Johnny Clegg is the answer

Daegu,

I woke up this morning feeling distinctly disgruntled. I went to bed early last night, partly because I was exhausted but mostly because I’m trying desperately to get my body to catch up with the time-zone. I really was tired and fell straight to sleep, only to wake up at midnight and lie awake for hours and hours. Also I was hungry. When I did the maths, it would have been around 5pm in South Africa – just the time of day I always get hungry. I realise this is odd – it seems to stem from Res days when dinner used to start at 5pm or something. I don’t know. What I do know is that waking up at midnight and lying awake for hours is not conducive to a good nights sleep. I haven’t started working yet (and it’s Sunday) so I could probably have caught up on those hours after my alarm went off this morning, but I’m now on a mission to convince my body that morning really is morning (and not the middle of the night). I wish there was some tablet you could take that would just ruk’t reg. I realise, with a deep sigh, that this isn’t going to happen. I’m just going to have to force myself to do things like eat at the right time and hope my stupid body eventually catches up.

As a result of the disgruntled-ness, I was restless all morning. Possibly also as a result of spending most of the last four days in my flat and not doing very much. I have been able to chat to one or two of my friends, who are now much closer in terms of time-zone. But a lot of the people I would normally talk to when frustrated and bored are 7-hours behind and not that keen to wake up at 6am and have conversations because I am bored. Also they are now variously at Fest and Nationals. And then I had a flash of inspiration: Johnny Clegg. It is almost impossible to be irritable and restless and unhappy with the world when you have Johnny Clegg filling the house. So I’ve spent the last hour or so with Johnny Clegg, followed by Freshly Ground, ringing through my flat, while I did domestic things like washing up and putting away clean clothes and now feel much happier with life. And a little bit of Mango Groove thrown in for good measure, because, after all, who can resist those penny-whistles?

One of the reasons I was so tired last night was that I went for a long walk around my neighbourhood yesterday. When I first left home to go to varsity (now approaching many years ago) I discovered that one of the best ways to turn an unfamiliar place into home is just to walk around. The area where I live in Daegu (and seemingly most of the city) is fairly built up. By this I mean that there are clusters of sky-scraper apartments everywhere. It’s also surrounded by mountains so the mountains and the skyscrapers battle for dominance of the view from ground level. This is the first time I’ve ventured out for long enough to see much of the area. And it’s fascinating. Just down the road – a marvellous discovery I intend to explore fully as soon as I’m a bit more settled – is an Italian restaurant and ‘Wine House’, with – so it says outside – wines from a variety of countries, including France, Australia, Spain, Italy and – yay – South Africa. Which will perhaps be an even better cure for homesickness than the KFC which is just a little further down the road.

I also discovered a wonderful world of other things. There is a park down the road, for example, with the most incredible jungle-gyms in the world. Seriously amazing castles with slides and bars and huge noughts and crosses games. This is apart from the ordinary swings and slides. Given the number of people who must live in the area – with all the high-rise blocks of flats clustered together, and the lack of open spaces, I suppose these are the only places that kids really have to play. As glad as I am that I grew up in a country with wide open spaces and lots of freedom to play anywhere, I’m still a little jealous that we never had jungle gyms like these.

Little children don’t play in the streets here – the driving is notoriously dangerous – but there were plenty of them walking by themselves or in small groups, obviously off to a park or school-yard to play with friends. Or perhaps an English or music lesson somewhere. Several of the shops I walked past had pictures of pianos and violins and music notes on the outside and I wondered what they were until I walked past one which said in English ‘piano lessons’. The mind boggles a little at a place where music teachers are in such demand that they can afford studios on the very busy (with shops and people, not just cars) streets.

