on kimchi and james dean's family

just got back from sleeping over at the house of a real live korean family. they live in deokso, just outside the eastern part of seoul. their condo unit is on the 14th floor and they have a good view of the han river. this is the same river that cuts through the southern part of seoul.

the dorm manager in tristan's kosiwon (off-campus dorm) invited tris, me, joan & danial (indonesian chef) to his family's house. i met the dorm manager (we call him james dean, pero panget sha, heh heh) last month, during joan's birthday, when we had a rooftop party at their dorm. actually, i dunno why i got invited. i don't live at their kosiwon, and i had met james dean only once before. joan said i'm sikat (may be translated as either popular/famous, or notorious) at their dorm. from what i gather, i'm like a punchline over there. strange.

anyway, i'm glad i got invited. james dean has a good family, very kind. and his apojee (dad) is funny-hilarious*, even if i could understand only 10% of what he said. james's hyong (older brother) and his family were also there. the two kids were the first korean kids i've actually quasi-spoken to. the girl is 14 (but trendy enough to pass for my 18-year-old students) and thinks danial looks a bit like pee (not what you think! she means that korean singer named rain; rain=pee). his omoni (mom) showed us how to make kimchi.

it turned out tasting quite different from the fermented swill usually found at sikdangs (restaurants) because there's no fermented baby shrimp in the recipe. it tasted fresh and light, not fishy at all. the downside for me was the inclusion of white sugar and MSG. (had a migraine minutes after dinner.) apparently, there are thousands of different recipes for kimchi, using a mix of veggies. the different regions, towns, even families have their own timpla. at lunch and dinner, there were at least 6 different kinds of kimchi on the table.

one thing i didn't really enjoy was sleeping on the floor. the western-style chimde (bed), cheksang (table) and euyja (chair) were introduced here only in the past few decades. so koreans really love their floors; they can do everything pretty much at floor level. (readers with dirty minds: kindly stop giggling) anyway, this cultural peculiarity and historical accident has resulted in my not only having right now a bad cough and cold, but also a very sore back. yay.

* for an ajussi, james dean's dad seems more cosmopolitan than young people in that he's curious about other cultures and encourages actual discourse. he asked, for instance, how we eat in our own countries (whether by chopstick, spoon+fork, or hand). he also asked about this quaint custom he had heard of called siesta, which he does not approve of. traditional hardworking koreans like him say that a person who naps after lunch (and here he mimes shoveling food into his mouth, closes his eyes and snores) is a twiji, a pig/swine.

this midsummer night's not so bad

it's the last friday of the month, and it's all access club night at the hondae district. my buddies (joan, pax, tristan, that geisha boy i like to call damon, and that tyler guy whose real name i forget) and i had been planning this since last month. alas, i was struck down by the flu. so while they're partying and boozing it up, i'm here in my room with a clogged nose and not much else.

but i did have a small measure of fun today, despite this cold and cough and headache. i skipped class again and slept until way past noon. was too weak to do much else. around 2:00 pm, i loaded my laundry into the washer and went out for some real food at hemaru. the new crimson manager noticed my miserable sniffling so she wrote out in korean the name of some cough+cold yak (medicine) for me. i didn't know where the yakkuk (drugstore) was but i found it eventually. nice surprise: the ajussi at the yakkuk gave me the right dosage in english! hooray for the kindness of strangers!

at 5:30 pm, tenzin & i made our way through the rain to the ifls building, where our teachers herded us into classrooms and made us eat a lot of sesame-flavored chapchae noodles, round ttok ricecakes with some sweet liquid inside, something that looks exactly like puto with black sesame and dried jujube on top, foil-wrapped kimbap, battered zucchini, some fried seafood roll of sorts, and chicken. there was also a big pan of watermelon wedges, which i liked. like everything here, they're insanely expensive at 500+ pesos per watermelon. a free dinner is always good.

then we stepped back into the rain and walked to inchon memorial hall to watch a mildly amusing talent show of sorts, with the different levels and classes putting on these performances. our favorite teacher, the kooky kang young ah, joined other eminent phd's onstage who danced in formation wearing huge afro wigs and male drag (suits?). there were also some very good hiphop dancing, as well as what we used to call 'breakdancing' back in grade school.

the highlight for me was this malaysian guy (a famous dancer who also teaches at korea university) who azri said went through some traditional dance. our first sight of him, he was airborne. and he kept leaping and moving like...like blazing white fire. the way he moved and danced, at that speed, leaping and turning with that power and grace, he was several steps beyond merely human. and boneless too. heh heh. super impressive.

but most of the time, especially with the occasional off-key synth pop and some desultory rapping that went on forever, the show was so chemi opsoyo (hellishly boring) that our scarily tall american friend john dewey kept falling asleep. or at least pretended to. mercifully, after a while, the show finally ended.

