Back to life, back to reality

Aldrin was like a cool uncle, with plenty of insight into life in Korea, usually paired with some sort of sarcastic or mocking comment. He had been in Korea for a couple years during an earlier tour of duty, and had returned only recently before I arrived to start a new one. Whereas both Graham and Tim were finishing out their contracts and had decided it was time to get out, Aldrin greatly disliked his school and felt like he was a terrible teacher, and he had decided to return to the US and go back to school, abandoning his contract and leaving the country overnight. 

I think, before going on, I must give a bit more explanation of my life in Korea. Beginning sometime before summer vacation, we had commenced playing weekly soccer matches at a small pitch in a nearby town called Hopyeong. This had been arranged by a Korean guy who goes by the name Brian, and who worked with Joe and Chris at a Maseok hagwon (after-school academy). We played these matches of generally five/side on Thursday nights, and they went on for a few weeks before my summer vacation trip. The soccer also coincided with an apparent ramping up of the social activity in Maseok.

When I met Graham for the first time at his demo class, he said they got together for dinner about once a week. Closer to the summer, as Ryley, Aldrin and I settled in, the amount of times we went out increased. I had one week towards the end of July where I went out to dinner every day, with different combinations of people each time. We played soccer weekly, we hung out and watched TV shows and movies, and we went out to dinner a bunch. I'm planning on doing a bit more in-depth profiling of the people from my town, but the main culprits are the three already mentioned: Graham, Tim, and Aldrin, and a few others; Ryley, Chris, Barney, and Joe. The most consistent repeat offenders were myself, Graham, Tim, Aldrin and Ryley. Chris and Joe worked at the same hagwon, which meant they started in the afternoon and didn't finish until after 8pm usually - too late for dinner with us. Barney worked at the elementary school immediately next to my school, but was more solitary by choice, preferring to stay in and save money. Commonly, Graham was the one who organized the get-together, as he was the most veteran Maseoker and had the most contacts. 

Back in Maseok after the adventure with Ryley, we reunited with Aldrin and Tim (Graham was in China until the 16th or 17th of August). We were home, but there was a "wind of change"* blowing in Maseok, bringing in dark storm clouds. As I mentioned before, the arrival of Ryley, Aldrin and myself had helped bring the social scene in Maseok to a peak. We had developed a pretty solid and steady group of friends and acquaintances who generally got on well and had common interests. The most common of these interests, of course, was food and drink.

Quite often, we'd get together fro dinner and discuss different topics from American politics to British TV shows to philosophy (led by Tim), and then we'd watch a movie or TV show at Tim's apartment to round it out. Our group had interesting backgrounds. Tim had two Master's degrees (Philosophy), Graham was Political Science and History, and loved Reagan and the Seattle Mariners (even though he was a Kiwi), Barney had worked for 7 years as a chef in France, Aldrin was Photography, Ryley English and I, History. We also had a bit of geographical diversity; Aldrin from Florida, Ryley and I from Seattle, Tim and Graham from New Zealand and Barney and Chris from England. There of course were, and still are, others, but these are the folks that were the core of our fleeting Golden Age.

It was the knowledge of this impending void, the loss of Graham, Tim and Aldrin, that hung over us, and that cast a new arrival, who didn't quite fit in, into glaringly dark contrast.

As I mentioned in one of my Jeju island posts, Tim had phoned me while shopping for a new laptop, and in the process informed me of the presence of a new teacher in Maseok. All Tim told me was that his name was Scott and he was from Florida. When I asked if he was cool, the answer "you'll have to see for yourself" sent doubt and disappointment** flickering across my mind, quickly pushed into the recesses to make way for the spectacular Jeju island evening.

By the time I took this photo from the car window, I had long forgotten even the new guy's name.

Returning to Maseok, I began to hang out a lot with Aldrin, Tim and Ryley, sometimes Chris as well. We stopped in at the local bowling alley and gave it a shot, but it wasn't such a great draw and we never went back. I met the new guy, Scott, soon after returning, at a group dinner with Aldrin, Chris, Joe and Liz (Joe's girlfriend). After the first meeting, I wasn't excited about him but I decided he was at least tolerable. One problem is that I'm discriminatory by age, so someone 44 years old (double my age) who acted like it, doesn't really appeal to me as a companion. A lot of the other guys actually were older: Barney, Ryley, Tim all on the brink of 30, and Graham and Aldrin had both passed the mark, Graham just recently and Aldrin quite possibly six years earlier (there was confusion, encouraged by Aldrin, as to his actual age). However, all these guys had personality to suffice, and thus they survived my age-discrimination policies.

Moving on.

