The Rain in Kore-a Falls Mainly on Me-a

The delay in updating my blog cannot be attributed to a dearth of blogable anecdotes, but rather to the ever-increasing viscosity of my creative juices and the simultaneous narrowing of the cranial corridors through which said juices must travel before reaching my cerebral cortex. Doctors call it xerostomia. Like starting a kelp forest fire, the hardest part about blogging is creating the first spark and I finally had a spark moment on Wednesday as I swam to work through the flooded streets of Gangnam.

Seoul was inundated with a record amount of rain on Wednesday and Thursday. Four hundred millimeters* of heaven’s finest water grenades pounded the head, shoulders, knees and toes of anyone crazy enough to venture outside. Meanwhile, the night sky was full of lightning, with thunder crashing like bowling balls enclosed in a steel locker turning in a cement mixer.

While most humble folk find their inspiration at some point between the shampoo lather and the gurgle/discharge of their morning mouth, my eureka moment came showering down at 7:30am, in the middle of a busy intersection, surrounded by women in heels and men in suits. As I stood ankle-deep in the swirling grey mass of flooded sewage and street grime, I couldn’t help but think, ”This is perfect blog fodder. To the blogmobile!”

So, here we are. May I continue?

By the time I arrived at school, I was the human equivalent of the forgotten pair of underwear left drenched and sticking to the top of the washing machine; a perfect target for a mildew soiree. Every step I took released a bubbling stream of water from within the confines of my foot aquariums, and when I managed to extract my feet from their pickling jars, I was able to pour out enough water to keep a goldfish content for a week. Left shoeless and sockless (I brought an extra pair of socks, but they also became saturated with angel tears), I was left with no choice but to spend the day barefoot. Given that this was the first day of our second semester, I had to command immediate respect in the classroom. “I will be barefoot today. If you have a problem with that, go outside.”

And that’s how the West was won.

During the last few weeks, I moved to the expat/American military/tourist-heavy Itaewon and have been preoccupied with teaching Korean high schoolers the beauty of the SAT critical writing section. Their progress gives me great satisfaction, or as the Germans call it, Schadenfreude. In my free time, I maintain a modest schedule of gallivanting around town. The following are a few tales from the gallivant.

Transformers 3: in 4D

Seoul is home to one of the world’s only 4D movie theaters. Contrary to popular belief, the fourth dimension is not time, but rather, moving seats. Not only did we experience the wonder of 3-D, but we also rode along with the film, tilting and turning as the robotcarpeople flew through the air. We felt blasts of wind as Transformers shot missiles through the Willis Tower and as humans jumped out of airplanes seeking to save humanity with their ability to manipulate the emotions of extra terrestrial machines. My favorite 4D moments were when characters spat on each other, and we, too, felt the flying spit hit us in the face. Another notable 4D feature were the knobs which would protrude from our seat and whack us in the back and buttocks as Shia LaBeouf was tossed around like a hamster in a NASA wind tunnel. I can’t wait until the day when 4D makes its way into the home television market and you will actually be able to feel LeBron James smack you in the face with a burning wad of $100 bills.

Dongdaemun Pet Market

Cori and I met up with some of the other teachers at the Dongdaemun Market. Aside from getting lost for an hour in the sweltering heat, which necessitated the climbing up and down of multiple flights of stairs in and out of the subway station over and over again left and right side to side not that I am bitter or mind the extra exercise but it was sweltering weather for the love of dehydration, it was a great excursion. My favorite part of Dongdaemun was the pet market. Flourescent frogs? Check. Blue crawfish? You’re damn right. Iguanas the size of mature lambs stuffed into toaster-sized cages? You bet your bottom noodle! They had everything. I enjoyed watching a large turtle stare into a tank of fifty tiny turtles. It was an interesting animal parallel of the Willy Wonka-Oompa Loompa relationship. As Van Gough said, “Pictures speak loudly.” Thus, I present you with some loquacious photographs:

Yongsan Electronics Market

The Yongsan Techno^✡ Market is a mall reserved exclusively for technology: Two floors of cameras, a floor of TVs, a floor of computers, a floor of cell phones, and a floor where you can actually throw your money into a toilet bowl shaped like Steve Jobs’ face. It is interesting to note that if you make it past all of the techno-floors, there is a floor of high-end, technologically decked out wedding halls. This is not a joke. I can see it now:

Marjorice stands alone at the altar, waiting, as the guests begin to fidget in their seats with unease. She turns to her father, “I know he’ll come, Daddy. Oh, I know he will.” Her father’s face flushes with the glow of a thousand capillaries detonating as he mutters, “I should’ve killed him when I had the chance. I should. Have. Killed. Him.”  

Meanwhile, four floors below, a tuxedoed man sits with tears in his eyes, surrounded by televisions. He turns to the clerk. “You mean to tell me it alternates between 720p and 1080i automatically?” The clerk’s response flows from his lips with the elegance of a high-definition butterfly on steroids. “Yes, I do.”

One final note. In my last post, I mentioned ordering vegetarian pizzas which came topped with bacon. During one such event, my fellow teacher, Dan, offered to split his blueberry dessert pizza with me. We went half-and-half and the blueberry pizza was pretty good despite the strange black color of the sauce. A few days ago, another fellow teacher, Alex, a native-Korean speaker and reader of all menus foreign, read to me the ingredients of the blueberry pizza:

“This isn’t vegetarian.”

“How?” I inquired violently.

“The sauce is made with squid ink.”

Ah ha. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a third time by making a blueberry pizza (in and of itself an abomination)  with squid ink, I give up.

Until next time,

간장공장 공장장은 강 공장장이고,
된장공장 공장장은 공 공장장이다

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* For those of you playing at home, that’s a third of Seattle’s average annual rainfall.

^✡ Think LCD, not LSD.