maybe bad entertainment induces hunger. we ended up at a chicken and beer place across the street from crimson house where the owner kept telling us exactly how to eat our food (e.g., eat the chicken with chopsticks, the fiery tofu-kimchi-tuna combo with chopsticks, the sausages with knives and forks). i like how with john and tenzin, we can have a really good time even with the crappy weather and lukewarm beer, telling vomit stories and whatnot.

tsk. john leaves for tokyo in less than 2 weeks. we gotta throw that boy a party. we'll party like we're in a city of 11 million, party like it's 2006. have no idea what that means, but it'll be great. yes, it will.

NOTA BENE: any mention of beer and ingestion of meat applies only to my companions. which is to say i've been behaving myself, as promised. owing to the fact that i'm still suffering from vestigial flu symptoms, i didn't drink any beer (not even the ones our teachers gave us) tonight. will commence partying maybe next week when i'm all better. hee.

sick as heck

you've been holed up in your tiny room all day, coughing and sniffling and feeling sorry for yourself. you want to indulge in some good old-fashioned weeping but realize that would just aggravate your cold symptoms. it's amazingly easy to to wallow in self-pity if you're down with the flu and everyone you love is 2,600+ kilometers away.

you want to call your dad or the stepmum or your sister or the love of your life but you don't have enough credit on your phone. and you're too weak to get up to eat real food at a real restaurant. when your phone rings, you wonder who it is, and feel half-happy half-disappointed that it's your favorite tibetan asking how you are, and not someone from home. then again, you never really get calls from them so you sniffle some more and tell yourself that the cold is just making your eyes all watery. you do not cry.

you're too dizzy to read pico iyer's erudite reading of kazuo ishiguro's novels. and you don't have the heart to trawl for what the love of your life calls 'free-floating net junk'. and there's nothing good on cable.

oh wait. after some desultory channel-surfing, you see project runway is on. snippy americans emoting on cam and pouting over sewing machines can be very amusing. there is hope on the horizon yet.

dogstrology

trawled the net for junk again and found this. it's astonishingly right-on. it turns out that my scorpio dog is perfectly compatible with scorpio me. and it looks like the love of my life (kitty) gets along famously with the other love of my life (the polymath). yay, happiness all around.

the love of my life. photo by me.

SCORPIO dog (October 23 to November 21): The Scorpio dog is such a terrific creature in every possible way that the word "terrific" can be applied. On the surface the Scorpio dog is a picture of calm, controlled and faithful devotion, devastatingly attractive and highly intelligent. But look closer and you’ll find that lurking underneath is a secret double agent with an agenda very much of its own. These dogs are passionate, secretive, intense, dedicated and competitive.

Famous dog most likely to be a Scorpio: Wiley Coyote.

Compatibility with humans: Aries, Taurus, Cancer, Leo, Libra, Scorpio, and Pisces.

the other love of my life. photo stolen from his blog.

ninja kids, dropping acid & that chinese girl

haven't been blogging lately because my broadband has been very unstable the past week. am now taking a short break from some truly insane translation work.

ever since i posted about that chinese girl, i've received requests for clarification: what exactly had she done to earn my eternal revulsion and disgust? the latest to ask is my favorite uncle who recently emailed me from arizona. am recycling here parts of my reply to him because i have little time to blog these days. here goes:

a lot of people have asked me about that chinese girl's unbelievable remarkable feat. well, simply put, nangulangot siya sa harap namin while we were all talking to each other. not the discreet patago and self-conscious pangungulangot that most people do. instead, i witnessed an absentminded almost-unconscious matter-of-fact out-and-out digging for clams that lasted a full five minutes. efforts applied to both nostrils. but thankfully, one-handed & one-fingered technique lang.

ok sana kung ganun lang, diba? the thing is, we were at an ice cream place that specializes in serving bingsu. it's like halo-halo with softserve ice cream on top, which they serve in a huge communal bowl that's more like a punchbowl than a dessert dish, with long spoons sinking into the slowly melting slush. when i saw what she did, i stopped eating immediately. (actually, i actually felt the vomit rise up the back of my throat.) i was 300% sure i didn't want my dessert flavored with essence of kulangot.

my favorite tito also asked me if i really did experiment with acid (LSD), and didn't i think it was a very unnecessary risk? the following is the rather lame reply i came up with:

i wouldn't really use the word "experiment" there because that would imply a long process of trial and error. it really was just a one-time thing. whatever weirdness i felt that night i think was more from the tapeuy and the nganga, than from the acid. my friend told me that night that it was a particularly weak/old batch, almost a placebo. which on hindsight is a really good thing.

