When In Seoul...

Yesterday I was complimented on my "Pre-Raphaelite" hair. I just found a mousse that doesn't leave me feeling like a wilted houseplant, so I guess that's a good thing.

I did a big scary thing last night, and went to this open mic/art event at an expatty cafe a good hour and a half away from my area by subway, And I went all by myself. I will never know if the experience would have been intolerable if I had had to walk in on my own, because right as I entered I was adopted by a group who were also trying to find the place. We got our own table and chattered over coffee. The one girl my age and I absorbed words of wisdom and jadedness from the poet/drama teacher/textbook writer and her charmingly-accented French partner (who bought me un chocolat!). Afterward I trekked to Itaewon where the girls were beering and watching the Liverpool game. It was a good night.

Today I bit the bullet and donned heels, even though I knew I'd be walking all day with my 5 pound laptop on my back. Korea is turning me into a classy dresser. Well, it's already provided me with the figure to be able to dress that way, I might as well enjoy it while it's here. A white turtleneck dress, black leggings, glitzy earring, high heeled boots...what have I become? And the makeup! At first it was just for nights out, then it expanded into low-key bar night, now I've caught myself smudging eyeliner and brushing mascara for shopping and coffee-shopping on at least 3 different occasions.

In other news, book buying has once again joined the ranks of life's great pleasures. Since devouring the last three books I bought at Itaewon's fabulous What the Book? I've been itching to go back for more. This new batch consists of The Historian (it got a Hopwood - I feel as though we're family), The Witch of Portobello, and - a last minute grab I'm really excited about - Breakfast At Tiffany's. I am a book dork, what can I say? I lost it somewhere in the mire of undergraduate procrastination. I'm glad it's back.

And I found feta cheese today! Real, cardboard-box blocks of feta! And pita bread! Nutella! Maple syrup! God bless Itaewon and its sleazy foreign food markets.

A Food Entry

The new Vietnamese place that opened up right across the street from the ritzy cafe that has become my nightly haunt (if only because they have internet access) has just confirmed itself as a "place people may eat alone at." Those kind of restaurants are something of a rarity in this city.

Eating seems to be a big thing. Most restaurants seat on on cushions on the floor at a long table. Your food is brought out raw and cooked right in front of you. Each table has a crater of sorts cut out of the middle. A guy in an apron and heavy duty gloves brings a bucket full of red-hot coal and lays them carefully inside. They slide a grate over it and (since you're a foreigner who obviously has no idea what to do next) they lay everything out on the grate for you. While it cooks you pick at the side dishes. And there are hundreds of them. Well, maybe not hundreds. There's usually a plate of lettuces and leaves (especially if you're grilling meat, you can make lettuce wraps), some kind of pickled radish, and at LEAST 3 kinds of kimchi. They also like raw garlic and hot sauce. Mostly want I'm recounting is our last Korean meal of galbi - marinated pork. But my chicken soup meal with Tack Youn was presented in much the same way (except for the fact that we sat on chairs), and so was my distant-memory bi bim bap lunch with Nam Hee.

Going to Korean restaurants is slightly terrifying. Nothing is in English, we never know what we're ordering. I tend to only return to places I've been to with a Korean. Besides, these restaurants are all group-oriented. There is SO much food. I find I lose my appetite rather quickly when I eat Korean. This is necessarily because I eat my fill; there's something about the consistency of taste present in the main dish and the side dishes. My mouth tires of eating the same thing for so long. I'm not yet used to the taste of this country.

The good thing is that I still adore school lunches. There I am in control of the portions and there is a wide variety of food: always rice and soup (veggie broth, kimchi broth, or pungent miso - my favorite is the seaweed soup), some kind of mild kiddie-kimchi, and then 3 or 4 wildcards. I don't know the proper names for any of this stuff, but I'm a huge fan of something I believe to be strips of dried fish-something. It's really, really chewy and has a nice sweetness to it. I also love the tiny little boiled eggs soaked in soy sauce.

Anyway, back to the Vietnamese place. It's one more restaurant I now feel comfortable going to alone. And, of course, it's a noodle place. Like the Korean noodle place a few blocks away from it where I've been a few times, and the dearly-beloved but positively mediocre Japanese place right around the corner from our apartment where I get noodle soup dirt cheap.

