"Human as meat, human as object, human as tool."

"They were nowhere to be found, leading me to believe they were long dead. I would never find the bodies, because if their organs hadn't already been carved out and sold off, the corpses would have been disguised for insurance fraud. I'm not exactly sure when it started, this habit of always assuming the worst-case scenario. My parents, the moneylenders, everyone said the words. All you've got is your body. A body. . . not a person, not a human. Human as meat, human as object, human as tool. A person's value is proportional to their bank balance. Our society seems to think it's okay to look down on the poor. And when you're constantly broke and beaten down, you start to think money's the only thing that matters. The more you're knocked down, the more you cling to money, hoping it can put you back together. It's messed up, yeah, but that's how it is."

-- Jin-Young Choi, Hunger

Mickey 17 -- What I Thunk

Hey, it shares a major plot point with Keanu Reeves' and China Mieville's The Book of Elsewhere!  What if you could live forever?  Scratch that, what if you could die forever, as in over and over and over again?

The first half of Bong Joon-Ho's film is pretty great.  When the titular Mickey finally meets a copy of himself, things fall apart.

Robert Pattinson is good but never does seem to get his working class American accent consistent.  New characters show up out of the blue.  Mark Ruffalo as the villainous president is actually not that great.  I'm willing to be a nickel that Bong told him to "do his best Trump," and it's not a very good Trump.  The animal rights stuff isn't unwelcome, but not really integrated the way it should be either.

The ending does manage to tie the important stuff together in spite of the sloppy second half.  I liked it.  I could have waited to watch on DVD too, nothing lost.

Really?

So the right-wing president of South Korea thought he could declare martial law and rally some support to a sinking presidency?

I emailed my former boss, a political moderate, and he told me Yoon "lost his mind."

South Korea?

What the hell is going on in South Korea?

North Korea Enters Ukraine

North Korean troops are apparently about to fight alongside Russian troops in Ukraine.

I don't see how this changes much.  Do they get thrown into the meat grinder, or kept back as reserves?  Do they speak any Russian re: integrating into the larger forces?

If anything, it strikes me as desperate, or a stunt at best.  And Kim Jong-un will expect to be paid handsomely.

Eyes on the Prize

Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I've only read The Vegetarian, but I enjoyed it.  Be advised that it's incredibly dark.

For The Dogs

South Korea has banned the consumption of dog meat, and it's welcome news:

"Despite the horrors highlighted by campaigners, few politicians appeared willing to act. Consumption has been in decline for decades and is now largely confined to older South Koreans who want a fix of culinary nostalgia. But the industry is no financial minnow. There are about 1,150 farms, while 1,600 restaurants sell dog meat dishes, according to the agriculture ministry. Activists say as many as 1 million dogs a year are slaughtered."

No doubt an underground trade will remain, but it took South Korean activists to accomplish this locally and organically.

Good news!

Itaewon

154 dead in Itaewon Halloween "crush."

Horrible, sad news.

Itaewon is the former redlight district for US soldiers in Seoul.  Over the years is has somewhat gentrified into a more general "foreigner neighborhood" with cheap rents and various foreign food restaurants and very poorly made buildings that should have been torn down years ago.

My only thought right now is along the lines of, gentrify the fucking place and be done with it.

Staying in Touch in Korea

Following up here, I agonized a little over what to do for phone communication while visiting South Korea recently.  My current plan didn't (AFAICT) offer an international pay-as-you-go plan, which would have been perfect.  So then I thought I'd rent a SIM in Korea (very easy to do) then had nightmares imagining I'd lose either the new or current one.  So, it's also easy to rent an entire phone, and very cheap to do so.

In the end, I did nothing more than download Kakaotalk.  And I hardly used it.

I managed to get by just fine using email and Facebook messenger.  And believe me, I hate Facebook!  But my Korean friends use it, and it worked out fine.

When it comes to travel I always find that less is more.  Another stop at the airport to rent a SIM or phone is just that -- another 15 minutes I'm not enjoying myself.

So at least for me, everything worked out fine with the caveat that it's very easy to find free wifi in Korea, or to buy a data card at a convenience store and roll with that.  Then again, I got along just fine with coffee shops.

Also, be prepared to use an app to get a taxi at night in Seoul, and probably smaller cities as well.  There's a shortage of cabbies right now.  If you ask nicely, I'm sure any good restaurant or hotel will order one for you but be prepared to ask.  They will go right past you if you try flagging them yourself, because they already have a fare booked in advance.

Visiting South Korea Soon? Here's What You'll Need (As An American, At Least)

First, schedule a COVID test for yourself (antigen is fine) within 24 hours of your departure.  I'd bring a hardcopy.