The street sides are literally littered with store-fronts, here. Anything from banks and internet cafés to vegetable shops, bakeries like Paris Baguette (apparently bread is a French invention) and little places with improbably European names like ‘My place Rest & Cafe’ (meaning, I assume Restaurant and Café). I also walked past a driving range (and down the road ‘Hole in One Rest & Cafe’). There are little supermarket-lets and take-aways and ice-cream parlours (with pictures of penguins!) everywhere. And little clothes shops that look just the same as what, at home, have become known as ‘China shops’ after one that opened in Stutt called something like ‘China Shop #99’. If I ever need to get my hair cut – and am willing to trust a Korean hairdresser – I should have no problem, there are salons everywhere,too, with what must be the Korean version of American pop music spilling from their doorways. I walked past several DIY shops (that said Do It Yourself), and through the open door of one of which I could see someone working on the most beautiful wooden coffee table. Garden equipment shops spilling onto the pavement, too, with unattended hoses and watering cans. And despite the plethora of vegetable shops and little take away places, you also have to be careful when walking along the pavements not to trip over people selling vegetables on the pavement, the kind of take-away wagons you find at Fest and street-stalls with more of the kind of clothes found at China Shop #99. I even came across someone selling fish on the side of the road – a slight upgrade from the Mozambique style because she had all her fish neatly laid out in plastic boxes with ice and transparent lids. Probably also not as fresh as Mozambique given that I’m pretty sure we’re not at the coast.

I have been warned that Korean drivers are, basically, crazy, so was very careful to cross only at designated crossings (with local people) and the appropriate traffic lights, and to wait for the lights to be green for me, even if there were no cars coming. Watching the driving, however, I think this has been somewhat overstated. I can fully understand why someone coming from a well-ordered European or American city might find the drivers a little intimidating but I think the South African taxi drivers, even those from a small town, are probably more crazy, and anyone from Joburg – provided they could navigate driving on the wrong side of the road – would probably handle this traffic fine. I do think, however, that it might be a good idea for a country that has crazy drivers and a high death-rate from traffic accidents not to put TV screens in all their car dashboards as a matter of course. Just a thought.

At one point I was walking up a wide, busy road when I came around a corner and suddenly had a perfect view of a mountain. Having spent a lot of time in Cape Town and a fair number of years in a town that is know for it’s forestry industry, there is something secure and welcoming about huge green hills covered in dark green trees. It made me smile. I happened to be walking past a café (Rest & Cafe?) at the time and one of the ladies sitting outside must have noticed my sudden joy and smiled broadly at me. I smiled back. I think she was amused but that’s okay – I’m perfectly happy to be the object of amusement if it means I get to see so many lovely new things.

In my meanderings, I also noticed a couple of churches. Churches are built differently where-ever you go but this was a new one on me. I suppose because of the space constraints when you’re trying to fit 2.5 million people into a limited area, pretty much all buildings are square. The churches, however, clearly feel that they need to have spires. So they put tall spires on top of their square, office-style buildings. Definitely different. There is one just behind my building. I could even hear the morning service singing to familiar tunes this morning. I know, from my reading, that this isn’t true of all churches in the city and definitely plan to go and find some of the prettier ones once I’m a little bit more settled.

One of the last things I did on my walk around the area was to pop into one of the markets, just down some steps into the shop, just lower than the road, and pick up some bits and pieces – in this case some coke and some beer (just because I had to try some local beer). It’s the first time I’ve been into a Korean shop alone but, as expected, not at all difficult. The beer says it is beer (it also says ‘cool refreshing and brisk taste with a twist of lemon’, but that’s a whole other story), everything is marked with numbers I recognise and the tills work just the same as anywhere else. And the shopkeeper – although he clearly couldn’t speak a word of English – was courteous and friendly and smiled a lot.

It’s amazing how people will respond to a simple smile. On the way home – after getting ever so slightly lost – I was walking along the same road as and towards an older lady (perhaps one of the famous Korean Grannies – think super-Gogo) who looked me up and down and scowled somewhat, even though I was perfectly respectably dressed and not doing anything to give her any reason to scowl. Until she caught my eye and I nodded and smiled. At which point her face broke into the most stunning grin.