When you come visit I promise I'll try to stick to the authentic Korean places. One of these days I might even manage to get to one of those restaurants with the live fish tanks outside. Won't that be fun?

Culture Burnout

My last visit to the Newey house was pretty subdued. I remember sitting on the couch, staring blankly. By then everything was numb. I couldn't comprehend the vastness of what was about to happen. I may never see some of these people again. And there was a plane leaving to Korea in a matter of hours (24? 36? 12? I can't remember anymore).

Andrew disappeared upstairs and brought down a book on teaching English in foreign countries. He said there was a good section on dealing with culture burnout. Of course, I had to ask him what that was, as so often happens with Andrew and I. And he described this. This ditch I've slid down into over the past week and a half.

It sucks, plain and simple. It confuses me. I don't know what it is, but I've been miserable. It's my windowless room eating away at my soul, it's my smoldering fury at my boss and the immature little reactions I shoot at him when he addresses me that I regret instantly but can't control because I so blindly hate him. It's the relentless, unforgiving conveyor belt of thoughts about Evan that simply will not let my mind relax. The emotionally draining arguments. We have never fought like that before. I can't bring myself to turn on Skype's video to see him, so I type. Let me tell you, typed screaming profanities are just as exhausting as real screams.

It was the first time I screamed at him and he couldn't even hear me.

I am tired. Tired of the shiny black heads in my classroom. Tired of the apartment that I've focused so much of my angst on. Tired of seeing people having fun with their friends. Tired of all the PDA everywhere I look how am I always finding myself next to an even more adorable couple on the subway?

If I can't have it no one should.

I'm tired of people walking on the left when they're supposed to be walking o the right, tired of cars making illegal maneuvers on tiny streets that stop me as I'm walking because they don't use turn indicators to indicate which was they are turning. I'm tired of seeing that damn squid humping the corner of the glass tank on the corner. I'm tired of waking up and feeling the world crash down on me just because I can't see the sky. I'm tired of holding back because I don't feel close enough to anyone here to unleash the full extent of Adri-caught-up-in-her-own-head.

I am tired of wanting to go home. And I'm tired of that leading to a flowchart of chaotically categorized, well-worn thoughts about the how and the why and the what ifs. Do I really want to leave what would I do where would I go who would I resent what would I regret what's the point of being here what am I learning am I really unhappy or is this just a phase?

Someone make this decision for me, please.

My Brat

4 years ago I was given an assignment to write about a family member in my Freshman seminar on the personal essay. I wrote about my little brother, structuring the piece around the middle school play I had helped manage that starred him as the courageous owner of a diner leading the battle against Mongo the space alien. I titled it "My Brat" (brat being the Polish word for brother), and to this day it's one of my favorite pieces.

2 months ago I implemented my first personal touch to my class curriculum. We have these Challenge sentences the kids have to memorize every night, just some 10-word blah I make up off the top of my head every morning. It's a silly thing but its the backbone of our curriculum and also takes up an entire class period every morning, so I don't complain. But it did seem like a pretty useless endeavor to have these kids commit a sentence to memory and forget it as soon as they've written in down during the morning test. So I started making up short stories - 8 sentences, 10 words per sentence give or take - that I could feed the kids one sentence at a time, that they could write down, illustrate, craft a cover for and presto! every month each kid gets to author their very own book.

And the first story I wrote? A little ditty about the "Running Boy." A boy likes to run, but he gets sad when he has to stop running due to the obstacles appear in his path (you know, trees, walls and the like). So one day he decides to jump over a wall and once he realizes obstacles can be used in his running, he can be happy ever after. Sound familiar? I just introduced my 6-year olds to the watered-down, ESL version of parkour.

I don't talk to Tristan very often, and I don't really know very much about what's going on in his life. But he pops up in my life in unexpected ways even all the way over in Michigan, or Korea. He's pretty awesome, my brother. I think that has a lot to do with it. He's a role model, and I'm not just using that in the general sense. It might seem a little silly that I, the eldest and 5 years his senior, aspire to be like him. But I must say that whatever meager little footpath I shuffled out for my siblings he blazed right over, expanding, paving, developing, and just to top it all off, polishing until it shone. Oh the Rewalds, each one better than the last.

Happy birthday, Tristan. I am so crazy proud of you. Ja cie kocham!