Sometimes I think about where I am, where I've been and where I'm from. When people ask me where I'm from,  the standard response has become 'the US.'  The "where are you from" question is complicated enough when I'm in the States. Though I lived in New Mexico longer than any other state, my appearance is cause for people to assume I'm not from there.  It certainly simplifies things to just tell people that I'm from 'the US' and to assume that any further description is unnecessary for anyone who's never been there.  I've become so lazy about the answer, I forget that sometimes I meet people who will know the difference betweeen New Mexico, New England, Texas, Illinois, California, Arizona, and Colorado.  The conversation can be unnessesarily long when I have to explain that I've lived in all of those places. 

And forget trying to explain 'New Mexico,' because so many people will not hear the 'New' part...you're from Mexico?!!!  In San Diego, California someone once asked me just where is New Mexico?   I had to explain that you can find it if you start heading East, pass right through Arizona and stop before Texas, there it is...New Mexico.  I guess he'd never heard of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and didn't know that if we were having this conversation in 1845, all of this territory would still belong to Mexico.   

Though I imagine I'd fare slightly better than the guy in San Diego in The National Geographic Geography Bee, certainly nobody would elect me captain of the team at their school. To make a gross generalization, I'd say most Americans are pretty weak at geography, especially when it comes to looking too far outside of own borders.  On a world map, we can hopefully locate Mexico and Canada...

The past months have been great for my sense of geography. With great shame, I confess that until I became aware of the opportunity to teach English in South Korea, I could not locate it on a map. Much earlier in my life,  the moving to South Korea theme came into play.   When I was in high school, my family once discussed moving to Seoul because my stepfather had a job opportunity there...a few years later a former boyfriend wanted me to move there with him for a job opportunity.  Both times, my response was this:  ewwww South Korea, NO WAY.  My gut reaction wasn’t actually knowing anything about South Korea.  Back then, a year was an eternity and not just a really long day 

 

It's too late now to wonder especially how having moved here during high school and attending an international school would have changed my life.  

Not that I can fit this into my mental scheme because I haven't been to either of the following places but South Korea is the size of Portugal, roughly the same size and population density of the UK.  Something I can grasp in definite terms, the land mass is 1% of that of the United States! North and South Korea combined are the size of the US state of Minnesota.

Coming to South Korea, I sacrificed a year of free standby travel privileges between 63 some US cities.  This will last until July of 2012...maybe in March of 2011 I’ll go back to the States and take advantage of it.  Maybe not.  I already know the geography there, and that when I get at the airport, I'll immediately find several familiar hotel chains, an Applebee's, a Chili's, maybe a TGIF.  Of course, there's always something new to find anywhere,  sometimes it means having to dig through layers of sameness to find it. I guess to all of that I prefer greeting the world with a tabla rasa.

When I started talking about going to South Korea, my friends and family mostly had the same reaction that I did several years ago ewwwww yuck...why?!!!  are you crazy?!?  

Time is passing so quickly. If I didn't like it this much, I never was worried that an entire year was actually a very long time.   Including my time in Guatemala, I've been out of the States for eight of the past twelve months.  

I was a little nervous about taking something out here in the Jeollumbuk-do province.  I'd read about Seoul and Busan but until two month my pit stop in Albuquerque when I had that comforting face to face interview about the position here, could I ever imagine myself somewhere so relatively untouched by Western civilization as where I am now, living in a place where I'm just as surprised to see another foreigner walking down the street as if I were a local.  In particular, during my early Korea research, I was fascinated by Busan.  It's on the coast and seems to have a big enough western population to keep me sane...enough people to be able to communicate without an enormous strain.

 

And here I am in the rice basket of South Korea...except for a barely perceptable sprinkling of other westerners this place is as homogenously Korean as it gets. Given my prior nearly nonexistant knowledge of Korean culture, it seems like the adjustment should have been more difficult.  I was nervous about the visit to Busan, that suddenly I would begin to despise my new hometown. Busan struck me as a somewhat uglier sibling of San Francisco.  Nevertheless, my Chicago area roots were as charmed as they usually are by most any waterfront city.  After a weekend of little sleep, on the bus ride back to my province, I tried to brush off my pangs of regret. For some reason, I'm here in what's known as the 'Spiritual Capital of the Josen Dynasty.'  After all, if I were in Busan I'd perhaps be behaving like a complete heathen.  

I have a friend who puts my relative isolation in perspective...He lives in a very traditional village of 3,500.  Without knowing any better, I don't think I could have committed to a years worth of that situation.  Though it sounds like it has the potential to be miserable....the four months of vacation, the two bedroom apartment, and the somewhat higher pay for less hours make it sound worthwhile.  I hesitated to apply with the EPIK program due to the unknown element involved in the placement.  As unfathonable as this sounded to me before, the relative isolation is during the workweek and then there is a luxury bus to anywhere.  There is a lot to see in this teeny tiny little country,  I try to think about this instead of the four months of vacation that I don't have to fill my passport.  I'm not on the coast here, but I'm really only an hour inland.  I only wish I had more time to see the things I want to see.  