It was something of a whimsical walk and will, I’m sure, be followed by many more, probably slightly more purposeful, exploring expeditions. But for now I am just, as a friend pointed out, hyper-aware of everything and am revelling in the sheer joy of the newness and differentness of everything I see.

Settling in

Daegu,

Today has been a productive day. After just less than 48 hours in the country, I’m finally set up with crucial things – like washing powder and bread. This is thanks to the director of my school who, with his wife, came and picked me up and took me shopping this morning.

Arriving at the shop – a local grocery store – I realised just how lucky I was to be there with someone who could translate for me. Largely because I would have had no idea how to ask for – or find – dishwashing liquid, washing powder or toilet paper. For those who are wondering, I have no Korean at all. I probably should have tried to acquire a basic level before I arrived, but even then I doubt I would have been able to figure out this selection of things. Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem today. And now that I know what to look for, I can probably manage in future on my own. Interestingly, the washing powder looks a lot like Skip. But the dishwashing liquid looks nothing like Sunlight (picks on fb).

I also picked up some food. After reading guide books and forums about Korea, I was a little concerned that I may find myself staring at lots and lots of foreign looking foodstuffs with no idea what to do with it. Not at all. Not only can I get all the usual things I’d pick up at home – potatoes, cheese, ham, butter, pasta, etc. – but they all use pretty much the same pictures on packaging as we do. Lots of them even have English names on them, along with the Korean. The only place where not being able to read Korean would have been a problem is with the salt and sugar, which look remarkably similar except that the packets are different sizes. But that one is really not that hard to figure out.

A few first impressions about Korean groceries:

1. Some of their packaging is really not particularly intelligent
(she says with the smugness of someone who has decided that, in some minor manner at least, her home country is superior). The eggs, for example. Eggs are normally (by which I mean ‘in South Africa’) packaged in these wonderful cardboard egg boxes that fairly efficiently stop them breaking and keep them safe until they hit your fridge and/or frying pan. It’s a simple system and, just to add to the beauty of it, the boxes (at least the cardboard ones) are biodegradable. I bought eggs this morning packaged in very thin plastic which did nothing more, really, than coat the eggs with a layer of think, pink stuff and was stapled closed. The (I think probably inevitable) result was that, by the time I got home, one of the eggs had broken. It just doesn’t make sense to me to use this silly packaging when there is another, easily accessible way of doing it. Unless this is cheaper. But even then, you’d think the customers would complain, wouldn’t they?

2. The Babushka doll-approach to packaging
It seems – in my very limited experience – that there is a tendency here to pack everything inside a packet/box/container of some sort which is inside another packet/box/container of some sort. Like those little Russian dolls. So, for example, the butter I bought this morning (which seemed to be the only kind available at this shop), is a whole box full of ‘mini-butter’ containers – just like those you get at hotels and restaurants – complete with their own individual foil and plastic. A box of butters as opposed to just a tub of butter. Similarly, the cheese (oh, how I’m going to miss real cheese) is packing in three 100g packets, all contained within a larger packet, to the front of which is taped yet another packet, this one containing four slices of cheese. I looked for a block of cheese but unfortunately could only find grated or sliced. Everything pre-packaged for convenience – sliced bread, sliced cheese, etc. The coffee also comes in little sachets inside a box, instead of in a tin.

3. Cooking oil can be made from anything!
This will perhaps not come as a huge shock for other people, but I’ve never seen anything other than sunflower as a basic, ordinary cooking oil. I realise you can also get olive oil, and recently avocado oil, in SA. But all of those seem logical – they’re all oily fruits (nuts? Seeds?). And all familiar, which I suppose is part of the reason. I’ve never before seen bean-oil, though, or… wait for it… corn oil. For cooking. More and more I think someone needs to do something about the USA’s ridiculous overproduction of corn. Or give the excess to starving Africans instead of turning it into cooking oil. I’m intrigued (but not hopeful) about the taste of  ‘Pure Corn Oil’.

