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| Mount Soraksan, North-East Korea, Fall 2002 |
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| Mount Soraksan, Fall 2002 |
At the start of 2003, I moved to bitter-cold Seoul to do a CELTA at the
British Council. I lived with Jai Moon and his sister and mom. By the end of April, I had moved to Banpo dong and begun working
for the University of California, Riverside, who maintains a distance-learning campus in Gangnam in partnership
with the local government. It was an ideal situation: to be living in Seoul but working for American academics and being paid
in US dollars. After a Summer leave in 2004, I returned for the Fall and Winter, and began teaching Drama.
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| With fellow CELTA candidates, Mike, Russell, Elisabeth and Richard |
Winter in Seoul means cold like an icy snake that wraps around your neck and tries to get at you from any
available gap in your multitudes of layered outerwear. It means a greyness that gets into your mind and spirit. It means blackened
ice lining wide streets of barely-moving, polluting cars.
Fortunately, Winter in Seoul also means steamy public baths that get the chill out of
your bones and hot, thick stews of tofu and meat. It means warm, crowded tents serving up fish and soju, and busy
restaurants with fogged windows and clouds of steam rising from enrgetic tables of red-faced students. Winter is a time to
excuse yourself from having to even get dressed in the mornings, and to permit yourself an afternoon of doing nothing.
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| Housewarming party at Richard and Stacey's. March 22, 2003 |
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| With Richard at Chong-no, February 2003 |
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| Doksan Palace, February 27, 2003 |
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| At a chicken hof in Cheongdam-dong with Sister Moon and Nuna |
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| Facials compliments of Jai Moon's sister |
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| With another teacher, Nicole, Songnam, Fall, 2003 |
Rainer Maria Rilke - Parting
How I have felt that thing that's called 'to part',
and feel it still: a dark,
invincible,
cruel something by which what was joined so well
is once more shown, held out, and torn apart.
In
what defenceless gaze at that I've stood,
which, as it, calling to me, let me go,
stayed there, as though it were all
womanhood,
yet small and white and nothing more than, oh,
waving, now already unrelated
to me, a sight, continuing
wave,--scarce now
explainable: perhaps a plum-tree bough
some perchinig cuckoo's hastily vacated.
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