After my last class is over at 8 pm on Friday night, in reality I can get on a bus and make it to Seoul or Busan after midnight..and then cram in every possible experience.  While my contract states that I have 7 days of vacation, what it does not mention is that these days are not allocated entirely in conjunction with one another or a long weekend.  This year, I will not have seven days in row available to jet off to Thailand or the Phillipines, at least not until the end of my contract.   

What I know now, is that the only way to really know what you’re getting into when you decide to take any position in any location in South Korea, is by knowing somebody who’s already working there; to have connections.  This isn’t always possible, leaving the rest to chance. I suppose, for some reason I find myself here in the Jeollumbuk-do province instead of somewhere else.  I think of it as a working meditation.  

 

And here I am, living in another city surrounded by mountains and like Albuquerque, the only body of water is a dirty river.  My Korean city feels like a bigger city than Albuquerque only due to the population density, but 200,000 less people actually live here.  There was a time when I wouldn't imagine I would choose a Korean city based on it's similarities to Albuquerque.  Or that one day I'd actually miss those all too familiar nooks and crannies, or the crazy street people with nicknames like Mad Scientist and Green Blanket Lady, or the people I'd see for years at the grocery store known as the 'Ghetto Smiths' but never said a word to.  I miss the graffiti under the bridges.  I miss New Mexican styled Mexican food, I miss red chile, I miss green chile,  I miss the hour flight to San Diego, the beach, and Baja style seafood.  I miss geeks, freaks, emos, punks, goths, skaters, and maybe I even miss the junkies and crackheads a little or at least the great panorama of humanity that one could observe when seated near the window at the Frontier restaurant.  I could sit there for three hours, reading and writing, drinking iced or hot tea and staring out the window.  I miss tortillas, beans, huevos rancheros....

 

On a single handle can count the panhandlers I’ve encountered in South Korea.  I have not spotted even a single abandoned hypodermic needle in the gutter. If there are any gangs in South Korea, the members dress in pink golf shirts with the collers popped.....

Antigua, Guatemala was smaller than Albuquerque or my city here in Korea but had a higher concentration of choices international cuisine (still no breakfast burritos, or huevos rancheros).  I miss the international randomness of Antigua, the mix of locals and foreigners.  And of Albuquerque, I just miss the random.  On the upside, I'm otherwise avoiding the random violence of either of those places.  The biggest threat from my daily life now comes in the form of taxi drivers.

After I got off the plane at La Aurora airport and realized that I wasn’t going to be gunned down before leaving the airport. Guatmala felt deceptively like home.  In Albuquerque, I owned a house in  400 year old Mexican neighborhood, so the fact that I was in a different country where everybody spoke Spanish was not a big deal.  The Mara Salvatrucha (otherwise known as MS-13) factor didn't bother me, we had them in my neighborhood too.  The likelihood of being a victim of random violence on the street felt about the same. If my time came up in Guatemala, I imagined it would be on a speeding chicken bus that swerved into oncoming traffic when it tried to pass the family of four on the motorcycle.  

Spanish colonization of what is now the Southwestern United States...really no different than the colonization of Central or South America. Though the outcomes of that scenario are various, they are interrelated but too heavy and complex to get into right now.  I bring it up now as I ponder the surprising food I encountered in Guatemalan homes, including lo mein noodles wrapped in tortillas. 

Mexican food isn’t Guatemalan food but is easily available in Guatemala, for that matter I ate in a Korean restaurant in Guatemala.  The reverse won’t happen here, though possibly in Seoul.

There's no free ice tea refills in Guatemala nor unlimited baskets of chips and salsa; not sure but I doubt there's free kimche refills anywhere outside of South Korea 

 

My entire life, I’ve generally been surrounded by diverse people.  Here in Korea, though I wouldn’t say I’m homesick, mostly I think I just miss cultural and culinary variations.  What would be much, much worse, a complete nightmare would be living in middle America somewhere, where everyone lived in an identical tract house and looked too much like me.  

Whether in Albuquerque or Antigua, I miss having friends to speak Spanish with everyday.   I miss the international flavors of Guatemalan cable tv with everything Spanish, some Italian, French, and the random Korean soap operas.  I'd kill for a telenovela from Telemundo, a badly dubbed American movie in Spanish, or even better something with mummies and masked wrestlers, perhaps La Mansión de Siete Momias.

I’m now moving into the second quarter of my year in South Korea, rapidly moving towards the halfway point.  Though I definitely won’t sign another contract at the same hagwon next year, teaching in South Korea another year isn’t entirely out of the question.  Living another year in a place so traditionally Korean and untouched by Western Civilization as Jeollombuk-do, might be more easily fathomable if it weren’t for not enough vacation time and too many teaching hours. I’d rather have more time to spend traveling inside and outside This experience is like celebrating Lent, giving up Western Civilization for an entire year (except on the weekends).   And I guess I won’t lie, as much as I actually like many Korean foods I’d like to eat other food once in a while..within the course of a regular week.  

• South Korea
• food
• Hagwon
• Guatemala
• cultural contrasts