The following is a beautiful, English romantic poem by Percy Shelley – a work of art that inspired much frustration in my next story. As you read this poem, please consider what the visceral meaning of the poem is, what the allegorical meaning of the poem is, and the poem’s level of difficulty.

[groan] And yes, I know that this assignment makes me sound like a stuffy English teacher. Ahhhh!

* * *

Mont Blanc

Lines written in the vale of Chamouni

1

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark--now glittering-no", reflecting gloom

Now lending splendor, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings 5

Of waters-with a sound but half its own,

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap forever,

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river (10)

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

2

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve-dark, deep Ravine-

Thou many-colored, many-voicéd vale,

Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail

Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, (15)

Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down

From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame

Of lightning through the tempest; thou A lie,

Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, (20)

Children of elder time, in whose devotion

The chainless winds still come and ever came

To drink their odors, and their mighty swinging

To hear-an old and solemn harmony;

Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep (25)

Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil

Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep

Which when the voices of the desert fail

Wraps all in its own deep eternity;

Thy caverns echoing to the Argues commotion, (30)

A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,

Thou art the path of that unresting sound-

Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange (35)

To muse on my own separate fantasy,

My own, my human mind, which passively

Now renders and receives fast influencings,

Holding an unremitting interchange

With the clear universe of things around; (40)

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,

In the still cave of the witch Poesy,

Seeking among the shadows that 'pass by (45)

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,

Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast

From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!

3

Some say that glean-is of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber, (50)

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live. I look on high;

Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled

The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep (55)

Spread far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? For the very spirit falls,

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep

That vanishes among the viewless gales!

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, (60)

Mont Blanc appears-still, snowy, and serene-

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread (65)

And wind among the accumulated sleeps;

A desert peopled by the storms alone,

Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,

And the wolf tracks her there--how hideously

Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high, (70)

Ghastly, and scarred, and riven. Is this the scene

Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea

Of fire envelop once this silent snow?

None can reply-all seems eternal now. (75)

The wilderness' has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

So solemn, so serene, that man may be,

But for such faith, with nature reconciled;

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal (80)

Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood

By all, but which the wise, and great, and good

interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

4

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,

Ocean, and all the living things that dwell (85)

Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,

Earthquake, and fierv flood, and hurricane,

The torpor of the year when feeble dreams

Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep

Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound (90)

With which from that detested trance they leap;

The works and ways of man, their death and birth,

And that of him and all that his may be;

All things that move and breathe with toil and sound

Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell. (95)

Power dwells apart in its tranquillity,

Remote, serene, and inaccessible:

And this, the naked countenance of earth,

On which I gaze, even these primaeval mountains

Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep (100)

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice,

Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power

Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,

A city of death, distinct with many a tower (105)

And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky

Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

Its destined path, or in the mangled soil (110)

Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks ' drawn down

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown

The limits of the dead and living world,

Never to be reclaimed. The dwelling place

Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil (115)

Their food and their retreat for ever gone,

So much of life and joy is lost. The race

Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling

Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,

And their place is not known. Below, vast caves (120)

Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,

Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling

Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,

The breath and blood of distant lands, forever

Rolls its loud waters to the ocean waves, (125)

Breathes its swift vapors to the circling air.

5

Mont Blanc et gleams on high-the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

11, the calm darkness of the moonless nights, (130)

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain- none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them-Winds contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath (135)

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapor broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome (140)

Of Heaven is as a law, Inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

if to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

- Percy Bysshe Shelley (July 23, 1816)

Dear Family and Friends,

“A peaceful teacher such as yourself couldn’t want to drive a tank.” one my Korean teachers told me a few weeks ago.

Just before that comment, I had been sitting, steadily tapping at my desk keyboard, riveted on my own words when my British co-teacher dropped by with news: “We are going on a staff field trip...”

“Oooh goody.” I absently and rather rudely replied - still not taking my eyes away from the screen.

“…to a Korean Military Tank base.”

My head jerked up, he had my attention now. “Sorry. Did you just say that we are going to visit Korean military tanks?”

He confirmed.

“Wow!” I exclaimed – immediately picturing us in the midst of military maneuvers. “Hey, does that mean that we’ll get to drive the tanks? I wanna drive the tanks!”

My reaction hadn’t been missed by the male teachers around me and that was when it was suggested that “[a] peaceful teacher such as yourself couldn’t want to drive a tank.”

My eyebrows jumped to my hairline while another teacher genially suggested that I wasn’t qualified to drive a tank.

Hah – as if I’d let a little thing like that stop me. “Oh, yeah???” I replied. I ducked into my bag and pulled out my driver’s license and waved at it at my surrounding skeptics. “I have a driver’s license! And really how different could driving a tank be from driving my Honda Civic???”

A little translation and the teachers around me roared with laughter at that – and again when my witty co-teacher told me that if I planned to drive the tank, that he wanted to operate the gun.

Oh, boy, we’d make quite a tank-drivin' team – the brash American lady tank driver in her periwinkle Gortex and the consummate tweed-clad British gentlemen gunner. I could barely wait.

* * * *

Mid-day a week or so later, our adventure began like other past outings in that my British co-teacher and I climbed into a beautifully tended back seat for a ride. Me being me, I couldn’t resist asking the kindred driver whether he had crocheted his own doily-like seat covers and promptly discovered that I was outnumbered as none of the men in my company understood that to be a joke.

I wrinkled my nose and muttered to myself, “Uhh-oh… strike one.” Martha Stewart is not well known in Korea.

As we drove away from the school, I caught sight of most other teachers climbing into a large red motor coach with lady bugs painted on its side (lady birds according to the British gentleman). When I inquired why we were driving, I was told that there wasn’t room in the bus for all – but did I want to ride in the coach? I hastily assured my kind driver that of course I didn’t want to ride on the bus. I wasn’t about to commit strike two in that rapid of succession.

The hour or so drive to the near sea-side base took us through my discovery of the concept of private highways (speedways built, run and profited on by private companies), regular government run toll booths, a very clean rest stop, and typical, interesting yet rather unlovely countryside. We were waved through chain-clad gates by two very young, camouflaged, machine gun-toting soldiers. We wound past trucks, faux plant-covered tank shelters, and gravel crunched as we parked in a gravel field dominated by personnel filled tanks, about five minutes into a presentation to the teachers by an important-looking soldier.