4. Processed, processed, processed

After enjoying a reasonable steak lunch yesterday (with my boss’s boss – probably. Still figuring the hierarchy out), I was optimistic about the food choice in this country – steak available suggests there will be much fresh meat and happiness (says the Eastern Cape girl, before anyone makes any comments). Unfortunately, it appears not. I’m told that most of the food in South Korea is imported, mostly from Australia. This is not surprising, given that 75% of the land is forests and lakes and quite a lot of the rest is covered with industry and a population of roughly 50 million – all of whom still need to be fed. I assume it is as a result of this that most food seems to be super-processed and/or tinned. This makes me somewhat sad but I’m sure it’s not the end of the world.

Also, it doesn’t apply to fruit and vegetables. These, it appears, are available on the side of the road. It feels a little bit like an extension of the type of market experience in Mozambique – with trays and boxes and plastic bags of tomatoes and potatoes and what in SA is called ‘Chinese cabbage’ – except simply as road-side hawkers rather than in organised markets. Which makes sense given the South Korean shopping set-up seems far nearer to the British ‘high-street’ system than American malls.

So vegetables shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Also, I am quite excited to explore the area around my school (the place where I’ll be working) because – from the very little bit I saw yesterday in the rain – it looks like it’s surrounded by a maze of the type of little alley-ways full of stores that you see in movies of ‘The East’, with everything from umbrellas to socks to lots of fresh vegetables. The idea makes me happy, even if I won’t be able to bargain any time soon unless I miraculously acquire the language overnight.

Another productive part of today has been doing laundry. I spent the last week in SA staying with friends in Joburg, so had a load of washing which needed doing from the moment of arrival. Luckily, my flat comes equipped with a washing machine. It’s a large, 10kg LG washing machine. Just like the washing machines we have at home in SA. I was pleased to see, when I was unpacking and rearranging things that there is even an instruction manual. Which is great. Except for one minor detail: It’s in Korean. Both the instruction manual and the washing machine are in Korean. Korean instructions and wash cycles and buttons. This resulted , this afternoon, in me standing in the wet-room with an armful of washing and a bag of washing powder, trying to figure out how to make the washing machine work and, equally importantly, how to make it work without flooding the whole flat or destroying the clothes. This was before the internet was working at home, so not even any chance of checking there. Eventually, after much guesswork and trying to remember what buttons did what on the washing-machine back home (which I don’t think is an LG but looks a little bit similar), I chucked in the clothes and washing powder, took a deep breathe and pressed the ‘play’ button. Amazingly, it worked. So I now have clean, if damp, clothes. I also have a bathroom floor covered in water but that’s apparently what is meant to happen – the used water runs right down the wet-room drain in the middle of the floor.

So, I now have food and the ability to wash things, as well as internet and a phone – even if the phone seems to have trouble sending international smses and is terrible at anything internet-related. All in all, a productive day. I start work on Monday, so am planning to spend the weekend curled up in my flat going over the teaching material. Or perhaps not curled up, given the weather. A little warm for curling up. Not ridiculously warm, though – at least not today. In fact, after a couple of days here, I am starting to think that all those people who write guide books that say that Korea in July is unbearably hot and humid have never been to Mozambique in summer. Or to Durban, for that matter. It’s warm but pleasantly warm, with lovely thunderstorm-y weather and the kind of mild humidity that is only really a problem if you’re trying to dry your clothes or have hair that tends to frizz. So perhaps I’ll just sit in the flat instead, perhaps with an ice-cold coke and some chocolate, and get ready to teach debating.

There’s a washing machine in my shower

Daegu

So, I have a new flat in a new city, half a world away from the country where I’ve lived all my life – and which I love very dearly. It is not a tiny flat. It’s smaller than the places I lived in Rondebosch but I think it’s probably roughly the same size as the flat where on Katherine street in Sandton.

