This just in -- I went to a Korean pop concert last night (my host mom got me free tickets!), and apparently I made it onto the televised coverage ! I guess I stand out in a crowd of screaming/rapturously crying Korean schoolgirls with camera phones. ;)

A little bit about my trip with the kiddies today on their picnic day – sat squashed between two first grade boys and listened to some Beatles on the way up until I felt a little sick. Promised my new Beatles friend that I’d make him a CD next week. Made an awesome t-shirt with two tangerines that said :Jeju-lovin’" :) Got some pictures and some smiles from my happy happy kids, stole some kimbap with some of the other teachers from the students – the teachers just go around snatching and grinning from all the kids’ lunches, it’s great (if not slightly unfair heheh). Explored Micheon Cave, which according to my teacher friend from the 1st grade, is "a very small cave" – I was expecting a little hole, but it was about the size of maybe 2 of my middle schools! The most interesting part was definitely the hal-mo-nee (grandmother) figure, which looked exactly like a Buddha figure with slightly different dress. Apparently prospective mothers come here and pray in front of a blue or red candle for a boy or girl, respectively. It’s part of the pre-Buddhist shamanistic religion here – it’s fascinating, and I know I’ve only just struck the surface ...

Yesterday, I ALMOST lost my faith in tea. ;)

Went with my homestay brother and sister to the International Tea Festival at the Convention Center here on Jeju. I'm really starting to appreciate that place, they bring in so much great stuff all the time. We got to the tea festival though ... and I really felt the language barrier. All sorts of tables were set up with beatiful tea sets, but I couldn't ask any questions - my host bro/sis couldn't really tell me any more than ... "over there, Chinese tea. Here, Korean tea." Sat down for a tea ceremony and ... okay, I'm not going to pretend to like it. I've never had a taste for the formality and mindnumbing sloth-litude of the Korean tea ceremony. I counted at least five people in the audience actually who fell asleep. Just as I was about to join them, my host mother came up from having finished her work downstairs in the bakery, and snuck us backstage! I swear, my host family knows everyone there is to know on this island. We got to taste a Taiwanese mountain green tea, grown with flowers, and an Indian black tea with cloves and milk. By the time we finished with those (delicious!), they had prepared teas in the lobby and I tasted Korean winter, spring, summer, and fall teas. I've never had a delicate enough pallette when it comes to distinguishing between different types of tea within the same general group, like green teas ... but after tasting each one, I could finally detect some subtleties! I'm developing that snobbery I so crave! :) (am i kidding??) ;) So anyway, the moral of this story is - host mothers are awesome. It's all about who ya know.

Today I went on a little ride on my scooter, a trip to find the "five days market" I've heard so much about. Every five days, the market apparently stays open all day. I caught the very end of it, and it was amazing!! A lot bigger than I expected. It reminded me of the English Market in Cork (awww Cork, how I miss you...) , and the market we found when touring Barcelona. This one wasn't just produce, though that dominated - there were a lot of clothes, from jeans to ajjima track pants to addoshi flannel shirts to hats and bras and underwear. I even found some parakeets. :) Went home with some tasty banana chips and a smile.

I love my students.

So during lunch I created a little program at my school called "English Lunchtime". At the beginning of the semester students signed up to eat lunch and talk with me. Today I had lunch today with my first group of boy students, I guess my coteacher put all the guy students in the rotation towards the end. I thought middle school girls were fun, but oh no. :) They were doing their best E.T. impressions (for some reason all my students are obsessed with E.T. (the extra-terrestrial), making funny faces, whispering to me confidentially (teacher, buy me ice cream!) and lamenting their lack girlfriends (teacher, girlfriendee no!). One of the boys was a little chubby but definitely the most cheerful of them all, happily telling me that he is having a baby, actually two babies a boy and a girl, twins. He also told me about his ghost girlfriend Dong Su who then started assaulting the boys around the table (they love beating themselves up). :)
Tomorrow I'm going to the PC-bang (internet gaming cafe) with these guys, they're going to trounce me in Starcraft. For those of you who don't know, Starcraft is nearly the official game of Korea, with national leagues, its own TV station dedicated to Starcraft strategy, and expert players whose popularity borders on celebrity. Needless to say, I don't stand a chance. :)