Second, you'll need to register with K-ETA first.  It costs about eight bucks, and it's a mild pain.  Be prepared to upload a passport-style picture (that you can take yourself).  The registration itself is good for two years.

Third, while you can skip the Q-Code I wouldn't.  You'll get through pre-immigration much faster.  Have the code on your phone or print out a copy.  I won't lie -- it took me a good 45 minutes to get their crappy website to acknowledge that my hotel and street address did, indeed, exist.

Within three days of your arrival in South Korea you'll need another COVID test.  You could do this at the airport if the scheduling works, but I went on to Daegu and got mine at the Daegu central public health office.  (The hotel provided directions.)  It was free, which was nice.

Finally, and it appears this is being phased out, you'll need another test for a return to the U.S.  It costs about 70 dollars and you can do it at Incheon Airport, but it's another thing you'll have to budget time for.

That's it!  Have fun!

A final note: I was told, and kind of noticed, that getting a cab in Seoul after nine is now harder than ever if you aren't using one of many apps.  In a pinch I imagine you could ask the restaurant owner to call you one if you find yourself in this situation.  Hotels will be less of a problem.

A Nice Little Trip

I made it home in one piece.  Daegu was hot, but not quite full furnace-blast as of yet.  I saw friends, my former boss, and former students.  In Seoul I met up with some foreigner friends.  I got tested for COVID a total of three times, and only had to pay for the service twice.

I miss Korea and always will.  At the same time, I think the time was right to transition back to home.

I caught a Samsung Lions game too -- they were crushed by NCsoft, 9-1.

Vacay

I'm off to Daegu and Seoul tomorrow for a real vacation.  I'll be back in a week.  Planning on eating anything in front of me, that's pretty much it.

One Week In South Korea Soon

I'm visiting South Korea next week for my first vacation in a long while.  I hope early June isn't too hot, but it will be Daegu so who am I kidding?  I'll sweat buckets.

Just A Number?

South Korea is (probably) going to scrap it's archaic age system (one that even China doesn't cling to):

"Thus, depending on the individual's birthday, one can have three different ages. For example, an individual born in May 2020 will be considered three in Korean age, one under the standard international age and two under the year scheme.

People Power Party (PPP) Rep. Lee Yong-ho, head of the judicial subcommittee, said the transition team is pushing to merge the three age systems and recognize only the international age."

Losing unique cultural aspects is a downer, but I'm happy to hear that apparently even most Koreans got fed up with their age system, and how is clashes with globally accepted "international age."

Still a big deal though. 

Gimbap Blues

I think part of the issue is that I live in the middle of nowhere, but my strong craving for Korean convenience stores is real.  One-dollar gimbap.  A single three-dollar can of Japanese beer.  A decent two-dollar sandwich.

Maybe it's just knowing that they're there, 24 hours a day without fail.

Snacking just isn't the same in America.

"something of a taboo"

South Korean president Moon Jae-In is asking people, maybe, to give up dog meat:

"The meat has long been a part of South Korean cuisine with about 1 million dogs believed to be eaten annually, but consumption has declined as more people embrace the animals as companions rather than livestock.

The practice is something of a taboo among younger generations and pressure from animal rights activists has been mounting.

'Hasn’t the time come to prudently consider prohibiting dog meat consumption?' Moon asked the prime minister, Kim Boo-kyum, during a weekly meeting on Monday, according to the presidential spokesperson.

South Korea’s pet industry is on the rise, with a growing number of people living with dogs at home – the president among them. Moon is a known dog lover and has several canines at the presidential compound, including one he rescued after taking office.

Adopting Tory was one of Moon’s pledges during his presidential campaign and the pooch became the first rescue dog to make its way into the Blue House."

I've done a ton of posts like these over the years, but never has a prominent South Korean official come out and suggested a straight-up ban.  I'm very happy to see he's adopted a rescue animal as well.

Life After Korea

I'm applying for some part time jobs.  I haven't updated (haven't had to update) my resume and materials for over a decade, so I give myself a little credit for taking some serious time to work on these things over the past few weeks.

In lieu of a longer post on how tough it is to find a job after coming back from South Korea, something that so many people droned on about when I lived in Daegu, I just have to say that, well, you get back what you put in.  For starters, yes, not having a network sucks but then again, I'm living in a place where I literally know nobody except my Dad and his immediate neighbors.  A good network probably wouldn't be that much help to me right now due to simple geography.  Next, and this was my feeling back in Korea, you're going to develop as much or as little as a professional as you want to no matter where you live.  Believe me, I'm not a diligent self-starter by any means, but during my 12 years abroad I managed to learn some of the language, co-publish a scholarly article, edited an ESL text by a professor at my college, and let my boss know that I'd be happy to help him edit (or write) things for the school as needed.  I also developed, or created from nothing, a decent set of teaching materials that I might end up using again.