i was younger back then and i know i wouldn't do it now or ever again. but i'm glad i'm not curious about that stuff anymore. at least i can honestly say that i know drugs are pointless. i've tried them, and the experience is neither that great nor that evil to warrant so much interest and attention. it's the stupid and weak-willed people who use them that are dangerous, not the thing itself.

of course it was an unnecessary risk, and i knew it, but i did it anyway. i've done and still do and probably will keep doing a lot of stupid and risky things in the course of my life. i try to keep out of trouble most of the time, but sometimes there are moments when i say 'to hell with consequences!' and just go ahead and try things out. just for the sake of trying things out. but i'm a lot more careful now about what i choose to experience. i will however never claim that i'll always make the right or the smart choices.

as for the ninja kids... that was just shorthand for "preschoolers with the ability to kill, maim, or inflict massive amounts of pain on would-be attackers". they're not really ninjas, but little kids who hold blackbelts in taekwondo. i refer to my cousins josh and gabbie. josh is eight years old now but he got his blackbelt back in 2004, when he was six (six!). my tito proudly informed me that gabbie got hers just last saturday. she is at the moment five (five!) years old, but turns six on august 7th. standing at three feet or thereabouts, she's probably the smallest cutest killing machine in the whole state of arizona.

just like home

photo taken at a jazz bar in the hondae district. the live jazz band refused to play my requests but i still had a great time. it wasn't cerveza negra but it sure tasted like home. taken 07 july 2006.

hell is a 2-day bus ride to nowhere

so we're back at crimson house again, a day early.

yesterday morning saw us leaving crimson at 7.30am weighed down by backpacks for our three-day field trip with our writer friends living in gwangju. we got to the aeogye subway station at 8.30am sharp, as requested by the various organizers kind enough to put this event together. after a long-ish wait outside a convenience store, we saw some young korean writers carrying many many many cartons of beer and soju and loading them onto the waiting bus. after a bit, our friends kris and kit arrived, with three other asian writers (a guy from mongolia and 2 poets from palestine) and their handlers. the weather was mild. and so we set off to kangwon-do, where we were scheduled to stay at a buddhist temple and later at manhae traditional village, named after a buddhist love poet.

and then it started raining really hard. and now, a day later, it's still raining. the sheer agony of what we went through is truly blog-worthy but because i don't want to risk feeling worse than i do now, lemme just give some bullet points:

• my phone kept receiving broadcasts about the weather, all in korean. but i could see numbers like 250mm and some scarily unidentifiable korean verbs attached to han gang, which is the name of the river that cuts through southern seoul.
  
• we got word that there were landslides all over and many roads were impassable. we got off the bus several times on the highway for smokes and roadside toilet breaks (sans toilets) because traffic was at a standstill anyway. after a few hours, the koreans just started firing up their little death sticks inside the airconditioned bus and poor kris had to tie a bandanna a la holdaper around his face because of all the smoke.
  
• it's a 3-day weekend so lots of people were also stuck in traffic en route to holiday high jinks all over the peninsula. i bet every bus on the road had a huge cargo of alcohol and no food. just like us.
• during said toilet breaks, i saw lots of koreanas shivering in the rain with their dinky little handbags, pekpek miniskirts and stilettos. said koreanas also had to, ahem, go by squatting beside the highway in the said weather-inappropriate outfits. wehehe.
• on the bus, i alternately slept, read pico iyer's tropical classical and listened to mp3s on my palm (especially my playlists entitled "uppers", "salon downloads", "about a paul" and "shirley bassey remixed"). got bored after 8 hours of this so i took out my camera and watched the video clip i took the night before of the lovely kanako* at the nurebang singing in a voice fit only for a cartoon character.
• we spent a total of 18+ hours inside a bus stuck in traffic, in the rain, and still ended up back in seoul the next day. however, we did have a pretty good time last night with the korean writers who organized the trip for us. at around 11pm, we got off the bus and into some fleabag motel, the kind where the bedrooms had no beds and the bathrooms had no sinks. only faucets 6 inches above the floor***. we made short work of our busload of alcohol, amidst some forced singing (kris did a bit of "walang hanggang paalam" and i squawked through the beatles' "i will"), fried chicken, dried squid and various makunat na chichirya.
  

lots of other miseries happened but not really appropriate for this blog. some things are best forgotten, washed away by this damned rain. on the bright side, as soon as we arrived in seoul, siege and i took the subway for a good lunch/dinner at our favorite pakistani restaurant in itaewon (aka, the foreigners' ghetto) and looked at books in What the Book? couldn't find the ozick book for my favorite person so chose not to buy anything. so i'm now back at crimson, in my usual comfy state, surrounded by unread books and laundry in various states of filth.

