The end of one path...

(Natalia, Mariko, and I left our mark on Korea...)

I am just wrapping up my last weekend in South Korea.  Lots of friends, lots of food, and lots of fun.  I am sitting in an almost empty, and very clean, apartment, looking at my plants that have been my companions over the last year.  A year!  Amazing.  Truly a sign of age - time flies by faster and faster.  My year here has been fantastic, and I am happy for the people I have me, the places I have been, and the lessons I have learned.  My path in life has definitely been different than I ever thought it would be, but I am so glad that it has been.  Even though this experience is almost over, I really feel that in a very tangible way it will continue.  I have made friends here that really made my time in Korea great, and with the ease of communication today, even though I will be half the world away, it won't really feel that way.  Korea will always hold a special place in my heart.  There are so many place I want to see in the world, that I don't know if I will ever make it back here, but I will miss many things here from the food, to the ease of life, to the beauty of the peninsula.  Two more days...a mix of emotions.  

(Christa, Jin, and I)

(Some of the girls...and T.J.)

Bummin at the beach...

This weekend I went to one of the many beaches in Korea.  It was perfect.  Amazing people, amazing weather, amazing views.   The place that we went to is on the East Sea, about 4 hours from Seoul.  You have to drive over the mountains, which are beautiful, with VERY windy roads.  We actually stayed at a resort that is fairly uncommon compared to most of the places I have seen in Korea.  Most hotels, and buildings in general, in Korea are not very creative as far as architecture goes.  This resort was called Sol Hotel, and was Spanish themed.  As you can see in the pictures, it really did look like we were in a Spanish, or at least European, hotel.

 The beach was beautiful, with clear, green water hitting up against pretty beaches and rocks.  Ideal really.   Being on a peninsula, Korea has an abundance of beaches and islands, but I think this place was somewhat unique as the beach was not crowded with a million people, and it had white sand.  It was very Korean though, as you will see, with most of the people at the beach fully dressed!  Koreans try to stay out of the sun at all costs. For example women walk around with parasols in the summer to avoid the sun.  And at the beach, they usually are fully clothed and sitting under tents or umbrellas.  Probably smart as far as caring for their skin, but being in the sun is half the fun!!!

The view from our condo

The hotel was bordered by a military base - it is really far north, getting very close to North Korea.

Reporters in North Korea

I am sure most of you have seen the news about the two reporters, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who have been found guilty by N. Korea of illegally crossing the border into N. Korea, and who were subsequently sentenced to 12 years in labor prisons. Regardless of your opinion about what the US government should, or should not, do to help free them, I just wanted to make the point that these women are not going to a prison that we are accustomed to in the west, they are going to prisons that more closely resemble those that were used in Germany during the holocaust. You can read the 2008 Human Rights Report produced by the State Department to get a better idea of what the conditions are in North Korea. The women are bargaining chips right now, and N. Korea has made a statement. The US is in a tough position, and I hope that something can be done to allow these women to return to their families.


Living in South Korea, I know little more than anyone else what is really going on across the border, but the proximity has given me a reason to learn more than many people. With the little I have learned, I have come to despise the things that are known to happen in N. Korea, and it is a constant reminder how fortunate I am, and have been, in my life. What these 2 women may be going through has been suffered by thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children in N. Korea. I can't understand why it is allowed to continue. I don't want a war, but N. Korea needs to be stopped. We express outrage about the Holocaust in retrospect, yet we stand by as it happens today in places around the world. People read about and express anger or regret. I write a blog. Some people ignore it entirely. But who is really helping those people that were unlucky enough in their lives to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or, as in the case of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were in the wrong place at the wrong time trying to shed light on some of these monstrous things going on in the world. It is sad. It shouldn't matter what a person's political views are, wether they like President Obama or Sarah Palin or Ross Perot...everyone should feel sad and frightened for these women and their families right now. My heart goes out to everyone involved.

Esperanto

Esperanto. Have you heard of it? Odds are that you haven't. Until very recently I would have said it was a form of the spanish verb esperanzar - to hope. And I would have been somewhat right...but I also would have been totally wrong.


Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language (in the words of Wikipedia) or, in other words, an entirely created language. The creator was a Polish man named L.L. Zamenhof, who, in the late 1800's, decided that in order to better communicate with others throughout the world, there should be a common language developed that would be less complicated that any of the powerful languages of his time (English, French, Spanish, German). You can read more about it on Wikipedia. He spent several years developing the language, and published a book in 1887 called Unua Libro. The word Esperanto in the language means 'one who hopes' - not far from the spanish esperanzar.


As a language teacher, and therefore learner, of both Spanish and English, I have witnessed first hand the difficulty in mastering these languages. For most, the difficulty lies in the irregularities. Most of us have learned some form of a second language, so I am sure you all remember the first time you were taught that there are irregular verbs, or when your English teacher told you that "the rule in English is that every rule has an exception." As a teacher I hate seeing my students go from really grasping the rules of spanish verb conjugation one day, to totally feeling inadequate the next because I have introduced "the irregular verbs". Now, I don't think everything should be easy - and as a Spanish speaker, I have, and still do receive, great satisfaction from conquering the difficult aspects of the language. English is much more complicated to learn though, and as a world language, quite honestly, it stinks.


My experience here in Korea has opened my eyes to just how hard people around the world are willing to work in order to gain something that I take for granted - the ability to communicate with others throughout the world. Those who do not speak English in today's world are, in many ways, rendered powerless despite their great potential or capacity within their own culture. Teaching English sheds light on all of the aspects of the language that I don't know that well myself, and I have had the opportunity to gain greater accuracy in my my own language. I have also gained an awareness of the sacrifices that people of other countries make to learn English, most of them unable to hold a confident conversation even after many years of study.

The idea behind Esperanto is that it has no irregularities. When you learn a rule, the rule doesn't change. Patterns stay the same. ALL nouns end in O, and to make a noun plural you add a J. Always. In reading about the language, it has been described as a great way to introduce foreign languages to children, which I would like to do at home with my Spanish students in the exploratory year. It has been implemented in some British primary schools, and has been recommended by UNESCO as a possible way for countries to overcome desperate language barriers.

Interesting. Sign me up. I have been meaning to learn another language, and unfortunately for me, Korean proved easier to get by without. I am going to try to teach myself a little bit, or maybe a lot, of Esperanto. Lernu is a website that has a free introduction and lessons. Esperanto anyone??

Capital T-True

One thing that has been amazing about being here in Korea this year, is that I have been able to spend many, many hours educating myself on things that interest me.  I have spent a lot of time learning about nutrition and health, traveling, issues in the world that I am concerned with, etc.  This is due in part to the extra time I have here, and to my wonderful Macbook that I nearly consider a friend.  :)  Lately,  I have been watching a lot of documentaries like The Planet Earth series, Flow: For Love of Water; and I have been watching talks on TED.com - an amazing website.  That is where I found the following speech.  I just think it has some good thoughts to ponder, especially with North Korea pointing missiles in the air and threatening the world with its angry antics.  Sometimes, you just have to focus on the true things in life, and be grateful that you have the power to decide what has meaning and what doesn't.  Enjoy...

From David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon College commencement address:

The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.