It beats me what was said – although we were allowed to crane our necks through the back entrances of two tanks, were shown a table of serious guns, and while the lecturer showed the attentive audience uniform and food rations (including “Brave Man Underwear,” and star sugar candy), several male teachers behind me couldn’t resist handling the guns. Presumably the barrels were empty and the men were competent – military service is mandatory for all males in Korea - but this still made me jumpy. And I could not restrain a shiver when my attention strayed from the camouflage winter face masks and I was handed a cold, heavy handgun. I quickly handed it back. The men chuckled.

The presentation ended with a rumble that reverberated through my spine as two of the tanks were fired up. We gathered to one side as one tank positioned itself for a run – barrel steady on us (this is actually rather intimidating in real life) - and then the tank advanced towards and past us, not especially speedily, but fast enough to spit gravel and a thick cloud of dust. The giant looped around the field, did a bit of showy revolving and then parked in front of us with another smaller tank pulling behind it. A wooden ladder emerged and there was a rush to climb aboard the big tank. Don’t think I didn’t join the rush – but I didn’t make the first run. But I made the next two – clinging to the side rail of big tank and wedged, jack-in-the-box-like out of the center of the smaller one. “Ridin’ cowboy!” I found myself happily exclaiming.

I haven’t seen pictures of my tank-riding debut (sadly, I was not allowed to drive) but I am certain that my smile was huge and crinkled the rest of my face. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that my Asian adventures would include tank riding. Horseback riding, could be. Elephant riding, yes. Tank riding, uh, no.

Anyway, we were next taken on a tour of the barracks – my favorite part was a badly needed test-drive of a toilet – before we trooped back to the car but were forced to pause behind the coach while everyone waited for two mischief makers who came running towards the bus clasping large black bags. Soju is a heck of a bargain on military bases.

We next drove to a tiny sea-side village. After pausing for lungfuls of sea air, we walked into a restaurant, assembled ourselves around low tables, took up metal chopsticks, and spent an excellent few hours consuming newly caught seafood: mussels in broth, oysters on half shells, steamed + pieced purple squid, kimchi (duh) and my newest favorite Korean dish: savory raw white fish, sliced, layered onto heaps of gentle shredded radish, consumed by itself (perfect) or with anything at the table including a dark red chili sauce, or sssaaam soy bean paste, sesame leaves or rich seaweed. I eagerly took up my first piece of fish, only to drop it, immediately pluck it up and then guiltily glance around to see if anyone had noticed. I got a knowing smirk from my guiding Korean teacher as I grimaced and plopped the fish into my mouth anyway. And naturally washed it down with soju, carefully poured and received with two hands.

The Korean word for delicious is “mah sheet sayeo” - a handy word, easy to recall and say because the middle is pronounced much like a certain English four letter swear word. Dinner that night was the most mahsheetsayeo of maysheetsayeo-ness. The meal finally ended with soup from the bones of the fish that we just consumed, alcohol reddened faces, coffee, and a game of impromptu kickball in the parking lot before we drove home.

On the way home, I again discovered myself outnumbered – this time as both the only female and the only political liberal – and probably committed strikes two, three, five, and twenty thousand – but that is another story for another day.

LOL - Ridin’ cowboy!!! --Laura

Dear Friends and Family,

Unhampered by a Thanksgiving celebration, the first signs of Christmas in Daegu cropped up mid-November. Fully decorated and lit (plastic) Christmas trees appeared in the subway stations, the Nordstrom-like Lotte department store became bedecked with gigantic shining snowflakes, cheesy Christmas music blared from sidewalk speakers, and the chill in the air deepened.

Daegu took on a festive appearance but I did not or could not detect a noticeable change in the air. No Christmas parties were imminent, in the school halls there was no chatter about what would appear under Christmas trees, no free wrapping was offered at the big stores, there were no brightly decorated cookies in bakeries, and no beaming Santa Clauses with children perched in their laps. As the holiday itself approached, I began to inquire into how the 3-day weekend/holiday would be celebrated. I learned that children receive gifts from their parents, that having a boyfriend or girlfriend was the social equivalent to Valentine’s Day (with Christmas decorations), and that singletons often headed downtown to eat cake or go to the movies with friends or family. It didn’t take me long to realize that while the trappings of Christmas have been adopted and while the holiday is celebrated in the multitude of Christian churches; in Korea, Christmas is not, as the clichéd song goes, the most wonderful time of the year.

Nonetheless, Christmas and the coming close of the school year was the busiest time yet for me. First came the afore-mentioned troublesome planning + manuscript, then hurried Christmas shopping, bit of a struggle to reconcile Korean Christmas customs with my own observations, as well as preparations for my sister’s arrival. At school, I was determined to end the school year on a fun note and prepared a secular American Christmas celebration for my conversation classes by setting up 3 stations: at one station my students followed English directions to cut snowflakes, at another station they sat at computers and watched the beginning of "A Charlie Brown Christmas Special" on YouTube, and at the final station, they were given candy canes and instructed to discuss what they’d do over the Christmas/3-day weekend. Overall, this worked although I did often find myself barking “English Only!” to the conversation table. At the end of each class period, I thanked the students and read them my favorite Christmas story called "A Year without a Santa Claus." Although my classes found the vocabulary antique and story long, they seemed to enjoy the reading itself. I sent each student away with a copy of the story, a list of favorite music/books/movies, and a fond farewell.

My last group of students before the Christmas weekend came rushing into the classroom and one by one began to hand me beautifully hand-written Christmas cards. And as the day wore on, other students would shyly advance on me in the cafeteria, at my desk or in the halls and hand me sweet Christmas cards. In return, I could only give them my brightest, sincerest smile. The appreciation in each card was an invaluable gift and I was utterly touched.

Soon I found myself waving “Merry Christmas” to my co-workers and the much-anticipated weekend had arrived. I spent Saturday spending an indecent amount of Korean Won on bedding and food and taxi cabs and cleaning. My sister arrived Saturday night bearing two stuffed bags – the vast majority of which was for me. That night, I fed her a traditional bean Korean soup and we slept, kind-of. Next, after puttering early on Christmas Eve, my sister and I hailed a taxi and the streets of Daegu flashed by on our way to my friend Kirsty’s place. When we arrived, we did our best to compile 3 plates of Italian anti-pasta and as the day progressed, Kirsty’s place became packed with “native English teachers” of Australian, Kiwi, Irish, British, Canadian and American descent. We all chatted (savoring the English), ate, drank mulled wine, snapped pictures, enjoyed a Secret Santa gift exchange, ate more, and enjoyed.