The point being, I'm not sure why teaching English abroad is seen as a professional black hole by so many folks.  It certainly doesn't qualify me for doing brain surgery, but over the years I feel like I did a reasonable job at self-improvement and, more bluntly, getting worthwhile stuff onto my resume.  And it seems like my secondary cultural experiences don't hurt -- if anything, maybe I stand out a bit.

It's a process of course, and we'll see how it goes.  I've applied for both classroom teaching jobs and more education-adjacent positions.  Putting my cover letter together I never felt weakened or at a loss for explaining why a decade in Korea makes me a stronger candidate than I was before I left.

I should have worked harder on my Korean, definitely.  But it was nice to hear from some of my former bosses that they'd be more than happy to give me positive recommendations.  My resume has a larger "narrative" that I can handle teaching ESL or English composition, and that I had a fairly productive last decade.  I'm not sure what more ESL folks are expecting from work history, either in Korea or in some mythical "perfect" job back here in America.

Work is work.

Yikes

I miss a lot of things about my life in Daegu, but the summer weather isn't one of them.  Those violent storms early in the week are relatively short, and just make everything even more humid and swamp-like.

How It's Done

My former home of Daegu, South Korea, was the first city outside of China to be hit by the coronavirus.  It all went down February of last year, 2020.

On the one hand, that sucks.

On the other hand, South Korea is arguably the one country you'd want to be in during a public health emergency:

"South Korean officials made a plan. They needed to test as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, to figure out how bad the outbreak was. Then they had to find out who might have come into contact with the infected people. And they needed all of those people — both the infected and the potentially exposed — to isolate themselves to prevent the virus from spreading any further.

It was a three-step protocol: test, trace, and isolate. And it worked. Within a week of Patient 31’s diagnosis, the country was performing the most Covid-19 tests in the world; it implemented perhaps the most elaborate contact tracing program anywhere; and it set up isolation centers so thousands of patients could quarantine.

As other countries saw their outbreaks spiral out of control, measures like these helped South Korea keep Covid-19 in check. On March 1, South Korea had about 3,700 confirmed cases; Italy, the first hot spot in Europe, had 1,700 and the US had just 32 cases, though its dismal testing meant the virus was likely spreading unsurveilled. By the end of April, Italy had topped 200,000 cases; confirmed cases in the US were already above 1 million. South Korea still had fewer than 11,000. Adjusted for population, South Korea’s first wave of coronavirus cases was about one-tenth as big as that in the United States."

This is what happens when you have an excellent public health system, leadership that is interested in keeping the infection rate low, not personal ego, and a public that is usually willing to go along with mask and distance protocols if it means the greater good of ending the outbreak is served.

South Korea had all of this, plus a very technology-friendly culture.  Within days everyone, including dumb foreigners like me, were getting multiple text messages a day telling us the specific locations of stores, restaurants, or subway stations where an infected person had been present.

The only Americans who think our health system is the best in the world are the ones who have never left the country.

People, Places, and Food

I knew the thing I'd miss most after leaving South Korea was the food.  But interestingly, my food cravings for han-shik didn't kick in straightaway.  And when they did, they were more based on the restaurants and the people I used to eat with than just the food itself.  Even my weekly Monday lunch meetings, where my boss would tell me and my foreigner co-worker everything we were doing wrong lately, is something I'm a bit nostalgic about.

I guess the fact that now I'm eating (and cooking!) pretty healthy meals for two (including my Old Man, of course) eases the pain a bit.  If I'm being honest, I'm probably eating a bit healthier now anyhow -- I did OK with eating plenty of raw fruit for breakfast in Daegu, but my veggie intake was hurting.  (South Korea is a carnivore's paradise, to say the least.)  These days I'm enjoying the access to incredibly cheap fresh produce, and in some cases just bags of frozen broccoli in a pinch.

The point being, I could name a few Korean foods I miss -- kimchi stew, soy-braised chicken and noodles, even Korean-style fish-and-rice rolls.  But each one goes along with a memory of a certain restaurant, or co-worker, or friend, or even my two regular convenience stores in northern Daegu.

It's not surprising at all, really.  Food memory imprints are directly connected to social ones.

I'd kill for a fried chicken joint within delivery distance, however.  If it isn't clear by now, I really am living in the middle of nowhere.  According my Google Maps there's a Subway about three miles from us, but that would just be sad and wrong, no?

Also, I miss the price.  Here in America five bucks will get you a fast-food value meal at best.  In my favorite joints in Daegu you could eat like a king or a queen.