Tokyo Dreaming

Am currently in the throws of a terrible fever; Tokyo fever. And I'm not even there yet! And there are also no guarantees I am even going to Tokyo. I don't know what's happened. I think it might be something to do with Ebony Bizy's hellosandwich Tokyo blog. It's got me all ...... longing for elsewhere-ish. I am dreaming of leaving New Zealand and never coming back.

Of meandering the ancient yet painfully modern streets. Of walking through the Spring gardens, of jogging early on Saturday mornings in the cool air of yoyogi park. Of the clean lines of my apartment. Of a neat, well organised life where my stationery is embossed with my own initials! Of Comme Des Garcons Carnation. God ..... I don't know! Romanticization, for sure. Of being awed by life again; like a child.

Hello ...... a tentative hello that is.

I don't think anybody shall probably read this. But running (yes, running) through Grey Lynn park today I felt an overwhelming urge to start sharing again .... even if it is just with myself on my old, dinosaur bones of a blog site.

There's been a long gap in my writing here, and even when I was writing more regularly it was rather aimless and irregular. But I've read back over some of the things I wrote while in Korea, and I've got to say I enjoyed them and even laughed out loud at some of my own humour .... !! Well, I wouldn't have written it if I didn't think it was funny now would I??!!

The long gap in entries has been due to the end of my Korean travels coming in March of last year. Arriving home, starting up a semblance of a life again here in New Zealand, living it in a kind of half hearted way, although I did manage to get my C.E.L.T.A. and a job at Languages International, a kick ass school where I've been working for the past six months. I've been teaching adults how to speak English as a second language, an ESL teacher.

I know many people think ESL teachers are a lackadaisical breed with no real career ambitions or cares, but this simply isn't true. It's a great job! But by no means an easy one. And the people I've worked with the last six months are such an interesting, dynamic and intelligent bunch of folk. No wonder I fitted in so well ;) haha. Actually, I didn't. Fit in that is, although probably only in my eyes. It took me up until only two or three weeks ago to start feeling really at home there, at ease. And here I am leaving again. Ain't that just life for ya!?

I think there are a couple of things I love so much about L.I. The students are the best. There are the HUGE hearted, eternally smiling, dreamy, sand swept princes of Saudi oil Kings. There are the stern, crease browed Russians. There are the grammar obsessed Swiss who ACTUALLY adore the fact that Auckland buses occasionally just .... don't turn up! There are the Koreans who are so close to my heart I can barely see them anymore, you know, like looking at yourself in a mirror. But I guess it's their kindness, there simplicity of taste .... I don't know. I can't do them justice. And everyone else ..... !!

The second thing is the location. Right in Albert Park. Surrounded by native and exotic tress. Four massive old historically protected villas house not only our school, but also multitudes of visiting tui, fantail, trush, sparrow and blackbird. I had fantails in my classroom twice last week!

So yeah.

Anyway. I am off to Japan come the end of April. Exciting. Nerve wrecking. Amazing. Lonely. Liberating. All of those things. Apart from maybe lonely. Something I don't really suffer from per se ...... it's something more along the lines of existential angst or doubt.

Not sure where I am off to yet. Have to wait and see.

Until then,

bye

I HEART KOREA

I have lived in South Korea for almost a year and a half now and like anywhere, once you get a routine going and you are familiar with your surroundings, it is easy to get into a rut and get bored. It is easy to forget that you are in such a foreign and wonderful place and to become complacent and to stop DOING NEW THINGS!

Doing new things re-opens your experience of the world you are living in and reminds you that your daily world is only as big as you allow it to be. New experience makes your world huge and exciting.

This weekend I met up with two friends in the city of Pohang about an hour and a half north of Busan by bus. It was a little cloudy and threatening to shower lightly but who cares. We were there for the official fireworks festival of South Korea. The year before I went to the massive fireworks display off the Gwangan bridge out at the coast. It was a scary experience because of the sheer mass of people. We discovered we were trapped on the beach at all sides and that the only way out was to FIGHT our way through a dense crowd, the kind where everyone is trapped by one another and people start to panic and fight. After that we were lifted off our feet by the crowd and carried by our rib bones into the subway car where my friend found she couldn't breath. So! We decided, NEVER AGAIN!!

