I traveled up to Seoul again this weekend (so that's 100,000₩ spent on buses in the past two weeks, ugh) in order to take the GRE. But I also took advantage of being in the capital again in order to meet up with friends and eat delicious food!
Din Tai Fung / 鼎泰豐 / 딘타이펑
Did you know that Seoul boasts two branches of the Taiwanese dumpling heaven also known as Din Tai Fung? I didn't either, until I wandered around the Gangnam neighborhood looking for a cafe to work in and saw one of them out of the corner of my eye. Seriously, you cannot imagine how excited I got. I quickly texted Jung Hyun, saying, "Forget that American restaurant you mentioned. Want dumplings?!" Or something along those lines.
Chocolate Kaya toast! (Click to enlarge)
While I waited for my friend to arrive, I studied for a bit at a cute cafe called Ya Kun, part of a Singapore-based chain that specializes in sweet and savory toasts. Strawberry cream tea (?) for 3,300₩ and chocolate kaya toast for 3,800₩. It was good, but maybe a bit pricey. The study atmosphere would have been nicer if folks at the table next to me hadn't been chatting very, very loudly.
Jung Hyun at Din Tai Fung
Anyway, the real culinary goodness started at Din Tai Fung. I've loved this place ever since I went to original restaurant in Taipei. It was small, busy, chaotic, and absolutely delicious. The restaurant wasn't delicious, I mean, but the dumplings were. The chain is supposed to have this fiercely-kept secret recipe for how they make their dumplings so juicy, but I don't know, that might just be good advertising.
Another aspect of the chain is that every restaurant has an "open" kitchen; in the photo at the right, you can see one of the dumpling chefs at work in the background!
Anyway, Jung Hyun and I got two combination platters of dumplings that were 11,000₩ each and some 볶음밥 (bokkeum bap/fried rice); our total bill came to 16,000₩ per person if I remember correctly.
I can only describe the dumplings as being 맛있어요 (delicious)! I tried the shrimp shao mai first, which were good, with really hot juice bursting from the thin shell. The pork dumplings were juicier, though. We also had some 油飯 (glutinous rice) dumplings, which weren't as memorable as the others... kind of dry, actually, in comparison. But overall, it was great; my stomach was full and happy before long.
Dumplings at Din Tai Fung. I'm so happy we found this place!
Jung Hyun and I chatted for a long time about our lives as busy adults with real jobs... what a concept! And after dinner, we went to Starbucks, got sugary not-really-coffees, and walked around the ritzy Gangnam area just to look at the lights and pretty things. All around Seoul, people are getting ready for Christmas!
It's Christmastime at the flower shop in the metro station!
Seeing all the decorations everywhere is really great, but also kind of strange, because Korea doesn't have quite the same connection with Christianity that western nations and cultures do, so Christmas seems, at least to me, to be more overtly commercialized. It's really about getting into the spirit of shopping and buying cute, pretty things that have no basis in anything remotely close to Korean culture. In the United States, of course, every Christmas spawns another round of the "Put the 'Christ' back in Christmas!!!" chorus -- American Christmas is indeed the epitome of the Commerical Christmas -- but there's also the strong religious cohort that tries to keep the roots of the holiday as visible as possible. Here, well, maybe not so much? I have yet to see any nativity scenes, but time will tell.
Okay, tangent aside... after dinner, I went back to the place where I was staying and crammed for a bit, slept, woke up at 8am, spent the morning nervously eating breakfast and cramming more, and then took the GRE. It was not easy. Four hours makes for a long exam and an exhausted Andrew. Then I Skyped with my parents, got lunch with Jake, Fulbright's current Executive Assistant, and hopped on a bus back to Changwon.
All in all, a productive weekend, I suppose. But although it was fun, I think I need to budget myself better. I spend so much money when I go to Seoul, it's alarming. I think I started out on Saturday with over a hundred bucks in my wallet, and I have only one 5,000₩ note left. Also, I'm pooped. I think the upcoming week is going to be tough... while my first-years are still doing their speaking tests, my second-years are turning in their first drafts for their speeches, which means several long nights of correcting papers are in store for me. Sigh... 화이팅!
Woah there, Blogger/Google/Picasa. Apparently I've used up all 1000 megabytes (1GB) of the free storage space that comes with this blogging platform. I've been in Korea for less than five months, and I've already uploaded a gigabyte of photos? Dang.
I'm loathe to pay for extra storage space, though. Hm, what to do now? Link to Facebook photo albums? Delete older photos? Resize all of my pho- NO WAY. So... Dear readers, any suggestions?
I was going to write about the lovely Sunday morning I spent in Hongdae and Myeongdong, two popular neighborhoods in Seoul, with Fulbright buddies as well as a long-time-no-see high school friend. I had photos of mint chocolate lattes and Myeongdong's famous street food. Whatever shall I do now that I can't share them?