Finally, Emilie, me and my friend Jules snuck away and while Jules headed away to pour her heart into a microphone, Emilie got her first glimpse of downtown Daegu while I did some last minute shopping. After thoroughly photographing the decorations, we took the subway home, opened a few presents, looked at some funny pictures that my sister Sara had thoughtfully sent, and chatted as long as we could hold our eyes open.

My sister Sara called to wish us a Merry Christmas – at 4:30 am - and as Emilie put it “was wished as merry a Christmas as one deserves at that time of night.”

After sunrise on Christmas Day, after a few more presents, hunger stirred us into thoroughly wrapping ourselves and walking down to Dunkin’ Donuts – for bagels – although we were too easily tempted into donuts as well. We popped into Sleepless in Seattle for mochas and walked to the fresh food market for some eggplant and sesame leaves. Although I cannot regret a minute of our stroll, we neglected lunch preparations for too long and while we chatted with our parents and our mother read “A Year without a Santa Claus,” we did a fair bit of rushing to have lunch on the table by the time my 5 closest friends began to arrive. We didn’t make it as two of my friends arrived 25 minutes earlier than expected and caught me in the shower! However, all’s well that ends well and we enjoyed a feast of Thai pumpkin soup, followed by a green vegetable curry, chicken sauté + peanut sauce, odd snackies, accompanied by a Spanish rosé. Dessert was compliments of my friends Jules and Stella, who took my directions to heart and found a beautiful chocolate cake complete with a plastic serving knife, festive Christmas decorations, and candles. Inspired, we sang “Happy Birthday” to Jesus, sipped a sweet Korean raspberry wine and laughed heartily when we learned that the wine is favored for virility purposes!

After more presents, some good-bye hugs, and lots of clean-up, my sister and I settled onto my warmed floor to exclaim over stockings, piece together my next day’s lesson (a game), and watch our annual Christmas favorite: Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.”

Closing our eyes on Christmas that night was sad – as always – but it had been a wonderful celebration – made especially so for me by Emilie’s company. The anticipation of her arrival cheered me through my rough Thanksgiving and her presence deepened the holiday celebrations with my friends. In fact, I daresay that our celebrations lasted the entire week.

Love,

Laura

A Year without a Santa Claus

Have you ever been told, did you ever hear? Of the curious, furious, fidgety year when Santa unhitched his sleigh and vowed that he was taking a holiday? How did it happen? Well, this way:

It was a long time ago before you were living – not yet Christmas but past Thanksgiving. Though I can't give you the very date, Santa got up that morning, late; pulled on one boot, then its twin, ruffled the whiskers on his chin. And sat back down on the side of the bed.

"Great North Star, but I 'm tired!" He said. "Painting wagons red and bright, sharpening ice-skates half the night, wrapping presents in ribbons and gauze, has worn me wear, " said Santa Claus. "A crick in my back, cold in my nose, aches in my fingers and all ten toes, and a sort of a kind of a kink inside whenever I think of that Christmas ride."

Into his workroom limped the Saint. He sniffed the varnish, he smelled the paint. And a reeling feeling came over him stealing to see things crammed from floor to ceiling: rocking horses with shaggy manes, balls, dolls, electric trains, gloves, mitts, doctor’s kits, rubber boots, cowboy suits, kites for flying in parks, bicycles, Noah’s Arks. And he started to shake and he started to shiver at the thought of the load he must soon deliver.

And he sighed, “Oh, dear!” as he buttoned his vest. “I wish one year I could take a rest.” When the words were out, he stood stock still. And then he whispered, “I think -I- will! I will,” he cried with eyes ablaze. “Everyone else gets holidays: sailors and tailors and cooks do, policemen and writers of books do; tamers of lions and leopards, preachers and teachers and shepherds; watchmen, Scotchmen, Spaniards, Turks; butchers and bakers and grocery clerks—they take time off as Christmas nears. All except me. So it appears that, saint or not, it’s time I got my first vacation in a thousand years.”

Out in the stable, muzzling hay, the reindeer dreamed of Christmas Day.

But Santa phoned to the reindeer-groom, “Hang up the harness in the big store room.”

He called to his Elves, he told each Gnome, “Cover up the shelves! We’re staying home.”

“What? Cover the shelves?” cried the Gnomes and Elves. “Cover the dolls and electric trains and the rocking horses with shaggy manes. And the rubber boots for splashing in parks and the cowboy suits and the Noah’s Arks? Alas! Alack!” For they couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t go riding on Christmas Eve.

“Put ‘em away,” roared the saint, vexed, “This year’s presents will do for next. Warn the people, tell the papers, I’m much too tired for Christmas capers. A crick in my back, a cold that lingers, aches in my toes and all ten fingers, a bit of lumbago, touch of gout, climbing down chimneys is simply out. I may be the saint of the children’s nation but this is the year of my first vacation.”

Well, you can imagine, more or less, what happened when that news reached the Press. Headlines screamed, Wires went humming,

SANTA SAYS ‘TOO TIRED’ – NOT COMING

And as the word flashed far and wide you should have heard how the children cried! So violently they sobbed their griefs the shops ran out of handkerchiefs. Their tears filled up the kitchen sinks and cellars and empty skating rinks. They wept in school, at play they wept. They dampened their pillows while they slept. Before those darlings’ eyes got drier, all the rivers rose three feet higher. And I don’t know what would have happened, quite, except for Ignatius Hepplewhite.

Ignatius Hepplewhite was a boy in Texas (or was it Illinois?). Six years old, but brave for his years, he sobbed no sobs and she wept no tears. But stood up tall in his class to say, “Santa deserves a holiday!”

“No, no, no!” Came the children’s plaint. “What is Christmas without our saint?”

“Shucks, now, fellows! Gosh, Good Gracious! Christmas is Christmas,” cried Ignatius. “And everyone tells me, whom I’ve met, it’s a day to give as well as to get. Since all these years in the children’s cause, Santa’s been giving without one pause, let’s pull together in the Christmas weather and give this year to Santa Claus!”