The rest of summer was fairly uneventful, I began to indulge in "corn water" (toasted corn tea) and just hang out with folks a lot. One Saturday night, Tim convinced us to go in to Seoul, so we caught a cab around 1am into the Hongdae area. Sadly enough for me, Tim sparked a conversation with our taxi driver who spoke little English, but enough to tell us that his kids went to my school. Hongdae is near a university, and is one of the areas where a lot of foreigners can be found. After bar-hopping Hongdae for a bit, we found our way to Itaewon, the major center of foreigner activity in Seoul. However, Itaewon is not exactly the place to be around 4 in the morning, so we soon found ourselves tired and bored and not really wanting to be there. With an hour and a half until the subways reopened, we found ourselves a 24-hour KFC to inhabit, and Chris and I sat discussing the bleakness of the scene in view of our 2nd story table, while Aldrin tried to sleep. Itaewon at that time of night is populated with the drunkest, dirtiest foreigners and there's trash all over the streets, from our view it seemed the perfect setting for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie, like the underground in Demolition Man. Eventually, the subways opened and we began the voyage home, and probably made it back around 8am. Sunday was a waste.

The immediate Wednesday, August 19th, I was back to school for administrative day, and soon was informed that I could actually leave whenever I wanted, so I went home. The next day, I was feeling bad, stomach pain, and I visited the school nurse, who gave me a pill. Friday I had diarrhea and I decided to call in sick. I wasn't sure what was wrong but I was having stomach pain and the diarrhea wasn't exactly new, but it was worse. The past week I had been having some uncomfortably long visits to the toilet, but Friday was the first day the two problems coincided. On that weekend, I pretty much relaxed, and suggested to Tim that maybe the corn water was responsible for my poo problems, which he thought might actually be plausible. That Sunday, I decided to break with corn water.

Monday, I was back at school, yet my stomach still hurt, and on Tuesday it was bad enough for me to go back to the school nurse, who gave me some medicine and made me lie down and sleep for a couple hours. Then, Hye-hyun took me to the doctor who said probably nothing was wrong with me, but gave me some pepto-bismol type stuff and some pills, and told me to eat nothing but Korean porridge until I was better. I had been stressing a bit over school, and I thought maybe I was getting an ulcer from stress, even though that's not really how it actually works. I decided it couldn't hurt to follow the doctor's orders, so that night I had porridge for dinner. I actually felt worse Tuesday night after eating and couldn't fall asleep, but maybe that was because I ate a couple dumplings that Aldrin had got for himself. Oops. Wednesday I stayed home again and ate porridge for lunch and dinner, then Thursday I went back to school and was feeling a bit better, but I still skipped a school going-away dinner for Su-won who was taking 3 months maternity leave. I ate porridge again, and then later met up with Graham and Aldrin who wanted to have dinner, and ate a bit of samgyupsal (like thick bacon) with them. Luckily, I felt fine after this.

It was good that I seemed to have recovered, thanks to the porridge and medicine, and my diarrhea had stopped once I quit drinking corn water, so I was in good shape for the weekend, which would feature a going away party for Tim on Friday and one for Graham on Saturday.

Friday night we had dinner and drinks in Maseok before bidding Tim and Aldrin farewell, but not before plundering (read:temporary long term borrowing) Tim's books and classical music CDs. Tim's departure was fairly haphazard, however, and the next day I was summoned to his apartment to collect a box of stuff he had ended up leaving behind. Turns out it was really 2 boxes, and I let Ryley inherit one, since he lived much closer. Saturday was a much bigger affair. We went into Seoul with nearly every person we could muster (except, of course, Aldrin and Tim who were gone) and went to a Korean Hooters, Graham's choice. Not unsurprisingly, the food wasn't amazing. After that, we went bar-hopping around, I'm not sure where, but eventually it turned into another all-night-in-Seoul affair. Luckily for us, we had found a much better place to spend it than a 24-hour KFC. The last place bar we went to, and where we stayed for maybe 4 hours, until 5 am, was a very relaxed, hippie-ish bar, with a cool atmosphere and long-haired Koreans wearing plaid. The event culminated in one of the girls with us who had recently broken up with her boyfriend getting way too drunk and going a bit insane, and she was led away home while we headed back to the subway.

Much less disappointed than we were after the previous Seoul all-nighter, we still faced the fact that Graham, Tim, and Aldrin were gone, and in their departure a vacuum had been created at the top of the Maseok social pyramid. Graham, the abdicator, had suggested to me, at our second bar of the night, that I seize power, and given that nobody else really wanted it, I guess I took it.

*"Wind of Change" by The Scorpions is one of the songs Ryley usually performs at the noraebong (karaoke). Generally I provide accompaniment during the chorus.

**I liked being around non-Americans, and we were losing both our New Zealanders in the same weekend, and Barney, from England, would go weeks later. Americans, who had previously held a small quantitative majority but oftentimes felt like a minority because of our relative newness in Maseok, would soon become the dominant majority.