...
Well, I can use words, I guess. I stayed with a couchsurfer named Kevin, who is from Switzerland, on Saturday night. My first official couchsurfing experience was great all around, although it was short. I would of course recommend it to anyone itching to travel but either worried about lodging costs, traveling alone, or traveling without an itinerary. I'll definitely look to it when I look for places to during my spring break next year.
On Sunday morning, then, I was about to wander around the Hongdae area by myself, when I ran into Rachel and Andrew M. in the metro station. We decided to get coffee/breakfast together, and Rachel and I tried in vain to find food. Now, Saturday night Hongdae is always a hoppin' neighborhood, unimaginably crowded and just jam-packed with all kinds of restaurants. But Sunday morning Hongdae is like a ghost town. You might call it peaceful, with weak ten-o'-clock sunlight shining through some trees and a pedestrian or two wandering about, but in fact, it was kind of chilling (and chilly). Where was everyone? And more importantly, why were there almost no cafes open? And why was there only one food truck in sight, one that was setting up and not ready for business yet? We tried a hole-in-the-wall place whose sign read that it would be open at 10:30 but failed to do so, which we found out when we almost walked into a chair stuck in the (open) doorway upon which a paper note had been affixed that read (something along the lines of) "Nope! We're actually gonna open at 12:30, sucks for you". Dang, run-on.
Rachel commented that this was the first time Korea had failed her when it came to needing food at any given moment in a day. Despite the previous night's feast, we were ravenous, and finally settled on Homestead Coffee, a sort of Starbucks knockoff that seemed too trendy for my taste, but it was all fine and dandy in the end.
Then my high school friend, Justin, called me up and we embarked on a mission to fill our 배 (pae/stomachs) with as much delicious street food as we could find around Hongdae and Myeongdong, several subway stops away. Eggy bread (1,000₩)? Check. Hotteok (1,000₩)? Check. Gross burnt caramel thing that looked a lot better than it tasted (1,000₩, unfortunately)? Check. Tornado Potato?!?! (2,000₩) CHECK. The problem with the tornado potato, aside from the fact that it is a heart failure-inducing, deep-fried entire potato, is that its twirly deliciousness is so thin that in the frigid air, it goes from piping fresh-from-the-deep-fryer hot to soggy, cold, and sad in mere minutes. Still a treat, though. I wish I could show you the photos.
Oh hey, it works! Facebook-linked photo; you should be able to see it if you're friends with me on FB. En garde, beware the skewer of deep-fried potato! (photo taken by Justin, fellow MSJ Yearbook alum!)
It was fun to hang out with Justin that morning, and all too soon, it was time for me to depart (lest I return to Changwon too late for my own good, as this bus commute takes five hours, one way). And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my weekend in Seoul! In two days I'm going to repeat the trip, only this time not for Thanksgiving and wonderful food, but to take the GRE, which I'm going to fail, no doubt. (Who does worse on practice test number two, after two weeks of cramming? Seriously?) But I'll be sure to do fun things and take good photos, and I'll find a way to put them here soon enough. Ciao!
National Novel Writing Month has arrived once again, and this time, I am determined to conquer it. My previous two tries, one during sophomore year of high school and the other during college, were met with abject failure due to poor scheduling and general time constraints.
I realized during college that I would never have enough time during the month of November to write a novel, what with exams, papers, and life all getting in the way. (This did not stop several of my fellow Swatties from winning NaNoWriMo, however. Just me. Because I'm weak.) So, I decided that I would put the endeavor off until the year after college, when I would presumably not have to write any more papers and be free to write nothing but 50,000 words of fiction and fantasy for thirty days.
But then Fulbright happened, and I now have a full-time job that has me correcting hundreds of really poorly written essays until the wee hours of the morning. And then I signed up to take the GRE on the 25th. So I realized another thing: I still probably can't do NaNoWriMo. At least not on my own.
And then a wonderful thing happened. I teamed up with my friend Sara, who writes a lot, and we hatched a brilliant ploy to win NaNoWriMo together by co-authoring a story about recent college grads figuring out post-graduate life in an unspecified city on the East Coast of the United States. We will write alternating chapters told from different characters' points of view, and they may or may not meet at some point in the story. Not everything is planned out yet (in fact, almost nothing is planned out yet), but it will be interesting to watch the story and characters grow along the way. NaNoWriMo is supposed to be a reckless writing frenzy, anyway, and bringing a friend along for the ride is an awesome choice, in my opinion.
Is it even allowed? I don't know, but that's beside the point. This will be a fun project for November. In fact, I've already started: I had a blast with my first 2,000 words, and I even conjured up a rudimentary plan of the unspecified city. NaNoWriMo will be a good way to fill in random free hours between classes when I don't have to lesson plan. Plus, I'm justifying the time I'll spend on writing as practice for the GRE. Yes, GRE vocab will be sprinkled throughout my writing, like chocolate chips in a loaf of banana bread. Mmm, delicious vocabulary.