“Hooray,” his classmates said “He’s right! Three cheers for Ignatius Hepplewhite!”

Fast as a hurricane, children hurled that happy message around the world, over each continent, isle and isthmus: “Let’s give Santa a Merry Christmas.”

With snow the earth was already whitening, but they rolled up their sleeves and worked like lightening. They opened their piggy banks, racked their brains. They chartered buses and special trains and ships and sledges and hydroplanes - to reach the Pole by the 24th was their goal.

East, south, west, north came gifts and gifts and gifts to spare form clever children everywhere: slippers with zippers to zip on; soap for his bath or to slip on; geraniums pink in a pot; one guppy, a puppy named Spot; balsam pillows, strawberry jam, dressing gowns with his monogram; ten harmonicas for him to play on, hand-painted pictures done in crayon, mufflers, pipes, an easy chair, and lots of winter underwear. In New State a boy named Pudge cooked him a plate of home-made fudge. And little Girl Guides of Britain each made him a scarlet mitten, while a boy in Siam sent him a Siamese kitten. They sent him lemon-drops by the carton; ashtrays modeled in kindergarten; Jack-knives, pen-wipers, cakes and crullers, and magic pencils that wrote in three colors.

Tots who hadn’t a penny to spend wrote him letters signed: “A FRIEND.” And they had more fun, that strange December (they said) than any they could remember.

While up at the Pole, in the fragrant hay, the idle reindeer dreamed at play. Comet nickered for oats and corn, Dancer brandished his velvet horn, while sadly, sorrily, lounged at home each idle Elf and Gnome. Santa sat poking the fire, and blinking, but nobody knew what he was thinking.

Then suddenly, from the sky there came the sound of planes. He heard the hoot and the cry of ships and special trains. “Noel!” tootled that sledges, “Honk!” the buses said, and out of his study window Santa put his head. He looked t the left. He looked to the right. He didn’t trust his own eye-sight, so many, so merry, so more and more packages rolling to his front door.

Smack at his doorsill they thundered, a million! A thousand! A hundred! Flat ones and fat ones and lean ones; crimson and silver and green ones, broad ones, odd ones, plain romantic ones, little and big and great GIGANTIC ones; parcels from London, Rome, Seoul, Atlanta and each addressed alike: “To Santa.”

Atop them all a banner glinted where Ignatius Hepplewhite had printed these words: “Good luck and holiday mirth from all the children upon the Earth.”

With toots and hoots and honks light-hearted the buses turned and the trains departed, leaving the Saint surrounded by parcels piled to the Polar sky.

Santa was silent for a minute. His eye looked bright but a tear stood in it. Then he blew his nose like a trumpet blast. “God bless my soul!” He said at last. “By the Big Borealis! By my maps and charts! I didn’t know children had such kind hearts. How could a man feel gladder, prouder?” He turned to his staff and his voice got louder. “Gnomes! Elves! Every mother’s son! Don’t stand staring, there’s work to be done. Bring in the barrels, fetch in the boxes, carry in those packages and don’t break a one!”

But where to put them? There wasn’t space in parlor or study or any place. They overflowed bureau, couch and table, filled the house the sheds; the stable; slid from the mantels, jammed the casement, bulged from attic and burst from basement.

“There’s nothing to do,” exclaimed the Elves, “Except to empty some workshop shelves.”

Off those shelves, then, Santa’s forces whisked the painted rocking horses. When the presents wouldn’t fit, down came kite and doctor’s kit. Still, there wasn’t room for all so away went basket ball, cowboy suit, rubber boot, bicycle and talking doll. Till by the time twilight reigned not a single toy on the shelves remained. All were sacked and packed away in the one place left – the Christmas sleigh.

Then Santa gazed from floor to rafter and gave his mightiest shout of laughter; laughed loud ho-ho’s, laughed vast ha-has. “What a joke,” he chortled, “on Santa Claus. You might as well phone the reindeer-groom to take down the harness in the big store room. Get me my gloves, the robe for my lap. Get me my gloves, the robe for my lap. And my coat and my warmest stocking cap. There sit the sleigh with toys inside. So what can I do tonight, but ride?”

“What about your gout?” the Gnomes cried out. “What about your aches and the crick in your spine?”

“Pooh!” laughed Santa, “My back feels fine! Never felt younger, never felt stronger. Haven’t got a symptom any longer. And before the midnight bells go chiming I’d like to do some chimney climbing. So harness the reindeer, let ‘em rip! It’s time to being my favorite trip.”

With a flurry and scurry and chatter and hurry they brought him his cap and his laprobe furry, they roused Cupid, they rubbed down Vixen. They polished the bells on Donner and Blitzen. There were cheers from the Gnomes, from the Elves applause. Then off through the night flew Santa Claus.

And I’ve heard the old people often say that there was never such a Christmas Day. Never such job after Santa had swirled from rooftop to rooftop around the world. While at the home of a sleep boy in Texas (or was it Illinois?) a special letter was left that night addressed to “IGNATIUS HEPPLEWHITE.” It was clipped to the handlebars (like a metal) of the best two-wheeler a boy could pedal.

“Dear Sir,” was written in Santa’s hand, “Please thanks the children in every land. Tell them I’ll take good care, I hope, of the guppy and the puppy and the slippery soap. I like my pipes, I love my chair and and I do appreciate the underwear. And I pledge this promise on my sled and pack: year after year I’ll be coming back. Vacations, I guess, weren’t meant for me. I’ll never want another one. Yours, S.C.”

And that’s one reason, you may believe, why children are merry on Christmas Eve. You know, yourself, as you hang your stocking it doesn’t matter if the winds are knocking. Though the storm falls heavy, though the great gale roars, though nobody else would budge outdoors. Snug in your bed while the tempest drums you can count your blessing on fingers and thumbs, for year, newly, faithfully, truly, somehow Santa Claus ALWAYS COMES.

“The Year without a Santa Claus”
was written by Phyllis McGinley, Copyright 1956.

Note: This is story is a lot more fun with the pictures but is out of print;
however, it can still sometimes be found at Amazon.com.

Christmas celebrations:

Classic Korean photo op: peace x2 and a golden good luck pig.

Where's Waldo (fka Emilie)?

Real Christmas cutie with faux Santa...