The Pohang fireworks festival was so relaxed and lovely. Just the right amount of people to feel that you were somewhere where SOMETHING good was going on. After a false start at a beach side food stall, where we were served inedible fish which when we complained about was taken, put onto a different plate and served back to us, we found a DELICIOUS restaurant and sat out on the open patio waiting for the fireworks.

As my friend commented, fireworks are in her top five things in life, up there with family and friends. And as they started I realised she was right, they really do strike you in the heart. She also noted that no matter how old someone is, everyone feels like a four year old awed by life while watching fireworks, open mouthed, head tilted back taking in the star spangled beauty in the sky.

Anyway....I loved the weekend. The big explosive red hearts that popped into the deep blue night sky made me feel love for whoever it was who was making that beauty, and it made me feel so happy and at peace and I remembered how great Korea really is. I think the BBQ and the alcohol helped.....but chaknow!!

Life life life. Too good.

Norfolk Giants

Along the
road just
around the
gravel
bend

past the soft
fern
and the silver
brook

through the daisy
chain maze of
your childhood

across fields and past
the red barns
where rabbits
hide
soft eared amongst
the bails
with this seasons
warm babies

rolling over the
tops of those mountains
where
your eyes always
traveled
to the
dark caravan of
giants
walking east
their eyes eternally caught
on the line of the
distant ocean.

And,
oh,
how you longed
to join them.

Vast Waters

Warning : Boring 'someone else's dream' blabber ahead

I dreamed last night that I was out in space. And as is the way with dreams I have no idea what kind of physical body I was inhabiting, if I was inhabiting one at all. I was clearly not a human body floating in the darkness, not an astronaut nor even an alien, but more like a kind of 'me eye' - just a looking viewing consciousness which was attached to my own individuality. I was looking down on Earth. As the big old me eye sat bobbing amongst the stars it couldn't help but notice how much the Earth looked like a tiny glass ball with a living micro-dot at its center.

The atmosphere around the Earth was SO clean, so fragile and so inexplicably delicate, like the thinnest of hand blown glass. 'I' felt astounded by this, how completely exposed, alone and terribly vulnerable we are, how it is the most unique and unusual of circumstances that this tiny ball of life, like a wee frog's egg in a vast empty pond, has managed to survive for as long as it has, the right amount of distance from the sun, with the right amount of gravitational pull from the moon, with the right amount of extraordinarily thin atmosphere around its skies and body to provide life for the minute little ball of creature that lies within.

And the me eye felt a deep lonely sadness. A thought that life possibly does exist somewhere out there in the universe. But the feeling that if life does exist somewhere out there......it is surely gazillions of billions of millions of light years, down trillions of black holes for which no map will ever exist, across exploded stars and outside the shell of everything that we know, away. Because the overriding feeling 'I' experienced was of how tiny this delicate ball was, and how vastly huge and endless 'I' and space were.

I am not saying this is a new realisation. I know that millions and billions of people, time immemorial, have had these kinds of experiences. It is just that I was able to experience it fully within my dream and I woke up feeling an incredible but sad sense of awe. And a lonely vastness. No wonder I suffer from periodic bouts of existential angst!

The New Zealand Made Cyborg Named Emily

As I get more comfortable with my role as a teacher I have started to play wee trickster games with my favorite classes. Especially my younger classes who are outrageous and crazy and love to be tricked and taken on long wild walks down the garden path. I love playing with their minds because eventually when they figure it out they scream in delight and get so worked up. Its the best kind of entertainment.

One of my most recent class room pastimes was convincing my rowdy class of eight year olds that I was not, in fact, Maggie Teacher but Maggie Teachers twin sister Emily who had recently flown into Korea to help out our school. For the first few seconds they sat staring at me, all fourteen heads cocked to one side inspecting every inch of me. Then the questions started. How old are you? Why do you look exactly the same as Maggie teacher? (because Emily and I are monozygotic twins of course!) How long are you staying for? Is Maggie coming back? Where is Maggie now? Can we go and see her? Can you speak any Korean? You are not really Emily are you? You are Maggie! Aren't you? TEACHER? TEEEEAAACCCHHEEER!! And then the screams of delight and semi terror began. It was excellent. And hilarious. I love watching as belief and disbelief flutter across their faces.

