The End

“Oh no! I forgot to have children!”

-Korean T-Shirt

I am a sucker for emotional goodbyes, and I like going out with a bang, so when I realized that my end of the school year was an entire two months before I would be leaving the country, I was a little disappointed. As much as I love Korea, I wasn’t crazy about the idea of lingering past my welcome, teaching English camp to students from other schools and loitering in Waegwan while my ex-patriot friends were on trips. This way, though, I managed to get two endings out of the deal, and being in Korea, I even managed to get two dramatic endings.

The last weekend of my school year coincided with the most anticipated festival of my entire year in Korea. It also coincided with the obligatory wrap-up meeting for the hundreds of foreign teachers in my program, but I assured my provincial education officer that no one would be going since every foreigner I had met planned on attending this festival. It is worth a tangent here to discuss Korean festivals in general. As you could probably gather from my last entry, Koreans don’t only work hard, and they will take any excuse they can get, especially if the moon is involved, to create a festival. Unfortunately, I missed the annual Body Painting Festival, but I hit up a performance at the Daegu Opera Festival and a really strange break dance theatrical performance involving a black light musical number from Ghost Busters and a really sad marionette at the Daegu in Motion festival. I traveled to Jinju for the Lantern Festival, where larger than life cloth reliefs of samurai fighters, Disney characters, and lotus flowers lit the river, an actual size temple lantern stood adjacent to the bridge and a lantern dragon on the shore turned his head from side to side breathing fire. The bonfire as high as my house that my friends and I stumbled upon on the shore of the Nakdong River was accompanied by fireworks, traditional Korean drumming, and a roast pig to celebrate the first full moon of the lunar new year, and the Korean government dismissed me from school for a two day festival of Chamanism in Gangneung where we drank unlimited ladle-fuls of free makoli and hammered our own rice cake and the only thing they asked in return was that we march in the featured foreigner section of the parade swinging lanterns that we later sent floating down the river.

The festival that took place on the last weekend of my school year was the Boryeong Mud Festival. My friend, self-appointed foreigner liaison, arranged four busloads of foreigners, and a handful of Koreans, to ride the six hours to Boryeong. The rain was no hindrance to our frolicking in the mud, which was rumored to be naturally healthy. We smothered ourselves in it and crawled into the mud fight ring where strangers were shoving each other full force like a slippery mosh pit. At one point, someone grabbed my ankles out from under me so that I almost ended up sitting on some poor boy’s face. The rain was a hindrance when we tried to watch the girl pop sensation, Son Ya Shi Dae, perform on the stage set up on the beach that evening. By the time they rambled through the typical opening ceremonies, we were soaked to the bone and shivering and gave in on the band that apparently never showed anyways. As we were darting through the puddles back to the beach house, we were surprised with the most grandiose fireworks show I had ever seen. Because ‘face’ is so important in Korean culture, I have read that Koreans will dig themselves into debt to impress. As we watched millions of Korean won exploding colorfully through the curtain of rain, we were definitely impressed.

The beach house doubled as a time machine back to college life. Over two hundred people were drinking and dancing, and the DJ kept up until six in the morning. Meanwhile, the open doors of the unairconditioned condo let in a battalion of mosquitoes that easily defeated the exposed sleeping foreigners wedged into the rooms like puzzle pieces. After fighting for pillows and square feet of floor, I ended up curled between a boy’s feet and a snoring man with my arm for a pillow and my extra T-shirt for a blanket. After cleaning up the wreckage in the morning, it was a weary ride back to where we would be teaching the next day.

My last week of teaching was going great. I prepared a class party with a game, a cheesy goodbye speech that I wrote in Korean, a class photo, and 4 watermelons to serve to each of my twenty classes. The students were showering me with cards that, according to the music teacher, they had made in music class, as well as candy and little stuffed animals. One class even asked me to go out of the room, and when I returned they were blasting Auld Lang Syne and poster they had all signed.

All went very smoothly at my main school. My final two days would be at Yangmok, my second school. While I loved my Yangmok students, I wasn’t crazy about teaching there because it was always a little more chaotic. Instead of my own English room, I had to move from classroom to classroom with my armful of teaching materials, and I usually didn’t find out about schedule changes until the last minute. The previous week, I had showed up to Yangmok to several surprises. Yangmok was about to rebuild the middle school, and when I showed up that Wednesday, they were in the process of moving their entire school into a different building so that their old school could be demolished. As soon as they settled into their new (actually very old) classrooms, I had to go in to teach. I found that my Korean co-teacher, who had been a long term substitute, had quit and for the last two weeks of school I was working with a brand new teacher the students had never met. Additionally, the computers were not yet set up in the classrooms, and with my lesson plan revolving around a PowerPoint presentation, I had to create a new lesson on the spot.

I was slightly worried about throwing the party at Yangmok with the hectic disorganization and with 16 watermelons getting delivered each day. Hyo Jin and some of the teacher’s assistants helped me order and slice the watermelons, and my first class went great. During my second class, though, the head English teacher called me out into the hallway.