A Christmas beauty under the tree of a favorite coffee shop.

Good times, good food, good friends on Christmas Day.

It's never too late to say "Happy Holidays!" --L

Dear Family and Friends,

Well, I am a week past my blog return date of December 16^th. Happily, I did finish that darn manuscript for teacher training but that rush of words completely gutted my writing voice. It has begun to return in incoherent bits and drabs but…

Of course, now Christmas has arrived and tonight, through the doors of Daegu International Airport walked my sister Emilie. She is here to celebrate Christmas with me and to visit during her week’s vacation. I was so happy to see her that (despite my best intentions), I cried. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I plead Christmas celebrations and time with a beloved sister while I continue to neglect this blog?

And yes, Koreans celebrate Christmas – in both strange and readily recognizable ways; I cannot wait to tell you about this and more.

Merry Christmas!

Love,

Laura

PS: This unusual Santa can be found at my newest, bestest Daegu discovery - a bakery called Choi's Patisserie in downtown Daegu. Although, sadly, when I last caught sight of Santa, he was a bit worse for the wear: his eyebrows had deflated and his boots had been flattened (he must've gained weight while munching on yummy Choi's cakes).

Dear Friends and Family,

Almost four months in Korea and I continue to wonder about this place and its people - although I’m far, far from the first Westerner to feel this way and to write about it. Back in the 1980s, journalist and now-bestselling author Simon Winchester became intrigued by Koreans and in 1987, he took a long, exploratory walk and wrote a beautiful book entitled Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles. Although frankly, his experiences and my own seldom match – I suspect for various reasons including time (1987 is eons ago in a rapidly changing country) – nonetheless, his story is never far from me. The beginning is especially memorable and I’d like to share. So the following is an excerpt of Winchester’s first chapter “In the Seamen’s Wake:”

* * * * * * * * * *

This story starts a very long way from Korea – indeed, very nearly halfway across the world from Hendrick Hamel’s ‘dangerous and difficult Kingdom’ – on a gloomy, rainswept, industrial street in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Newcastle was where I had my first job on a newspaper in the middle sixties: it was a grimy and then rather depressed old place tucked away up in the far northeast, a place of deep coal mines ad half-closed factories that were worked by men (the luckier ones, that is – many had been out of work for years) who still wore overalls and cloth caps, drank the strongest beer brewed in Britain, and had a tradition of making the sturdier items of advanced society – things made of iron and brass and heavy alloys, things like battle tanks and cantilever bridges, artillery pieces and cranes, telescope mirrors, power-station turbines and railway locomotives.

But it had a softer side, too. As robust and no-nonsense a place as it might have been, the Newcastle I came to know was a city surrounded by and shaped by a wild and starkly beautiful countryside, and a place whose whole life and economy and folk history were dominated by two mighty waterways that were born high up in the nearby hills, the River Tees and the River Tyne.

The Tyne! Such – or so it seems at this distance – such a grand old river and such grand old memories! The Tyne remains for me, and probably for anyone who has ever fallen under the subtle spell of what they call Geordie country, one of the great streams of the world. It is neither a very long nor in truth a very great river, yet somehow in its brief passage from source to sea it managed to capture all the alluring mixtures and contrasts that make England what she is – grace and power, rustic charm and ironbound sinew, breeze-ruffled heather and hot industrial oil, lonely moorlands and bustling factory gates. These contrasts exist in many river passages, perhaps, but in the case of the Tyne seem to represent so accurately all that for which the country once stood and all that had been for so long part of the leitmotiv of Empire.

The Tyne rises high in the broom-covered hills near the border between England and Scotland. It chuckles merrily through narrow gorges and across small waterfalls. It matures and lazes through meadows and prosperous suburban villages. It washes grandly between the old cathedral cities of Newcastle and Gateshead, cities of grey sandstone and marble monuments, vaulted railway stations and imposing city halls; and finally it passes by the low-lying, swampy slakes of Jarrow and Wallsend - the latter named for the eastern end of the might wall Hadrian had built to protect Rome’s English dominion – on its way to the cold and grey heavings of the North Sea. And in those last ten miles of its brief course, by which time it has widened and deepened and slowed to a kind of majesty, the River Tyne became over the centuries the home of an industry that perhaps more than any other made the northeast of England famous throughout the world: on the lower reaches of the River Tyne they build ships.

Vessels of war and passenger liners, gritty little tramp steamers and sleek container ships, ugly grain haulers and bulk carriers, motor vessels of every imaginable type that now ply between faraway ports, Baltimore and Capetown, Pago Pago and Papeete, Shanghai and Port Moresby, Colombo and Mombasa and (with a cruel irony that will shortly be apparent) the Korean ports of Inchon and Pusan, and a thousand places besides. Anything that was made of iron, and that floated, and that was made in England seemed to have some inevitable association with the River Tyne. So many of these ships in their uncountable armadas have, on some ‘tween-deck bulkhed, an oval brass plate with the engraved name of the shipyard and a final phrase of simple geography that still stands out proudly like a mariners’ seal of approval – made, the plaques say, in Newcastle upon Tyne.

When I arrived there as a reporter in 1967, they had just started work on the last family of truly great ships ever built on the river. The first, the flagship, was called the "Esso Northumbria," and she weighed in at something like a quarter of a millions tons – a supertanker, everyone called her. The people of Wallend, where she was built, were glad indeed after many months of short orders and short time – to have won the order to build her. I was fascinated by her construction. (I had been brought up in Dorset, and the biggest boat I had ever seen was a six-man whaler built of teak.) Each weekend I, along with scores of local people, would drive down to Wallsend to watch her progress. I would walk down to the tiny lanes of terranced houses where the shipyard workers lived, and I would watch her mighty hull rise behind them.

Week after week a wall of steel, fireworked by rivet throwers and welders, resonant with hammering and flecked with red lead and rustproof paint, would rise higher and higher, blocking out the view, the light, and the wind. Wallsend housewives who where normally muffled to the eyes would walk to the shops in summer dresses. The icy gales that so often roared across the river had been stopped in their tracks by the "Northumbria’s" ever-growing hull, which, within its cobweb of cranes and scaffolding, climbed higher and higher into the sky.