The Katherine Street flat, however, was modern and western and super-secure. This is not. I knew before I left home that I would be in a fairly student-y flat. Given that I’m doing what for many people is a student-type, just-post-varsity, almost-backpacker-nomad thing, it really is to be expected. That doesn’t stop me being sad that my flat is not pretty. My life for the last few years has been a succession of pretty homes which I have generally chosen myself (or which were my parents’) and which required very little effort to make them comfortable and homely.  Even my res room didn’t take much to make pretty. Apart from the ages spent in hotels over the past 10 years, this is the first time I’m in a place that I haven’t chosen myself and which is likely to require quite a lot of effort to get it looking the way I’d like. Or perhaps it really won’t and I’m just feeling a little intimidated by the idea of being so far from home and am taking it out on the poor apartment.

The flat has 4 rooms. The main bedroom is big enough to fit, with reasonable comfort, a double bed and cupboard. It also contains a modem – which I’m hoping means that I will shortly be able to set up internet at home – which would add greatly to the flat’s appeal. The bed is reasonably comfortable even if it does creak. It appears to be one of those that you put together yourself from a kit, but which hasn’t been put together particularly well. The cupboard is fine, if rather plastic and even comes with coat-hangers – a huge relief given that I left mine at home as part of an effort to stay within weight limitations. The particularly interesting feature in this room is the window. Or rather the window covering. Most of the windows in the flat have 2 sliding layers on the inside-side of the burglar bars (if this country really has no crime, why are their burglar bars?). The layer just inside the bars is a fly-screen. Or rather a mosquito screen. This makes me super-happy – mozzies and other summer-heat-related bugs are my nemesis. The next layer is a clear sliding window (side-to-side, not sash). The final layer is smoky, patterned glass which, I’m guessing, is intended to replace curtains. In the main bedroom this is supplemented by a layer of thick and violently blue plastic. I initially thought that this was because there were no windows. Further investigation, however, suggests that it is probably just there to keep out the sun in the mornings. I feel that I may well remove it sometime soon. Especially because the noise from the middle-school across the road will probably be more of a wake-up call than the light.

Not that there is much natural light that will reach the windows anyway. This area of Daegu is fairly built-up. Actually, it appears that every area of Daegu is fairly built up. The view from the kitchen/dining-room, which is also where I have my computer set up, is of the next building’s stairs and front doors. Sigh. The kitchen/dining-room itself has some of the necessities of life. It has a cooker-thing (although I haven’t yet tried it), a lovely fridge, a microwave which is not plugged in – which may indicate that it does not work – and a semi-functional air-conditioner which is situated over the table and no longer has a remote, so that you have to stand on a chair and balance precariously in order to make it work. It also smells a bit mouldy.

The kitchen also has a typical student-digs collection of plates, cups, glasses and cutlery. I’m currently drinking espresso out of a tin (with ice) from a wine glass because there aren’t really any ‘normal’ glasses. The kitchen does have a table, which although not all that stable (I wouldn’t try sitting on it for example), is very convenient and would even mean that I could probably invite people to dinner if I had any people to invite. Or something to feed them. Apart from Spam. Why is it that in every digs you will invariably find some weird thing left by the former tenants? In this case that includes a large cardboard box – sort of a gift or presentation pack – of Spam. I’m thinking that perhaps the former tenant was American. Tenants, sorry. Apparently the previous person to live here had a wife. Not entirely sure how she coped. They have also left behind one egg, some store-bought ice – which is super given that the water here is apparently not great for drinking – and, oddly, a pack of cigarettes in the freezer. This last mystery I intend to explore further. Does everyone in Korea keep their cigarettes in the freezer? Does it keep them fresh? Were they hiding them from someone?