In another of my best classes I convinced them that I was not a human but a New Zealand made cyborg. That New Zealand was famous for producing top of the line educational teacher-cyborgs which were then shipped all over the world, predominantly to South Korea, China and Japan. One student asked me why a cyborg would be eating popcorn (as I was at the time) to which I responded that this was not popcorn, but polystyrene which kept the small engine in my chest running at optimum capacity. Do you have a heart teacher? One student asked. Of course not! I replied! I am a cyborg!!

I have been informed in a very serious manner by one of my classes that it is imperative I go to prison very very shortly, as I am a terrible liar and they just can't handle the injustice of me making such outrageous accusations and still being free to wander the school halls.

My First Bike

Until a Christmas
when the crunchy shells
we had eaten
lay on the track
outside our front door
and the hibiscus flower
bloomed in the summer
heat
like a softened earthbound
sun and against
the trellis wall
leaned a bike
with red and white
checkers
cutting through the
bluest air with
tires that pushed
marks into the cool
red clay the
shape of diamonds
fallen from a
pocket.

Seasonal Transfusions

The moon did not enter my life in Autumn.
It was always there.
We picked blackberries
when the days were long and dry
and we too were as ripe as the black blood
which bled like real
from the small collected cells of juice.
Scrambling with skins scarred by summers hands,
bleeding just a little
the grasses and thorns
testing our sincerity,
our full blooded-ness,
taking a little back from what we took and ate
with our expectant pink mouths;
bleeding us
enriching the soil
for the next summer.

Vanishing

I’ve got my own head in my

hands

and suddenly its so heavy

it presses down through

my ageing palms

burning a hole down

towards the ground as

if it longs to be buried,

to be six feet below the surface

of this life,

sighing, whispering amongst

the feeding enzymes and

atoms of the earths body.

While my body walks around

these streets,

motioning, signing, in the language

of life and forward, linear

propulsion,

no one really notices the

empty space above my neck,

no one notices that

instead of expectant brown

eyes there is now only

the odd passing cloud or

the glassy empty blue of

atmosphere.

My body jostles,

pushing fleshy jovial

sounds of bodily existence

out into the world

convincing those

around,

that I

am still

here.

But, long ago now, my head

burned a hole

through my palms,

through the cover of my

bed, through the

grassy cover of the earth,

and now lies

whispering and sighing

waiting for someone

to hear it.

Ten Love / Hate / Wow Things About Korea

A wee list of things that I love about Korea (even the things I hate, I secretly love)

1. Plastic surgery is huge here! Before arriving in Korea I knew very little about Korean culture and had no idea how much of an image obsessed society it would be. I had no clue that people were relatively label obsessed or that they would be as 'blingy' as they are.

Plastic surgery is a booming business here and some of the most advanced techniques and innovative plastic surgeons in the world are located in Seoul. One of the first 'crazy' Konglish advertisements I saw here was a massive billboard advertising 'small face, lovely breast'. Meaning 'make your face smaller and your boobs bigger'. Koreans have insecurity issues about having big heads. I find their big heads and their insecurity about it really really cute! They all think that their noggins are massive and that to have a small face equals beauty. I often get my head compared to the size of someones fisted hand.

Eyelid surgery is extremely common and half of the women in my office have had the procedure. The eyelid it cut so that a western style fold in the lid is created. I love Korean eyes, I love the long moon like shape of them and their long black lashes. I often want to stroke peoples eyes here. Weird I know.

Because of the low Korean Won and the strong Japanese Yen it is becoming an increasinly popular weekend gettaway choice for wealthy Japanese to pop over here to A) buy some cheap Louis Vuitton and B) Get some plastic surgery done at much more affordable prices than at home.

2. It is often assumed that I like to drink simply because I am a westerner. This annoys me greatly as I am not a big drinker in any way shape or form. I get 'asked' (they are actually more statements than questions) in a mocking fashion questions such as 'you love to drink!?' and 'you love soju!' to which I answer 'no......not really', but nobody seems to hear!

