Sunday 29 August, 2010

Intensity of Intensity, Seoul is wired for activity and work. The Han river divides the city north and south. Sungshin Women’s University, on the north side,  is ten minutes’ walk from where we are living — a 16 story apartment house (we’re on the ninth floor and have never been this high before) rented by the university — and it is embedded on a steep hill an octopus would find challenging. I’m looking for shoes with suction cups; the native Korean automobiles have trouble with traction at the peaks, as if there were ice on the road, but it’s tropically hot right now and even hallucinating from the thin air up here, one does not imagine it’s the result of an ice storm. And the humidity is amazonian. We arrived at 3am on Thursday the 26th after a divine conveyance on Asiana Airlines. By the time we reached baggage claim, ours were the only bags on the carousel. From that it’s clear that moving as fast as one can is a national characteristic, and I defy anyone telling me it’s a sweeping generalization. Not.

We were met at Incheon Airport by Teresa Zyung from the International office at Sungshin. She had grown up in Chicago and graduated from Penn State in the boonies, and she  made for an easy transition to hanguk soil for us. When we arrived in Seoul it was a quarter to five, and after the cab driver struggled with the address, we reached our apartment: three rooms, two baths, and four sets of bunk beds; the space had been home to ten students previously. My  MCH student Sushanta Singha, a junior…already, sent me an email saying that he was billetted in International Faculty Housing. Did someone get us confused? Yes, it’s pretty freaky at approaching my octadic decade to be confronted with bunkbeds, with forty-two years of marriage on our sleeves, and guess what: eight matress slabs, 75cm in width. I think I had better digs my first year at Columbia which specialized in humiliation  through dorming, and that was in 1867.  Maybe, I thought, this a test of my civility and would I be macho and suck it up? That’s absurd, no. Would a real starker be fazed? I made a life out of being fazed, or was I being hazed. Fortunately we had slept well on the flight and could face the bedtime story with a soupcon of sanity.

Aside from this wrinkle, we have been meeting with our departments and engaging in basic training riding the Seoul subways and getting misrouted even though the experience is so far superior to the disease named the MTA at home, and I think that even though Barbara has said that she can’t believe we’re here, we are here, although on Saturday morning I did wake up in    Ethiopia. It’s familiar fortunately on the surface, but there is a vast amount to learn. I leave you with one great fact about Korea: there is no tipping. that’s worth the whole expedition right there. Not in cabs, not in restaurants, not for any service. No tipping at all. That’s  better  than an advantage  in the exchange rate. Free, from tipping, at  last at least oh lord.  You may see clearly where work is at: you’re supposed to do it. Take note America! So there.

Gary