* we all have a crush on her, this sweet japanese girl who lives in room 401. after weeks of plotting and pining, we finally convinced her to join us for some yogurt-flavored soju (like yakult that delivers a kick in the head) and lots of bad singing at a nurebang on chamsari-gil**. so last friday night, jon, siege, tenzin and i brought kanako to our favorite soju place. this favorite night-time ritual now includes puffing on chocolate-flavored cigars so we gave one to kanako, too. she knows very little english, lots of korean and of course, japanese. jon knows no korean, a little japanese, and english. tenzin knows tibetan, hindi, english and urdu. siege & i know english, tagalog and lots of curses in various languages. you can just imagine how much got lost in translation (eg, kanako almost took a bite out of her cigar, thinking it was actually made of chocolate).

** our photographer friend from klti, mr. song in-ook, told me yesterday that chamsari-gil means "real life road". very appropriate, as it is lined with bars and nurebangs and more bars, all for the pickling of generations of korea university student livers.

*** once more, i give in to my inner bigot and make tawa at the idea of korea being a developed country. i maintain that it's a matter of software (ang mga utaw) not being able to catch up with the hardware (ang kanilang hi-tech insfrastructure). tercer mundo pa rin mag-isip ang karamihan dito, basta nakalabas na ng seoul. having just survived a hellish roadtrip that inevitably includes stops at roadside toilets with electric hand dryers but no toilet bowls (only those horrific crusty squat-type abominations), i must ask you to forgive my grousing.

non-required reading

been reading a lot since i arrived in seoul, to fill the hours that sleep refuses to claim, and because i can, finally, without the multifarious distractions that home offers. below is a list of books i've finished reading, excluding the korea lit in english translation that KLTI requires us to read. so, without regard to order or ranking, here they are:

books finished:
1) skyscrapers, celadon and kimchi: a korean notebook by cristina pantoja hidalgo
2) the giving tree by shel silverstein (in korean translation)
3) a user's guide to the millenium by j.g. ballard
4) the global soul by pico iyer
5) video night in kathmandu by pico iyer
6) night by elie weisel
7) the lady and the monk by pico iyer
8) confessions of an ugly stepsister by gregory maguire

books being read:
1) kiss by polly clark
2) the voice at 3:00 am by charles simic
3) sounds, thoughts, feelings by wislawa szymborska

books to be read:
1) take me with you by polly clark
2) sun after dark: flights into the foreign by pico iyer
3) the rarest of the rare by diane ackerman
4) the art of travel by alain de botton
5) cosmicomics by italo calvino
6) dark hours by conchitina cruz
7) tropical classical: essays from several directions by pico iyer
8) the light of belief by bediuzzaman said nursi
9) collected prose: autobiographical writings, true stories, critical essays, prefaces, and collaborations with artists by paul auster

so even without my book acquisition moratorium, i have my work cut out for me. still, this is the kind of work that is very much welcome.

a bit scary

Who Should Paint You: M.C. Escher

Open and raw, you would let your true self show for your portrait. And even if your painting turned out a bit dark, it would be honest.

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

losing sleep again

so it's 3am there now.

in a couple of hours you'll be awake and making that long trip past green fields and into smoggy trafficky metro manila. i feel so empty right now. and maybe a little bit broken somewhere.

i want nothing more than to be home in my own big bed right now, with kitty snuffling and snoring on my pillow. because that would mean i'd only be an hour away from you.

you have no idea how many nights i spent awake in that big bed, just thinking of you: breathing deeply, your skin warm with sleep, in a dark room. and the river somewhere outside.

i remember thinking of the dark water flowing past your house, and despairing that i'll never get the chance to watch you sleep, never get to wake you from the grip of a nightmare and tell you it's all right, i'm here.

but now i'm here. and there seems little else to say or do at the moment besides try to get some sleep.

Hmmn.

You Are Marge Simpson

You're a devoted family member who loves unconditionally. Sometimes, though, you dream about living a wild secret life! You will be remembered for: your good cooking and evading the police Your life philosophy: "You should listen to your heart, and not the voices in your head."

The Simpsons Personality Test

it's aliiiiiiiiive!

yes, my friends, i now have my camera back. took lots of photos today but none of them good enough to post here. sorry. school starts tomorrow. am so not excited about it. but... lemme end on a high note.

tops 3 things i like about today:

1) felt really blessed by sermon in church today.
2) got my camera back.
3) had a good talk with 2 important people in my life.
4) discovered an indian restaurant a block away from crimson house, right beside that lovely bistro/cafe/wine store that plays nina simone & ella on lazy afternoons

okay, so that's four. counting has never been one of my talents.