In other news ... I bought a scooter!! I'd been thinking about it for a while and I finally made the plunge. It's only 50cc so I don't need an international license, and the bike only cost me the equivalent of US$350, and I can sell it back for US$200 at the end of the year ... net cost to me - US$150! It was a (wink) steal! Love it to death already, took it for a ride last night down to the beach under the full moon and watched some lonely fishermen on one of Jeju-do's dramatic cliffs. Picutres of scooter soon. Don't worry Mom, I'll be careful. ;)

Buddhism and Expectations

So, I've being interviewed by the Franklin Country Gazette, my hometown newspaper, and the reporter emailed me a bunch of questions which I answered early this morning. One of them was "What were your expectations going into this and have they changed?" I started to write something loftly about trying not to have any expectations, living right here in the moment all the time by the seat of my pants, immersing myself in the experience, that sort of thing, but a couple sentences in I realized it was absolute crap. It bothered me so much that I actually deleted the question entirely from my response (hope she didn't notice!). But it's stuck with me. I visited Yakcheonsa Temple this afternoon and the question was still bouncing around in my head. This post is an attempt, I guess, to answer that question.

The truth is I had a LOT of expectations coming to Korea. We all did, each one of us Fulbright ETAs and also the hagwon (English academy) teachers - everyone who picked up and left their homes and everything familiar to come halfway across and do something most had absolutely no experience doing - teaching English to non-English speakers. It takes a certain type of person to do something like that, but I think it also takes a certain amount of faith that somewhere in Korea you will find what you're looking for, something that wasn't just around the corner (but maybe was all along - that enigmatic "search for the self"). Anyhow, for me it was a little different, I'd been studying Buddhism and Zen from books for years and I thought it was time I experienced it directly, in its cultural context and in all its native glory. I fully admit to being caught up in a romantic image of "The East" - captured in self-help meditation and New Age books, movies like The Matrix, and permeating almost every area of pop culture. I guess I came out here to find out how much of that is true.

The truth is, I've found more inspiration in a little book I read my senior year while I wrote my thesis than I've found in all the Buddhist temples I've visited here. This is not necessarily a bad thing - I guess I'm just recognizing what my expectations were, and reconciling myself with the fact that I'm a little surprised with what I found. Temple tourism here is similar to cathedral tourism in Europe. I suppose if I were a devout Catholic I might be a little upset by the camera flashes while I tried to pray in the pews of an ancient seat of my religion. Every temple I've gone to here, with the exception of Dea Heung Sa in Mokpo (I'll be posting a little bit about that one later this weekend), has been little more than a tourist zoo. What did I expect? A set of misty stone steps that I might ascend barefoot, to be greeted by a shining-eyed old monk who would hand me a bowl of rice and then teach me how to be the next Batman? Deep down, I think I hoped for something like that. At the very least, I hoped to find the same sort of energy and passion that I read about in books by the Dalai Lama, Thich Nat Hanh, and some of the short works we read in my Engaged Buddhism class back at Wheaton. Whenever I've approached monks (even with a translator) or Buddhist laity here, they can give me no answers about Buddhist ethics. As the pictures below show, there are some beautiful gardens in front of Yakcheonsa, but my repeated efforts to indicate I'd like to help out with the temple community and lend my labor have been met with puzzled stares.

I've always known that there are different types of Buddhism in the world, and I think I'm seeing that more clearly now. The Engaged Buddhism I read about is prevalent in Southeast Asia, and things are much different here, in a highly Christianized and mostly Confucian society. Buddhism is just one small part of the social picture. I'm currently in contact with a professor from Maryland and his research grantees that volunteered at a Engaged Buddhist sustainable community this past summer - I'm 90% I'll end up there for a few weeks this winter. :) But I'm not in Thailand right now, I'm in Korea.

