Friday
Taekwondo was a hard workout but I am gettng more conditioned these days. I have weights for my legs and hands that I practice with in my room. I have 3 more poomsaes (forms) to learn before the black belt level. Then I am planning on finding a hapkido studio to practice a style more similar to my philosophy of harmony. Some day I want to study tai chi in China with some old master or join a large group in a park. I want to have peace in my emotional mind and confidence in my physical skills.
Saturday
I temporarily fixed my bicycle: the rear tire bolts were loose and my banging on them with a hammer made them worse, so I finally got some pliers. It's embarassing riding down the street when your back tire is rubbing noisily against the wheel-well, while people pretend they aern't looking at you. Later, I rode the bus almost two hours to Daegu and spent the day there with two lovely Korean (English-speaking) lady friends. They took me to a large Kyobu bookstore where I bought a large stack of language and teaching books. I am going to learn Korean and (some) Chinese and become a skillful teacher before my adventures here are over. We also went to some nice restaurants and had bibimbap and a braised chicken stew. Later, I found a hotel for under $20 that was decent and slept there after drinking some tea with them. Daegu is the third largest city in Korea, and it has a US Army base, which we drove past.
Sunday
The next morning, one of them picked me up and took me to Dunkin' Donuts and then the bus station. Her and I have a nice connection and we'll see where that may go. The bus ride home was calm. I read about the opening up of Korea to the West in the late 1800's. Japan, China, US, France, America, Russia and Britain all wanted to impose their own unequal trading treaties on Korea and make Korea modernize after their own models. Korea had its own enlightenment movement and diplomatic efforts, but it struggled against the neo-Confucian orthodoxy of the entrenched aristocracy, under the weight of foreign domination. I thought about these things while I looked out the window at the beautiful mountainous blooming scenery; the countless and unknown lives who have built this country. When I got home, I met with my friend Kim Ho and his mom and uncle. We ate bbq pork wrapped in lettuce with peppers at a restaurant. Then we went to his mom's farm and collected some edible greens in the forest nearby. Later, at home, I wasted an hour or more moving furniture around in my apartment; finally I ended up back almost where I started, but with simply less stuff. It is easy to collect other people's junk when it is free, but it feels better to have more space to live in and just the essential furniture. Hopefully my current arrangement will be OK for a while. I am finding my couch more comfortable than the floor with pads, and even better than my bed, which had a dip in it.
In a general context, Taekwondo is a hard work out that involves the Poomsaes (forms) that are requisite for the collective foreign adulation through the means of the prestigious black belt you persistently ascribe to. Hapkido studios have their clear advantages, but China is now known to many as the ancient country that serves as a regional production/manufacture center for the exported component parts of countries such as America, Korea and Japan, global/political/economic phenomenon that is by now un reversible.
ReplyDeleteFixing a bicycle provides you with a modulated activity not exactly on par with the excitement you experience in Taekwondo or regulating children attempting to pitch large phones through classroom windows, but this is good, even if the modifications to the cycle—whether 10-speed, cruiser or mountain bike, results in a self-satisfaction deriving from your desire perceptions of your foreign presence to others through the reduction of a noise to quiet ratio.
Trips to Daegu with Korean women who speak English are healthy—and as long as kept within the appropriate parameters, fulfill your innate need for self-efficacy in a new global economic environment revolving around work, leisure and intake of the shared experiences that foreign teaching/traveling obviously entails. Learning Korean and reading about the various histories, including imperial histories that tried to open Korea on U.S. terns—and the “[Korean] Enlightenment Movement and diplomatic efforts” that “struggled against the neo-Confucian orthodoxy of the entrenched aristocracy, under the weight of [this] foreign domination,” especially enhances your framework of understanding the multifaceted nature of the world in which we live, all of course while looking out a window.
BBQ pork, farms and the people you know who occupy them add exponential dimensions to what is by now a clearly integrated experience into the Korean system and subsets of culture, consumption, work leisure, historical analysis and opportunities to demonstrate ethos in a variety of self-efficacy work/leisure contexts.