And then one day in early May 1969, Princess Anne came by, a young girl in a big yellow hat and a warm yellow coat, and ended it all. She cracked a bottle of champagne over the bows of the mighty new ship. With a roar of drag chains and a muted roar of pride from her Geordie builders, the "Esso Northumbria" was let go. She gathered speed down the slipway, slid effortlessly into the dark waters of the Tyne, performed the traditional curtsy of buoyancy to the thousands waiting on the river banks, and proceeded downriver to be fitted out and to undergo her sea trials. Then, probably (for I lost track and now cannot find her in "Lloyd’s Register of Shipping"), she took off for the distant destinations of the petroleum trade, like Kharg Island and Kuwait, Philadelphia and Kagoshima, and all the oil ports of the world. Newcastle upon Tyne would never see her again. (She was broken up in Taiwan thirteen years later.)

The housewives in Wallsend complained that night that their protective wall had suddenly vanished and that cold gales blew grittily up their terraced streets once again.

What the women of Wallsend may then also have vaguely suspected, and what the months and years would confirm, was that Newcastle upon Tyne, and indeed the River Tyne itself, would never see so great a vessel again. It was not simply that the "Esso Northumbria" and her sisters were the last of the massive supertankers to be built there; they were also the last really big ships to be built in the English northeast. The "Northumbria’s" launching and the empty slipway she left behind were powerful in their symbolism. They represented in a mournful way the formal close to a lengthy and glorious industrial era – the end of a historical chapter for the Tyne, for Britain, for Europe, and, one might say, for the once-ascendant countries grouped around the Atlantic Ocean. As each tanker vanished downriver and out to the ocean, so it became the turn of the nations grouped around the Pacific to take up the duties of the Old World and begin to accept the benefits and the responsibilities of being the world’s new industrial powerhouses, for the remainder of the century and beyond.

Sixteen years after the "Northumbria" had gone I traveled on assignment for a newspaper out to that Pacific Ocean, and I spent a couple of weeks in the Republic of Korea. On the Wednesday of my second week I flew down to a small seaside town in the deep south of the country, an unloved place with the unlovely name of Ulsan. And in Ulsan I came to realize in an instant just why the River Tyne, so very far away and to these people so very unknown, was in the throes of dying.

For here, on a huge plain below a heather-covered bluff jutting into the Sea of Japan, was the headquarters of the shipbuilding division of a new Korean ‘miracle’ company called Hyundai. I was shown around, I remember, by a young man named Lee Seong Cheol (though some of his cards gave his name in a more Westernized style: Mr. S. C. Lee). He was an assistant in the company’s protocol division. What he showed me would make Tynesiders – any Europeans, indeed, and many Americans too – shiver in their shoes.

Any one of the yards on the Tyne, in the river’s heyday, could possible manufacture four or five ships at once – in wartime, perhaps, or during a period of grave emergency or extraordinary prosperity. The Hyundai Heavy Industries Company’s shipyard at Uslan, however, could make forty-six ships at once. And it could do so without any of the romantic Victorian nonsense of tallow and drag chains and bottles of champagne and princesses in flowery hats. Out here it was all much more business like – the yard had seven immense dry docs, and when a hull was finished the dock was simply flooded and the monster was floated away. In one of their docks – the biggest – they could build a million-ton tanker; two more of them could hold a 700,000-tonner apiece, two more could each build 250,000-tonners like the "Esso Northumbria," and one each could accommodate a 400,000-ton and a 350,000-ton monster – or any combination of smaller vessels that they buyers appeared to need. Three million six hundred and fifty tons of shipping could thus be manufactured at any one time in the Hyundai yards.

And superquickly, too. From the moment the immense plates of steel were cut in the foundry shops until the moment that dry-dock sluices were opened and the sea waters were allowed to float a new behemoth away, took the Korean workers only nine months. With a further nine months spent in the fitting-out yard, this meant that any new Hyundai vessel took just a year and a half to make. A ship order at Hyundai took half the time it would in a European yard – and at a price a good 10% lower than the nearest-priced competition (which happened to be, rubbing in the prosperity of the New Pacific, just across the sea in Japan).

Eighteen thousand men worked at the Ulsan yard. They worked six days a week. They started at 6:30 am with thirty minutes of compulsory jogging. They then reported for work at the yard at 7:30 am, and laboured uncomplainingly until they were allowed home at 5:30 pm. They had an hour off for lunch – invariably they would be handed a plastic box filled with the mess of Korean cabbage known as kimchi (which now has so much status as the country’s national dish that a museum has be dedicated to it in Seoul). They were permitted two ten-minute breaks, one at ten, the other at three. A worker of average diligence, competence, and seniority was paid about £300 a month. (Although, two years later in this story, this sum came to be regarded as so derisory that Korea suffered a period of major industrial unrest, with rashes of strikes and riots, [but] back in 1985, when I made my first visit, the workers seemed docile and content and behaved peaceably enough.)

They enjoyed, in any case, many fringe benefits. The men lived in Hyundai dormitories and ate at Hyundai canteens. They wore Hyundai clothes – even Hyundai underclothes and Hyundai plastic shoes – and were given, at appropriate times in the year, appropriate Hyundai gifts. They had a Hyundai motto: Diligence. Co-operation. Self-reliance. (The word "hyundai" simply means ‘modern.’) They read Hyundai newspapers. They watched Hyundai films. Every possible need, from the moment of a young man’s application until the moment of a foreman’s retirement, was taken care of by Hyundai. And further, to ensure that an employee, a member of the Hyundai family, spent as little time as possible in the uncomfortable and unknown world beyond Hyundai’s protective wings, he was allowed only three days’ holiday each year – and many of them seemed reluctant, so Mr. Lee informed us with gravity, to take even those.

I daresay most European shipbuilders could have learned a great deal from a visit to Hyundai – about styles of management, about efficiency, about the means of inculcating keenness in a work force. But the Europeans I met didn’t seem to want to know. They just seemed overwhelmed and rather miserable. During my expedition through the yard I had an instructive conversation with one shipowner from the Old World, a Swede, as lugubrious a man as a caricaturist might wish. He had come to Hyundai to inspect his company’s new ship, a 160,000-ton bulk carrier called the "Nord See" – a vessel that might once have been build on the Tyne but was now being finished in Hyundai’s Dry Dock Number Two.

