Mantianxing-

So this Saturday we had an MT. MT is one of those words that are ostensibly in English, but which English speakers never themselves use. MT stands for “management training” and is a ubiquitous feature of Korean culture- the equivalent roughly of the English word “retreat”. Other examples of this strange linguistic phenomenon I have noticed are “Handy” for “mobile phone” and “Beamer” for “projector” in German. Borrowed from English, but misborrowed somehow. With the huge rate of borrowing from English, it is only natural that a few miscarriages will happen along the way I guess.

Anyway- we went to a place called Mantianxing… Which would be translated “Plentitude of Heavenly Stars Lake”. The English translations of these things always sound way more exotic than the Chinese originals. Anyway it was a great time to get away from the pressures of YUST, and even though I am still battling a bad illness, I am really glad that I went. The drive, on the road to North korea, was spectacular, and trite as it may sound, the best adjective for the day was “golden”. The rice fields ripe for harvest, the steep karst hills lining golden valleys, covered with craggy tamaracks, and silver maples, and some kind of bamboo-ey pine tree, yellow and orange and gold and brown and red. The roads are narrow here, lined with birches, the villages are neat and orderly, pink houses with blue rooves, an occasional red neon cross marking the site of a ch, and always that last line of mountains, on the other side of which is THAT country- the other side, that brooding presence to the south that is always on the horizon of our thoughts and minds. I couldn’t help, as I spent the day playing games with the English majors, meeting my advises, going on a lazy motorboat ride through landscape straight out of ancient Chinese paintings, thinking about the people who live on the other side of THOSE mountains. Especially as I spent a lot of the day talking with one of my advisees who is from the capital of that country- an energetic, smart young kid, with great English… not quite what I expected, honestly…

It was a good chance to meet my students, freshmen, hesitant and uncertain about their English, some older S Korean brothers, enjoy the lakes, and the pagodas, and the beautiful fall foliage. The only hitch is that one of our buses wouldn’t start on the way home, so we had to spend an hour all crammed into the buses. Eventually someone thought to jump the bus. It’s frustrating when you don’t know the language well enough to be involved in what is happening, or in the decision making process, but in a way, it is also kind of relaxing. There’s a certain kind of freedom that comes from being ignorant and powerless.

Random post, I know, but just wanted to write about our MT. Please check out the photos on my flickr page.

Foiled again:

There are Five Famous Mountains in China, storied in song, and the nearest one, Eternally White Mountain, is only 5 hours away- tantalizingly close. From all accounts I heard, now is the best time to see the mountain, and if I were to wait any longer, I run the risk of running into winter. So after a couple foiled attempts to arrange passage to the storied mountain, my incredibly sacrificial and generous friend ChunHua gave up some of her precious weekend to get up at 3 am and arrange for big-nose me to go to the mountain. A new friend, Josh Kwan, a journalist doing a piece on Chinese Koreans hitched up with us (even though he had already been to the mountain) for the long ride. The lake is spectacularly gorgeous, with steep mountains, crashing down into the crystal azure waters of the crater lake, verdant beaches sweeping around the azure pool of blue, the stalwart rampart of North Korea on the other side of the lake. The fluffy clouds reflect in the water like a mirror as you look down on the lake from the crater rim, some 1,000 ft above the lake.

Unfortunately, all I saw was this:

Yes it was pouring rain, and frigidly cold, and the visibility was about 10 meters. So I had a 5 hour long bus ride, got completely soaked and freezing, basically for nothing. Yet I still had a great time- it was really fun talking to Chunhua and josh, seeing the foggy countryside of China, seeing beech and tamarack forests at the peak of autumn colors, and even seeing a waterfall in the mist.

