It'll be good to marshal my thoughts, clear my head, and sleep soundly knowing that the events of the day have been recorded and analyzed (in a non-electronic medium). Might help with penning my memoirs down the line, too. Journal-keeping rather sounds like a constructive habit to cultivate.
Apart from that, there's not much news. After China, I don't have definite travel plans. I'm still considering doing a working holiday in Australia in January and February of 2014, but that might have to change if Miss H and I are going home early.
Speaking of 2014, the World Cup qualifiers have begun. I was in a bottled-beer bar with a couple of coworkers last Tuesday and the Korea-Croatia game was on. I didn't stick around to see the whole thing, but apparently Korea lost 2-0. The national team has a rookie coach this year and this loss has made it warm for him. Korea will play Mali and Brazil in the coming weeks and they'd better put on a good show, or they might not qualify for the Cup. Golly, I'd hate to see what'll happen to that coach if that happens.
Alright, it's time for me to run. Miss H and I are meeting our friends Josh and JB (my coworker and his North Korean wife) for a double-date today: coffee, the Paul Gauguin exhibit at the Seoul Museum of Art, and samgyeopsal for dinner.
What's samgyeopsal, you ask?
Barbecued pork belly—strips of thick, streaky bacon fried Korean-style and eaten with lettuce leaves and ssamjang (meat sauce). Very fatty, very delicious and very popular among the locals.
So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair on the back porch, a gin gimlet in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I was in a play?
It was 1992. I was six, and in first grade. I had been tapped to perform in Oakview Elementary's Thanksgiving play. And get this: for some mysterious reason, I was picked to play an Indian.
This wasn't the most politically correct play, either. In the early 90s, political correctness hadn't evolved beyond an amorphous invertebrate thrashing its way around a primordial soup of bull-squeeze. Be it otherwise, the ACLU would've been on this play like white on rice. I don't remember much of it, unfortunately. I don't think I had any lines. My memory of the affair is almost completely gone. Most of what I know I gleaned from the videotape.
Yes, Mom rented a camcorder and taped the whole affair. Of course. I can't hardly stand to watch it, even now. It mostly consists of me, my costars and I, wearing brightly colored headbands with feathers stuck in them, dancing around in a circle in front of 300 people, kicking our legs up, flailing our hands around, and singing in little-kid voices. "Hiya, hiya ah hiya hi-ya-ya-ya Hiya, hiya ah hiya hi-ya-ya-ya!"
You honestly can't blame me for mentally suppressing this, can you?
I didn't win an Academy Award for my performance. Before and after the big dance number, my costars and I just sat around looking complacent, grinning like woodchucks and waving to our mothers. I highly doubt that Squanto would've recognized us. Even the Pilgrims would've laughed themselves sick. If there were any history teachers in the audience, I didn't see 'em. They probably excused themselves before the intermission.
That's the only play I've ever been in. I have since become afflicted with chronic stage-fright, which still hasn't wholly deserted me. Class presentations scared me stiff; standing in front of more than three people was torture; I died a thousand deaths before every piano recital. The only thing that didn't scare me was reading aloud. That's because I knew I did it a million times better than anybody else in class. It's called "inflection," people. You may have heard of it.
Since I've tagged this post with a "humor" label, I shall leave you with a joke. I went over to my buddy John's house one afternoon a while ago. His father was busy doing some landscaping. John objected to this. Why? John's father had removed a bush from the side of the driveway. John claimed that this bush provided him with a landmark vital to the act of reversing his car out of the driveway. John's father was nonplussed.
"You know," he said, "they have these things called mirrors."
"Yeah," I agreed, "you might wanna look into 'em."
Next up: a long-overdue book review. Stay tuned.
Right, folks! I think it's time I got down to business and started reviewing season-themed cocktails for you. We're a bit late in the year for fruity drinks like the zombie and bebidas frescas like the martini. I gave you a Halloween sort of deal with the Dark and Spooky; now let's move on to Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Actually, I have a marvelous libation in mind for Yuletide, but I'll get to that later.
And so! In the midst of this season of harvesting, cooking, baking, eating, imbibing, and everything else having to do with saliva, I give you a cocktail you'll be thankful for. It's best sipped in a house smelling of pumpkin spice or apple butter, possibly even turkey grease. It's called the "tower topper."
1½ ounces Canadian whisky
½ ounces Grand Marnier
½ ounces light cream
In a shaker half-filled with ice cubes, combine all the ingredients. Shake well and strain into a cocktail glass.
I won't lie. The first time I ran across this recipe in The Bartender's Bible, my nose involuntarily wrinkled up.
Yerk, I thought. Who's going to want to try that?
Fortunately, a complete lack of Grand Marnier made the issue a moot point.
I've been on a whiskey kick lately, as I think I've mentioned. So when I paged through the Bible last evening and encountered this drink once more (with a half-full bottle of Grand Marnier in the drinks cabinet), I was given pause.
...for about two seconds. I mixed it up (using milk instead of cream, which we didn't have) and sampled it.
You'll have to decide for yourself what this drink tastes like. The flavor is highly subjective, and could potentially be the topic of much debate. I was, however, forcibly reminded of cooking as I imbibed. To me, this stuff tastes like a kitchen full of people cooking Thanksgiving dinner. The tower topper has a holiday feel to it, probably lent by the softness of the milk (cream), the spice of the liqueur, and the warmth of the whisky.
Try it, it's good. Have one handy when you're basting the turkey. And make it a double, it'll last longer.