If you're doing NaNoWriMo, please let me know! Sara and I will need accountability buddies and friends off of whom to bounce ideas!
The problem boarding wall. Write out your problems, write out advice for others.
A neat portion of Fall Conference that ran continuously throughout last weekend was the problem boarding wall. All of the ETAs were asked to respond to two questions on a folded sheet of paper. On the outside, "What do you wish you knew about teaching?" On the inside, "What is one unresolved fear or worry you have about being in Korea?" Our questions and problems were then posted on a literal wall, and during any free moment we could write an answer on a Post-It to help one another out. As you can tell from the photo, we had a lot of problems.
Anthony, our Program Coordinator and conference MC, tried to lighten the mood a bit by joking about how we should be writing our "deepest, darkest fears" on the insides of our problem boarding sheets. Regardless, I took it seriously. Some things have been weighing on my mind a bit more heavily than I'd like to admit. They're not really fears, to be fair, but simply vague clouds of dissatisfaction. And they don't actually have anything to do with my placement or how life has been for me these few months. It's hard to explain, but I'll try my best.
On my "I wish I knew..." section, I wrote that I wish I knew how to engage the students in my classes who are at a lower level of English than all the rest. I can tell they don't understand sometimes, but what student is willing to raise his hand and ask the teacher (read: announce to the entire class) that they're confused? As a result, they keep quiet and zone out. I wish I knew exactly what my students want or need out of my class, too. Most of them will need English to attend the top science universities, but if they're not aiming that high, or if they fall short of their goal, what then? What's the point of my class? Can I offer them a different motivation? And I wish I knew all of my students' names and their stories. As for this last one, I think I'm getting there. It just takes time and patience.
Those were my teaching questions. My fears, on the other hand, are much more broad and substantial. The first (of two) was a fear that I've already fallen too far behind in my goal to reach basic conversational fluency by the end of the year.
One optimistic stranger wrote to me on a Post-It: "It's really not too late!! Take advantage of winter break and take a class! Ask a co-teacher or faculty member to do a language exchange. Go to a university area -- or ask around -- and find a college student who wants a language exchange. NOT TOO LATE!"
The rational part of me already knows all of these things. It's not that I don't know what I should be doing -- in fact, I am taking a class, sort of. But the worry is an ambiguous projection into the future. The goal I set was not concrete enough, so I won't really know if I've reached it. That is to say, what is "basic conversational fluency", anyway? From one perspective, I've already reached basic conversational fluency, because I can hold a conversation with my host parents completely in Korean about my weekend plans or what I did today. I've also had lots of practice at the Korean class held at the community center. But because I still run into communication problems on occasion, I get frustrated about the simple things that I don't know, and that's why I am doubtful of my progress. In fact, it's pretty irrational, when you think about it.
The second fear I wrote is that I'm having trouble figuring out what to do after year one. Should I renew my grant and stay for one more year? Should I apply to graduate school? If so, in what field? If I don't apply now and I don't renew, should I just go home and become a sad sack?
The Post-It reply I got read, "Sounds cheesy, but where is your heart calling you? I'm going home at the end of the year."
It's not cheesy, Post-It peer. I understand exactly what you mean, and then some. It's the same irrationality that has brought about my lack of confidence in Korean. See, I know that I should be following my heart -- or to put it in spiritual terms, placing my trust in God and trying to discern His will -- but actually doing so is a different matter entirely.
And this is where things get depressing. I have no idea what God wants me to do after my grant year. I'm still trying to determine if coming to Korea in the first place was a part of His will, or if my coming here was really just me running away from something else, like Jonah trying to go to Joppa in order to avoid Nineveh. The analogy isn't perfect, of course. If Korea were truly my Joppa then God would never have actually let me come, and I'm sure Megashark would have leapt out of the Pacific to swallow my plane before I'd arrived.
Joking aside, I'm starting to feel the creeping pressure to get myself a concrete plan. For starters, although I'm fairly comfortable and happy in Korea, I don't want to give off the impression that I'm drifting. Deadlines for graduate school applications are coming up... and I don't even know what I want to study in graduate school. Linguistics? Religion? Education? Should I switch to law? Do a post-bac in medicine? I had so many ideas before graduation but never settled on any of them. I never sat down and considered any of them seriously; now I'm afraid that if I choose one, I'll second-guess the decision and spend the next five to seven years wondering if I should have done something else.
Thus, in the meantime, it's like I'm just stalling for time by teaching during the week and exploring Korea on weekends. Not that teaching is just a meaningless method of killing time -- far from it! I love teaching (see yesterday's post for proof); it's been nothing but a pleasure so far. And anyone would agree that traveling is a neat way to spend a year after college. But like my dad says, I can't do this forever.