“Did you know about the swine flu?” he asked. My heart sank. I knew exactly what was about to happen. One of three other foreign English teachers in my town, who had slept in the same beach house as me and hundreds of others, had caught the swine flu at that miserable Mud Festival. I was told to go home immediately. I asked if I could at least say goodbye to my students, so I went from classroom to classroom repeating my goodbye speech and writing my email on the board. My poor students were just torn between feeling awkward at seeing their teacher cry and germophobic. Still, they managed to scribble some really sweet goodbye notes for me to read over during my five day quarantine in my one room apartment.

Summer went by quicker than I expected. The remainder of July I taught English camps, first to a group of sixth graders from around the county and then to a group of elementary school teachers. Instead of one big farewell party, I spent the beginning of August spreading out individual goodbyes to my traveling friends, and in my final two weeks when I thought I might feel lonely and bored, I divided my time between packing up my things and constant adventures with ‘Anchovy Poop.’

Although I studied some on my own, Okhee was my main source for learning Korean. Every day, she would teach me a word or two in Korean in exchange for a word of Spanish, which she wanted to learn in hopes of visiting Spain one day. Whenever I impressed her with my Korean, putting together a difficult phrase or slipping in some provincial dialect, she would tell me “Hasan haseyo” – come down from the mountain. This saying comes from when Korean monks were said to isolate themselves in the mountaintops for intense study and meditation. When they felt learned and enlightened, they came down from the mountain to put their wisdom to use. Therefore, it was especially appropriate that our final excursion was in the mountains.

Seorak Mountain is among the highest peaks in South Korea, at 1,700 meters, so when I was told that we were taking a three day trip, I imagined two or three days of serious hiking from the bottom of the mountain to the top and back down, probably sleeping in a lodge, but possibly even camping. I should have known better. I was traveling with a group of 4 ajumas – the strong married woman type, not the bow-legged ancients. We drove about five hours to the mountain and then continued to drive 1,100 meters into the mountainside. We stayed at a temple where we ate delicious food and frolicked in the stream, where I fell in fully clothed after chasing Okhee’s flip flop downstream. That was the extent of our first day’s work.

The next morning, we rose with the sun and began our hike at seven. In the beginning, it was a nearly flat leisurely walk, and I was getting a kick out of all the ajumas decked out in walking sticks and visors. Okhee had even bought new pants for the occasion. People descending, though, began to tell us that the temple we were headed for would stop serving lunch soon. Because one of our partners was struggling, Okhee and I raced ahead up what had become a steep and strenuous climb to the temple to save lunches. After a hearty monk lunch, I realized that this was our planned turn-around point. Their idea of climbing a mountain was to drive up the first kilometer, hike up to not the peak, turn around and head back. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, Okhee was an adventurous spirit like myself.

The two of us pushed forward to the top. The trail was labeled with three summits, and the first of the summits, we were told, was only an hour uphill. But the peak turned out to be a bit of a tease. After reaching this first peak, which did not end up being much of a peak at all, we decided it would be worth the extra 600 meters to the second peak, which ended up being only a snack shop along a ridge toward the actual peak. We finally reached the true top of the mountain two hours after lunch. Beyond the Koreans posing with the altitude sign, the view was unbelievable. In one direction, I counted thirteen layers of tan rocky peaks; in another I saw the East Sea spreading into the horizon; in another, a peak rose into view from the communistic expanse of North Korea.

Assuming that the descent would take about half the time as the climb, we figured that we would return to the temple just as it started to get dark. We stumbled down the steep slopes on sore knees, making good time. As the grade lessened, though, so did our speed. What we forgot to take into account that the first half of the hike had been practically flat, and would take just as long in the opposite direction. We would not make it back to the temple in daylight, not to mention before the temple dinner. We tried to call our companions to ask them to save us some food, as we had done for them at lunch, but we weren’t getting reception on the mountain. While Okhee was beginning to panic on the quickly dimming trail, we were sure the others were twice as worried. With Okhee limping on an arthritic joint and leaning on my shoulder, we lit the rocky path directly in front of us with our cell phones. We finally hobbled back to the temple, stinking and starving, under a sky illuminated with stars. What we never expected to find was an empty room awaiting us.

The three other ajumas had taken an alternative route home, and similarly had no reception on the trail. Although the map had shown the other path to take only an extra hour, it had taken them up and down ridges until 10:30 at night when they finally showed up to the room where a worried Okhee and I were ravenously chowing down dried fruit and nuts. Compared to them, our excursion to the peak and the five hour trek back had been a shortcut.

Despite meeting multiple times over the last couple weeks, ‘Anchovy Poop,’ who usually united only once a month, came together once more for my last night in Korea. We ate Korean barbecue and drank soju in a mud-walled charcoal sauna as a final send-off, and in the morning a couple members even surprised me for one more farewell at the bus station.

I came to Korea with an open mind, knowing nearly nothing about it, hoping to like it, and expecting some adventures. I never foresaw, as a middle school English teacher, just how adventurous my life would be, and I definitely could not have known that I would fall in love with the country. I am sure that there was infinitely more for me to learn and love if I had stayed, but I felt ready to come down from the mountain. If my metaphorical coming down from the mountain is anything like my literal one was, then I am looking forward to a lot of challenges and laughter in the days ahead.