I stayed with him for a good hour as he shinned up the "Nord See’s" companionways and clambered down her bulkhead ladders, peered at her tracery of pipework, measured the officers’ swimming pool (‘Nice time they’ll have in this, eh?’ he grinned, rather bitterly I thought), idly polished the brass journal at the end of her waiting propeller shaft, and knocked at the solid oak of the wardroom door.

Then he came out into the hot late-summer sunshine, and we clambered down the steps onto the dockside, and he looked admiringly up at the great wall of rust-red steel with fireflies of welding torches glittering here and there along its immense length. He turned to me and said, with a note of real sadness in his voice: ‘You know, I think that Europe is quite finished.’

I prompted him to explain. He warmed to his miserable theme as only a Scandinavian could: ‘There was a time, you know, when we were past masters at building things like this. Ships so grand, so beautiful… But now, looking at this… Oh, sure, from my owner’s point of view I’m pleased. We’ve saved some money, we’ve got a ship delivered on time, everything’s fine in the balance books. But seeing how they do it, these Koreans – I just can’t see how we can continue to have any real industry at all. I suppose what I mean to say is, I don’t see how Europe can survive in the face of competition from miracle workers like the people here. For that’s what this is – it’s a sheer, bloody miracle.’

And that, I suppose, is when my fascination with Korea began.

* * * * *

I knew, as my Swedish companion had, that Korea had quite literally rise form the ashes of recent ruin. Just thirty-two years before this particular autumn day, a war that had lasted for three years, claimed 1.5 million casualties, and raged quite pointlessly up and down the playing-card-shaped Korean Peninsula, had been concluded: a cease-fire had been announced, a truce that divided a nation in two and separated it by barbed wire and minefields and ever-vigilant guards was put into effect. And South Korea, utterly devastated and demoralized, an emasculated shambles of a country, started shakily to get up onto its two feet again.

And get up it most certainly did. With an effort that, more than any other post-war recovery effort in the world’s history, appears now to have been superhuman, truly miraculous, Korea stood, then took a first step, then began to work with confidence, then to trot, and finally to run until – as now – it has started seriously to challenge the world’s industrial leaders, with a seemingly unbeatable combination of energy and efficiency, national pride and Confucian determination.

There was no shipyard in Ulsan thirty years ago. There was not even a company called Hyundai. But now the Hyundai plant at Ulsan is one of the best and most productive in the world; and the men who had the idea to make it thus, and whose pride and visions have kept Korea’s shipyards and Korea’s car plants and, indeed, the Republic of Korea as a whole forging ahead and pulling away from all others, were, it seemed to me, true miracle workers.

I was not, I confess, either terribly interested in studying nor competent to explore the mechanics of Korea’s industry, nor the unfathomable mysteries of Korea’s economics. The price of steel plate and the costs of fuel oil, the insurance rates for the Strait of Hormuz and the cumbersome tables of freight rates for the North Atlantic Conference remain among the arcane that I could never hope to master. But I was, I soon discovered, fascinated by the Koreans themselves, by the Korean people. How, I wondered, had they managed it? What was it that had allowed them, or had perhaps impelled them, to become so hugely successful when all the Cassandras would have marked them down for Third World ignominy, for poverty, for oblivion. In short, what sort of people were they?

* * * * * * * * * *

This question, what sort of people are Koreans?, is a question that I’d like to answer myself, for myself, and for all of you while I'm here. Hmm...

Well, with, as always, thoughts in every which direction,

Laura

PS: The Hamel that Winchester refers to is Hendrick Hamel, author of the Description of the Kingdom of Corea, written in 1668 – the first Western account of the Hermit Kingdom.

Dear Family and Friends,

Please accept my apologies, again, for my previous long blog silence. I am well in health and not much worse off in spirit – but I am terribly busy and very likely to re-lapse into silence until after December 15th.

I should explain that the Korean school calendar, unlike the US school calendar, runs from March 2 – December 31st. For me, this year’s approach of Christmas is complicated by final test proof-reading (for others) and planning final lessons (for me). This is distracting – but what is downright arduous is that I have agreed to teach sessions at an “English Camp” for English teachers during the January 2007 school break. I believed that this would provide good teaching experience. In fact, I still believe this; however, I have found that I will be paying for this experience with the time and effort that it will take to write a 23-paged “manuscript” for the class while the compensation is… underwhelming. That said, I continue to draw my regular salary (good deal) and the experience will be good. But I now have less than 10 days to plan curriculum and write the manuscript. While this is within my capabilities, my blog postings will suffer.

Please forgive me if this is all ‘til December 16th – but (as always), I have lots more to share with you all.

Cheers!

Laura

A few reasons why I love Korea...

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

1. Daegu city - and its plethora of upside down stalagmites as seen from Woobang Tower...

2. Moments of quiet beauty...

3. When something familiar becomes utterly Korean – these are hermit crabs and their painted shells are en vogue in the elementary set. And really, who could resist?

4. Being goofy...

5. Discovering (for myself) commonalities between seemingly disparate cultures...

6. And beautiful sunsets.

And that I have so much more to see and learn! Ciao! --Laura

Dear Friends and Family,

Pavlovian conditioning works and I'm walking proof. Here in Daegu, as grey winds blast deadened leaves from the trees, I have been acutely aware that in the States “the holiday season” is in full swing and I have been tortured, tortured, by visions of tasty roasted turkey, browned in the oven, soft stuffing, steaming mashed potatoes smothered in gravy, cranberries sweetened with oranges, and pumpkin pie. I have found myself struggling to reconcile my deep desire to explore while the call to my roots, to my traditions, to my family grows stronger. They say – and I don’t know who they are – that the “holidays are the toughest time to be away.” And oh, yeah, I can confirm that. Perhaps it is my absence, perhaps it is Korea, or perhaps it is the combination, but this year I fully understood that the importance of Thanksgiving is the re-visiting one’s roots and holding hands with family. I lusted for turkey – and I cried for my loved ones.