The reason this frustrates me is that there is an assumption that western people are alcoholics and drink far more than Koreans but often this attitude comes from people who have no idea that all westerners are different. It also frustrates me because I have never in my life been to a country where I see so many people absolutely WASTED wandering the streets on the weekends, having public brawls with their wives or husbands and spewing on pavements or gutters. 'Kimchi Flowers' dot my walk to work every Monday morning. Kimchi flowers are the red explosion which are projectile vomited from Ajoshees (married men) after nights of having consumed far to much Kimchi (fermented cabbage) and Soju (weak vodka tasting alcohol). Beautiful.

3. Giving and receiving with two hands. Wonderful. In Korea, when you are pouring a drink, having a drink poured for you, handing money or receiving change, giving or receiving a gift, in fact in many many giving and receiving situation, you use two hands to offer what you are giving and two hands to take what you are receiving. It is SO lovely. It shows a real sign of respect to the other person and takes the time to acknowledge the fact that you are having a moment of your life with this person, that they are another living human being who deserves respect. It also seems to counter the 'take take take, now now now' aspect that is taking over more and more of our modern lives. Love it.

4. Korean babies / kids. They are gorgeous. Soooo much cuter than western babies! They have gorgeous huge heads, dark crescent moon eyes, silky black hair which is occasionally permed
( hilarious - perms on babies are another much loved thing here!) and mocha coloured skin. Do I hear a chicken coop near by?

5. Being stared at. Don't like it. When I first arrived I felt thrilled to be stared at all the time. I was on the high one gets from being in a new land and felt like an exotic foreigner for the first time in my life. I could not understand why my friends Meg and Max had developed such an angry attitude toward being stared at or hassled by members of the Korean public.

Now I understand. I do mind being stared at if the person who is staring at me is A) a really nice looking man or B) someone who is having a quick stare and is conscious of the fact that staring is rude, and so knows when to stop. When I don't like it, in fact, when I HATE it, is when the staring is shameless, ongoing and accompanied by comments such as 'HOW MUCH?' yelled across a crowded subway car by a man who has politely assumed that I am a Russian prostitute.

6. Korean food. Amazing. Delicious. Spicy. Fresh. Yummy. Many people know little about Korean food unless they have traveled here. I guess before coming I assumed that Korean food would be a lot like Chinese, greasy, deep fried, oily, heavy and so on. It is nothing like Chinese food and not really similar to Japanese either. Lots of barbecued meat wrapped in leaves with sauces. Can't explain it, but its damn fine I tells ya!

7. The necessities of life are cheap here. Renting an apartment is about 300 dollars per month, my favorite restaurant meal is five dollars, the last dress I bought was 40 dollars, taking a taxi costs about three dollars, my electricity bill is about ten dollars per month, a beer costs two dollars.........etc. As it should be.

8. Korean humour / craziness on T.V. There are many 'reality' style T.V. programs here in which famous Korean singers and actors regularly take part. All sorts of simply mad games are played which involve flinging each other into mud, throwing octopuses, being human tetris blocks through moving walls, wearing crash helmets and trying to run across waterfalls, seeing who can circle a girl around their body the most times before dropping them into the ocean of a home made raft and so on. The awesome thing is that while celebrity culture is VERY strong here, Korean celebrities do not have a problem with making fools of themselves and having a grand time while doing so. Its refreshing to see people not taking their 'cool/rich/goodlooking' selves to seriously.

9. Style! Koreans are stylie! They are willing to take risks and wear some outrageous things. Its especially wonderful to see men being daring with what they wear. Lots of bright colours, stylized mullets, skinny coloured jeans, awesome high top sneakers in various shades of ultra neon and some scarily 'plungey' necklines on mens T-shirts. New Zealand seems so conservative in comparison and it makes me realise what a macho and limited culture that still prevails. Men really embrace fashion here (well, men of a certain age.....) and its great.

10. Men are allowed to be openly and physically affectionate with each other here without being judged, while at the same time the existance of gay people is ignored or even flatly denied. This is one of the things here that I find surprising / contradictory and bizarre. It is so wonderful to be in a country where teenage boys can hold hands, old men can wandering arm in arm down the street and young boys can stroke their friends hair without being thought of as gay. Men being affectionate with other men seems as 'natural' and accepted as womens affection for one another. Yet unless you are in a very specific area of Seoul, you could imagine that Korea is completely devoid gay men or women. It not acceptable to be gay here. In any way shape or form.