Although my plan to gaze at yet another “axis of evil” power (I viewed Iran from Armenia in June) was foiled, and the most beautiful lake eluded my view, well I still got to eat corn cooked in a hot spring, see real mountains, drive up a windy road, try lots of fun foods, and spend some good quality time with ChunHua and Josh. We topped it off by eating some AMAZING bulgogi (a Korean BBQ kind of thing, eaten inside of lettuce leaves with chili bean paste and rice) and noodles. My stomach was a bit upset, perhaps from the donkey dumplings I had the night before, but the long day, despite the rain, the crazily loud and horrible Chinese variety shows inflicted on us unmercifully on the zigzaggy bus ride, turned out to be all-in-all a pretty good one. Sometimes my foiled plans, turn out to be OK after all… (as per the very first entry on this blog)

You can see more pictures of Changbaishan at my Flickr page

Google Earth:

Whoever invented this thing was evil. And Jared is also evil for installing it on my computer. This is my latest Jones. Yesterday I spent an hour that I should have spent grading wandering the streets of Bandar Seri Begawan. You can see all of the houses built on stilts in the Brunei River, and walk from house to house on the wooden planks. You can see the 16^th century fake sailing ship parked in the lagoon in front of the most beautiful mosque in the world… You can dive bomb into the swimming pools in the luxurious courtyards of the Sultan of Brunei’s palace. This week I strolled up and down the Avenida de la Reforma in Buenos Aires, tooled past the Parliament Building along the highways of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, and jostled among the sailing ships parked in the harbor of Valetta, Malta. Is this a cool program or what!!

I am the foreigner that I hate…

We have met the enemy and he is us. G is dealing a lot with my pride of late, and judgmentalness (not sure if that's a real word- sounds like one, but my spell check says no).

Basically I have become the American in some ways that I have always hated in other people. I am frustrated that I can't make myself understood in any language. I am grossed out by seeing the live silkworms wriggling in huge vats in the marketplace (we're supposed to eat those!!). Its day 10 and I already feel like I don't want to see kimchee again for at least a month. I crave hanging out with other westerners, and feel intimidated by the crowds around me. No matter where I go, there is nothing I can do to fit in… it is going to be painfully obvious no matter what that I don't belong here. I find myself thinking skeptically about the country I am in. I'm not embracing the inconveniences as colorful differences owing to a vastly different past, and an engaging opportunity to learn about another culture. Instead I find myself thinking superior thoughts about my culture, and judging the system I am in. In short- I find myself afraid of the unknown. I have never really been this way before. I devour languages normally, and analyze them and revel in them and love them. After sitting in 8 hours of meetings in Korean, I feel overwhelmed by the Korean language (Hangukeo). I don't feel like I have an in- I realize that I rely heavily on morphology to do my language analysis. That's why languages like Estonian and Lithuanian were so great for me. Korean has some morphology true, Chinese has very little, and I have a hard time hearing the phonemic contrasts I need to hear and a hard time parsing the words.

I know it is the first hump, and once things get going I will become more myself I hope. This is a bigger cultural jump than I have ever made before, and apparently even jumps like to Georgia or Armenia didn't prepare for me this. Or maybe they did, and it would have been still harder for me had I not gone there. I think the key thing is that its one thing to be somewhere as a tourist, it's another thing to live there, and know you are committed.

As much as I find myself sometimes wanting to just run away, I know I won't and I shouldn't, I know I am called to stay and to let this wave crash over me. I know I am being changed- I can feel it.

I am hearing incredible stories still, and I am very blessed and encouraged to see what is happening in this part of the world, people who are risking literally everything for the sake of what they believe- an intensity of life I have rarely seen. I see G answering that belief by manifesting H'self in powerful ways!

I sat in a little ch last night, cold autumn rain (yes its quite autumn already) pouring on the roof, singing pr songs in Russian, surrounded by Russian Korean bros and siss from central asia and maritime kraj, and I felt truly at home for the first time. The Russian language felt so familiar, and the students who had grown up in Tajikistan and Ussuriland and Tashkent, I was able to understand them in a way that I still feel unable to do with many here so far.

And a sign that I am maybe slowly becoming myself again…. I hammered out a little conversation in Chinese/Russian/English with a Mongolian student (brother) who speaks no Korean (the operating language of our college), almost no English, a few words of Russian, and only some Chinese… (I don't envy him… lift up Amo and his transition if you think to). And I loved it. Being bathed in those songs pointed upwards toward our source of peace, the walk through the rain, past the sunflower and applepear trees in the darkness of a September night, corrected my focus, gave me hope that I could in fact make it here. I know that My Best Friend is very active here, and I will be guided into those opportunities and relationships that I will need to survive and to thrive here.