The kitchen is missing a kettle, which makes me quite sad. Once I have finished the tinned espresso my recruiter (who picked me up at the airport and brought me here last night) was kind enough to buy for me (along with some orange juice, some bottled water and some tomatoes), I will boil a pot of water on the stove to make coffee. Or tea, even. I wonder how anyone in a tea-addicted nation manages without a kettle? The kitchen/dining-room/now-study area also has space for sitting and to put stuff on the walls. So I will be putting up some lions and African-people-pictures just as soon as I can find some prestic-like-substance. Or perhaps drawing pins.

The second-bedroom-come-lounge contains one times single bed (cream), one times 3-seater couch (brown ‘leather’), one times big TV on stand (brown and with possible cable decoder) and one times fancy-ass Hi-Fi – that I’ll probably never be able to figure out – (in brown stand). And a coffee table. Everything in the room is brown or cream. If I end up spending a whole year here, I will most definitely be opting for a slightly less res-common-room circa 1970s (without the psychadelica) feel.

Which leaves the final room in the house and definitely the most interesting. And disconcerting. The whole place is a little bit like a cross between a Mozambican backpackers (mostly because it needs a good clean and the furniture looks like something someone else threw out) and a dodgy Grahamstown student digs of the sort that has been a digs for a very, very long time – and still has the original not-expensive furniture and obligatory  bottle-opener. The one thing every digs and backpackers has, however, is at least one bath and/or shower. This flat doesn’t. Or at least, it doesn’t in the traditional west-European (and, let’s be frank, urban African) sense. It has what is known in some places (Turkey, possibly?) as a Wet-room. What this means is that the toilet and, in this case, washing machine sit in a tiled room, which has a drain in the centre and a tap and shower-head on the wall. In order to have a shower, you simple close the door and stand in the middle of the room and turn on the shower. I have already discovered one of the major drawbacks of this system – which is damp toilet paper. I also feel that it, surely, cannot be good for the washing machine to sit in a wet room and get showered on every day. Given that it’s a Korean-made washing machine, that this type of bathroom is apparently normal in this country and that washing machines apparently always live in bathrooms here, it’s probably fine. It just feels odd. Although, come to think of it, perhaps this is why washing machines, which used to be metal and occasionally rusted, suddenly started to be made of plastic at about the same time as the economic miracle in this part of the world. Food for thought. In the meantime, I’m going to have to used to a very different kind of shower-experience. And a perpetually damp bathroom floor.

But as much as I may bitch about it, there is a certain charm and sense of potential to a student-like place and I’m sure I’ll be able to make something of it for as long as I’m here. The only thing that concerns me a bit is security. There is only one door without any security gate and only one lock, for example. Not even a bolt. This is within courtyard reached by a locked gate. But the gate could be easily climbed over. According to the guidebook to Korea and all of the many forums (fora?) on-line, this shouldn’t be a problem. There is supposed to be a distinct lack of crime in this country. So even walking up a not-particularly-well-lit alley-like road, to a dark and not very well lit locked gate, through a courtyard and up the stairs, after a bus trip back from the school, should be fine. I am meeting my director shortly and hope to be able to confirm this with him. I’m guessing – given that the last two teachers who did my job lived here quite happily – that it is true. Which is going to require me to overcome all of the instincts which make my hairs stand on end and my shoulder muscles tense immediately at the very idea of walking anywhere alone at night. You can take the girl out of South Africa but it’s a whole lot harder (especially because the trip was hassle-free) to take the South African vreemdeling-vrees out of the girl. I anticipate a series of rapid, slightly terrified runs up the hill before I settle in. And that it’ll take time for me to get used to sleeping soundly with only one locked door and one locked gate as security.

It’s possible I may be moving at some point to a place within walking distance of the school. This would be preferable purely for convenience. But for now, this is home – many, many miles and a world of difference away from a small town in the Eastern Cape where I grew up.

3 July, 14:00 – PS Internet now set up in flat. Appeal greatly increased.