Real, roasted turkey is an almost impossible commodity here in Korea. Believe me, I’ve looked – which has become a lesson unto itself. In the States, we take the flood of cultures for granted, especially in the food arena. Grocery stores cater to multi-ethnicity while countless restaurants peddle fast food, American “down-home” food, fusion cuisine, Chinese, Mexican, Japanese, French, Italian, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Indian, and Thai foods and so much more. In contrast, Korea is an insular, self-sufficient country that adores its own food and is convinced of its cuisine’s healthiness (and holiness) to the point of being inhospitable to other cuisines. While a smattering of Japanese and Chinese restaurants can be found in Daegu, other Asian foods, such as Thai or Indian, are rare. And I’ve so far found the Western food here crap: McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’ Donuts are fairly common and while they are somewhat popular, I suppose that their presence only serves to enhance the Korean notion that Asian food – Korean food – is vastly superior.

Happily, I’ve learned a lot about Korean food since that first time that I peeled grapes. Although I continue hold to the Korean cultural norm of not dining alone, I have become relatively comfortable eating at Korean restaurants. A typical restaurant experience: we walk through the restaurant doors, take off our shoes and leave them in a memorable spot. Next we seat ourselves at a table that lies low to the ground and usually has a gas burner of at its center. We sit cross-legged on cushions and immediately, a tray full of small bowls is brought to the table filled with kimchi (naturally), trays of leafy greens (lettuce or sesame leaves), pickled vegetables, bean sprouts, steamed green vegetables, and perhaps tiny dried silver fish salad, an almost clear soup, Korean potato salad with pumpkin dressing, and there is the potential for countless other side dishes. Interestingly, despite the ubiquitousness of rice in Korean cuisine, one must usually request rice. Just after the bowls are placed on the table, we diners lean over each other and pluck desirable bites while for the main event, the center gas burner is next lit. Although soups can be the main event, their ingredients tipped into boiling broth and simmered to completion, the most common “entrée” appears to be “ssaaam” – my personal abbreviation for the dish’s soy bean paste called ssamjang.

A plate of raw bacon-like pork and a bowl of sliced garlic is proffered by the waitress just before she starts the cooking process by stretching the meat onto the already hot grill. The meat sizzles and spits and cooks, the garlic slices become golden and from there, one diner takes over supervising the meat – turning it over, moving it from the hot center to the warm part of the grill, using kitchen scissors to slice the meat into bite-sized pieces. When the meat is cooked, diners take a lettuce or sesame leaf in one hand, place a piece of meat into the leaf, add garlic, the bean curd sauce (ssamjang), and perhaps pickled radish, rice or any other side dish that appeals. Creativity is its own reward and when you have assembled your mouthful, you fold the edges of the leaf into a package (if you are really skilled you use your chopsticks for this) and place the delicious roll into your mouth. Variations to this “ssaaaam” dish are endless – varying the meats (i.e. using marinated meats such as beef bulgogi) or chicken is possible, as is exchanging the fresh leaves for seaweed. What remains constant is the cooking method, the wrapping, and the ssamjang sauce. Yum.

Korean food, rightly has the reputation of being spicy hot; however (knock on wood), I have yet to eat anything that has been too hot for me. This has surprised me – my history of tolerating hot food has been spotty - but have come to believe that Thailand proved a spice tolerance builder for me.

One thing that continues to touch and amuse me, is that everyone here seems to worry about what I eat. Koreans are borderline as bad as Italian matriarchs in this regard. The other morning, my alarm didn’t go off and I awoke 10 minutes before my appearance at school was required. Scrambled and frizzy, I just barely made it on time where there was gentle laughter and then concern about what I had had for breakfast (I had an apple and yogurt in my bag). And to this day, I continue to surprise students and fellow teachers alike when I place a fair portion of kimchi on my metal tray. Students will ask, “Laura, do you like kimchi?” And I smile innocently and reply: “Of course. Do you like kimchi?” To a student, they look surprised and laugh and say “Of course.” Here in Korea, I find myself constantly assuring Koreans that (a) no, their food is not too hot for me (although I’m careful not to dare them to make it hotter – they could) and (b) yes, I really like their food.

Although I have become fairly comfortable with Korean food, every meal continues to have an element of surprise to it. I love the constant surprise and I love the food; however, a few weeks ago, I discovered that I'm also getting sick of Korean food. Never in my life have I had so many continual meals of the same ethnicity. I thrive on a variety of cuisines and my craving for non-Korean food has resulted in my making conscious ventures to western restaurants (although I still have yet to break down and eat at McDee’s or the like) and buying a membership to the place with the most western goods in the city: Costco. I cannot tell you how badly I miss decent pasta sauce (am even having a hard time making it myself due to inferior cans of tomatoes), fresh motzerella, sweet basil, turkey, good sandwiches, the ability to buy “foreign” foods in grocery stores, and the ability to bake at home. Even more than all of this, I miss the ability to go to restaurant for whatever kind of cuisine I’m in the mood for. That said, I have much more exploration to do – and I am optimistic that I’ll find a few acceptable non-Korean alternatives.

Getting back to Korean food, I am developing favorites. I adore kimchi – especially when fried on the ssaaam grill. But I have developed two favorite meals. My rumored favorite is bibimbap: a bowl of vegetables, topped with rice and red chili sauce and mixed. As a girl who does not even deign to mar her salads with salad dressing, I was surprised to find myself scooping warm rice onto a perfectly nice raw salad – but one bite was all it took to convince regarding the brilliance of this dish. And when I’m that dreadful combination of hungry + lazy, I walk myself 5 blocks to the local food market. I order myself some variation of diibuki (rice-cakes in an alarmingly bright red chili sauce with tofu and vegetables), pajon (green onion pancakes), another jon (pancake – with variations like cabbage or shredded pumpkin), noodles in sausage casings, kimbap (resembles sushi rolls), and sweet rice cakes. I’m beginning to have low, low level conversations with vendors as they place each dish in a clear plastic to go bag and then double bag my order in a black bag with handles. I drag my purchases home, spill the diibuki into a bowl, grab a metal pair of chopsticks, pour myself some barley water (this replaces water in my little home as I still haven’t found a Korean water that I like). I place my own low table on the bed, arrange the food on top of it and turn on the Daily Show. I end up full and perfectly happy to be dining in Korea.

Bon Appetite!

Laura

My friend Cathy once commented that “pears in the United States are tiny and not very good.” At the time, I let this comment pass with only a skeptical lift to my brows; a favorite supermarket staple of mine is fresh Anjou or Bartlett pears. But I have learned that there are few treats better than an Asian pear and that the trick to turning them into best of treats? Peel them. V. Korean. And v. good.

Love, Laura