And that's the next source of pressure: parents. My future is nowhere near the path that they envisioned for it. I was supposed to go to Berkeley, study medicine, and become a doctor like my two older brothers. Instead, I went to Swarthmore, studied Linguistics (what is Linguistics, anyway?), and didn't even take a single course in organic chemistry. But that was okay, they reasoned, because with my quarter-of-a-million-dollar education, I could do something else just as amazing, right? Right.
Then, I became an English teacher in Korea. Nope, that was definitely not on their radar.
These days, our Skype dates have become a weekly episode of Where in the World is Your Future Headed? and it's just as disappointing for myself to have to answer that I don't have a clue as I feel it must be for them. Dear Swatties, remember The Graduate?
Mr. Braddock: Ben, what are you doing? Benjamin: Well, I would say that I'm just drifting. Here in the pool. Mr. Braddock: Why? Benjamin: Well, it's very comfortable just to drift here. Mr. Braddock: Have you thought about graduate school? Benjamin: No. Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me then what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work? Benjamin: You got me.
Sigh...
Its not all bad, though. I've registered for the GRE; I'll be taking it in late November. I'll study hard so that I only have to take it once, and then the scores will last for five years. That should be enough time to figure out what I want to do. One doesn't decide overnight that they want to commit to years in some graduate program or other. I can still patiently think and pray and discern.
I'm not drifting. It's not that I don't have any plans; I just have many options on the table, and I'm being non-committal. Oh, and you know what? One of my main goals for the Fulbright grant from the very beginning was to see if I had what it takes to be a good teacher. So this is a year of prospective job training, isn't it?
Well, there's a fine line between looking on the bright side of things and sugarcoating the truth.
"Don't settle. You can do better. You're smart, you have a good education. You should aim to be the best in your field. Don't you think your skills are being wasted if you spend more than one year in Korea? Hey Andrew, didn't you once say you wanted to be a doctor, a professor, a missionary? You need to wait for God to tell you what to do -- oh, and also, you need to decide now. Dear Andrew, I hope South Korea's treating you well. What are you planning to do afterward?"
Mr. Braddock: What is it, Ben? Benjamin: I'm just... Mr. Braddock: Worried? Benjamin: Well... Mr. Braddock: About what? Benjamin: I guess about my future.
This evening I had the immense pleasure of seeing Erik-san, who is visiting Korea from our neighbor across the East Sea, Japan. Erik is an Assistant Language Teacher with the JET Program (very much like Fulbright, but based only in Japan), having fallen so much in love with his placement school and town that he has renewed twice. Now in his third year and completely conversant in Japanese (and dressed head-to-toe in Uniqlo), he is very much the model of how I'd like to see myself in, say, 2015.
Erik-san, looking confused at a Dunkin' Donuts... perhaps an awkward consequence of being in the same photo as a suggestive banana cream pastry and two radioactive-looking coffee cups. By the way, that green tea latte was good, but my current gassy state tells me I shouldn't have consumed it...
I haven't thought too much about what I will do when my grant year expires next July. I think renewing my contract for another year would be amazing, especially since I have been having a wonderful time so far and have some personal goals (i.e. learn Korean) that could require an extension of my stay in this country. However, I'm also thinking a bit further ahead at options back home (i.e. graduate school), and I believe a date with the GRE may be fast approaching.
Anyway, this was just one of the few things we caught up on... We also swung by Yongji Lake, one of the few interesting public sights in this city, experienced the terror of Changwon buses in the evening, had pizza and chatted about life in Japan, our shared Altaic languages, homestay life, and much more. When I think about it now, I think it's kind of unusual that we didn't really talk about Swarthmore at all. Usually, when Swatties meet up, all we want to do is talk about Swarthmore and other people in our rather insular community. But perhaps due to our having graduated and looking forward to what's next in life, our college connections simply never came up. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant evening. Thanks for visiting, Erik! 부산국제영화제 즐겁게 보내다!
Other highlights from a nice day: I got nine hours of sleep last night, and when I woke up I felt like I was on top of the world. If only that could happen every morning. Also, two students of mine are planning to take the AP Biology exam (like, whaaat?!). They've asked me to help them prepare for it! This strikes me as slightly insane; still, I agreed. Except it's been about five years since I took the exam. I don't know how much of a help I can be to them... ALSO! My cousin Irene got engaged today! When I found out -- via Facebook while at work, no surprise there -- my jaw literally dropped open, and I wanted to jump up and down. Congratulations to Irene and Dan! And lastly, I just had some great catch-up time on Skype with another friend from Swat. It was great. Great, as in, if you're a friend from home, this is my not-so-subtle way of telling you to set up a Skype date with yours truly!