At the same time, I feel like I'm getting half the picture here. As I sat and inwardly grimaced at the tourists, I watched young mothers and their children, older women in visors and baggy Jeju pants, and men in full business suits silently take off their shoes and do bow after bow in front of the Buddhas. I watched a little boy not more than 4 make a very formal bow in front of the temple and then run grinning back to his mom. It's times like this that I feel the language barrier the most strongly (although I did hear the mother say "Cha-de-sa-yo" - good job! to the beaming kid). There's something here I'm missing, there's a Buddhist culture here that I don't understand. And I think with the right attitude, that mystery, that challenge, is more than enough get me excited again about Korean Buddhism. :)

Fields of a beautiful white flower, possibly an Herb or Vegetable, growing in front of the temple. This is the kind of informative narrative you can expect when I venture into non-English speaking areas alone. ;) 

Gardens in front of Yakcheonsa temple, I guess they do have some Buddhist farming on this island! 

Medicinal holy water, from the fish's mouth at Yakcheonsa. 

The view of the sea from Yakcheonsa. If you look REAALLY close, you can see Indonesia out there. ;) 

The river and the sea 

The river, spilling into the sea. 

I found a secret cache of haenya (women diver) nets and equipment next to the river and the sea ... I totally felt like I was in a video game and I just found an Important Item! 

I realized that although I've been here a few months, I've never once wrote extensively about Korean, food, although it is one of the most enjoyable parts of living on this side of the world. Sooooo ... here ya go. :) As you probably know, rice is the main dish at every meal, in fact the phrase "pap mogassoyo?" or "did you eat?" literally means "did you eat rice?" Koreans like to wrap meat in leaves, that's what the traditional "Korean barbeque" restaurants in the States usually focus on, and it certainly is delicious. They cook it right at the table for you, and you wrap it with lettuce, sesame leaves, or cabbage (very healthy!) But here in Jeju we get a lot of raw fish, which we dip in go-to-jawn (spicy red pepper sauce). Kimchi is the most important vegetable dish, it's pickled cabbage in go-to-jawn paste - and its freakin' fantastic. There's lots of different kinds of kimchi, cabbage is the basic one but radishes, spring onions, and a lot of Chinese vegetables that don't really have English translations get kimchi'ed. One of my favorite things that my host mother makes is a kimchi'ed cuttlefish ... I guess strands. Strands of cuttlefish. It tastes a lot better than it sounds. Koreans also don't have their own plates of food (except for bowls of rice) ... they put all the side dishes, meat dishes, even soup sometimes in the center, and you take what you want. It is then customary to save the rest for the next meal (no food waste). What a beautiful system. :) Yes, as you see, I've fallen in love.

Did anyone know you could eat sweet potatoes, raw? My host mother gave me a few for breakfast this morning, and they've got to be the most delicious thing I've ever tasted. So soft, so natural.

Did a little researching and I might be visiting my first Buddhist organic farm on my day off this Wednesday! It's about an hour away by bus. There's a fairly big WWOOF community here in Korea, and I want to be a part of it. You know, on top of a new teaching job, in a new country. ;) I'll let you know how it goes ...

went to see a parade that went from the center of Seogwipo City to Cheonjiyeon Waterfall ... it was a celebration of Jeju culture and was pretty amazing :) Here is Kim Soo-Hee, my coteacher and partner in crime, striking the pose. 

these are haenya, or "women divers". they go underwater and catch fish, squid, clams, etc. - it's a traditional practice that's slowly dying out 

i loved this guy. peasant farmers and their wise sage. 

traditional drumming at the parade 

confetti falling from the sky at a parade in Seogwipo City! :) i actually had a big part in this parade, a man dressed up as a Confucian scholar, complete with fake beard and 'stache, put his big hat on me and led me into a circle of dancing old grannies in traditional costume, who cackled and grabbed at my hands. i was then interviewed for on KBS (korean broadcasting) and i think some sort of local NBC channel. my kids were telling me all about how they saw me on tv the next day ... ahhh, to be the funny foreigner celebrity :) 

Mo Cheong Ju and Kim Sun Mi catch a little fish, I think this one's called cha-ree 

we took a smaller boat out from chuja island to a big group of rocks offshore, about the size of a football field. we stayed until the sun set, so gorgeous ... 

Two weekends ago (I know, I know, it's been forever since an update), I went on a retreat with my teachers to Chuja Island. This is me and my principal (I'm the goofy guy on the left). ;) NOTE: soju bottles on the ground, my principal's got an iron liver. he's a machine!