Tag Archives: sky

Another washing machine in another shower …

Admin, Daegu, ,

I am not a fan of moving house. Some people find the change exciting and enjoy the packing and the unpacking. I’m not one of those. I don’t mind unpacking as much – creating order out of chaos appeals to my OCD side – but it takes ages for me to settle and I really, really hate packing. Moving house in a foreign country is a whole new level of misery.

The question of me moving has been discussed on and off for months. When I first moved here, I was told I would be living within walking distance from the school. Then that changed and I was told it would be a few months before I could move. Then, in November, I was told I’d be moving soon. Then I was told I’d move at the end of January. And so on and so on. So, you can imagine my dismay when I discovered on Tuesday that they wanted me to move now, only to a place not anywhere near being within walking distance of the school. In fact, when they first mentioned it, they referred to an area that isn’t even on a bus route. I was, I think understandably, unimpressed. After explaining repeatedly, to people who only use private cars, that a place not on any bus route may as well be in Siberia in terms of convenience, they finally got around to explaining where the place actually is, at which point I – being the only person familiar with the bus routes – figured out that there would be a bus. After a lot of stress I really didn’t need.

Then I discovered, on Thursday evening, that I would be moving on Sunday. The practice of only informing people of things three minutes before they happen seems to be a Korean ‘thing’. Several of my friends have also commented on it. Perhaps there is something cultural that de-prioritizes proper advanced planning. It bothers me. A lot. Particularly in a case like this, where the short notice meant that all the work of sorting and packing, along with all the emotional ups and downs of moving, has to be squeezed into three days. I asked how the move would happen. They said they’d organise movers to come in and move the furniture. I also got to pop into the new place so that I’d know what I needed to bring with me. Armed with this information, I started packing on Friday. This largely involved taking everything out of cupboards and all the pictures off walls and putting them in piles.

On Saturday I was woken early by worries about moving. I spent the morning sorting through things and then made a couple of trips to the new flat with a backpack full of things like books and plates and frying pans. I would have continued during the afternoon but I had plans to meet a friend downtown, a friend who is leaving shortly and whose company was infinitely preferable to the packing.

As happens when the company is congenial and there is ice-cream and strawberry dessert, the time just flew by and before we knew it, it was evening and we decided to grab some dinner before heading home. The ice-cream and strawberry creation, accompanied by miniature bottles of Rose, was at Café Lucid, which I hadn’t discovered before but which was lovely and quirky and the perfect place for sitting and chatting for hours. For dinner we ended up, after walking in a large circle, at Gulliver’s Travels – an ‘antique restaurant’. An antique restaurant is not, for the record, a place that cooks and serves up antiques, as the name may suggest. Rather, it is decorated with an eclectic collection of antique bits and pieces, paired with old record covers, big wooden tables and comfy chairs. The food was pretty good and the atmosphere lovely so we, not surprisingly, lost track of time all over again and before we knew it, it was nearly 10pm.

Sunday was far, far less fun. I woke up early so that I could get everything done. The movers were coming at 2pm so I had time to finish packing once I actually managed to drag my exhausted body out of bed. I packed up another backpack full of stuff, as well as a grocery bag (think Woolworth’s canvas bags) full of tins and dry pasta, and headed to the new flat. At the new flat, I unpacked the bags and put stuff in cupboards and drawers and then headed back to the old place to get the next load. These trips involved me walking down the hill to the bus stop (5 to 10 minutes), waiting for the bus (10 to 15 minutes), taking the bus the 10 or 15 minutes to the area of my new flat, unpacking (15 minutes), and taking the same bus back and walking back up the hill (20 minutes). I managed two more trips across to the new place before 1pm, taking everything I wanted from the kitchen.

The person from my school who was organising things phoned me at 2pm to tell me that he wasn’t able to be there just yet but that the movers had arrived. I let them in and watched in frustration as they packed everything in the house into the same crates to move them, as if they were all going to the same place. They spoke no English and my very few words of Korean had deserted me, so we were entirely unable to communicate. I was moving from a two-bedroom apartment to a one-room flat. The new place is just a bit bigger than a university res room. There was no way all this stuff would fit. The Beommul-dong flat is also the place where a series of foreign teachers have lived over several years, many of whom have left things behind: basketballs, weights, a large table, books and videos in which I have no interest, a huge hi-fi system with speakers and radio and tape deck, a pressure cooker. None of these are things I wanted, especially in my tiny new flat. I watched with growing impotent panic as they packed them all up.

Just then, to make things worse, the landlord’s wife came in and started talking at me in Korean. I couldn’t understand her. And I was already miserable and stressed and tired. I tried to explain that I didn’t understand. She just kept on and on talking at me in Korean, getting louder and more and more annoyed. By the time my boss arrived, ages and ages after he was supposed to be there, I was close to tears. He proceeded to have long conversations with various people before we could finally leave. I suspect that the problem was that the landlord and his wife – neither of whom I had actually seen much of at all before this horrible day – had not been informed that I’d be moving out. Either way, it was not a fun few hours.

We arrived at the new place and I had another struggle to convince the movers and the person from my school that they could not just dump all the stuff at my new place. I stood my ground fiercely and eventually got just the few things I wanted moved in. They left and I went upstairs and collapsed on my couch and stared at the the things I needed to unpack.

The silver lining of the whole experience is that I quite like the new place. It really is tiny, one room which includes sleeping area, sitting area and cooking area – picture a bedroom closet next to a refrigerator and the sink and cooker, just a couple of feet from the edge of the bed and the couch – plus a little bathroom. But it on the second floor on the top of a hill and the windows that look out across the top of buildings towards tree-covered hills and, most importantly, I can see the sky. Blue sky and clouds and stars and everything. Just up the road is a large art gallery and theatre (Suseong Artpia) with another small tree-covered hill. Nearby (probably within 10 or 15 minutes walking distance) is Suseong Lake. The hill I have to climb to get home is much, much gentler than the one I used to walk up from the bus stop and also shorter. There are better and closer little shops. At the end of the road, literally 10 minutes walk away (I timed it) is The Hut where we generally gather on a Friday night to drink dongdongju and eat kimchi pancakes. Almost all my friends live in the area. There is a range of little restaurants and take away places within a couple of blocks. A lot of the top fancy restaurants in town are nearby. Inside, the flat is done in a colour scheme of back and white, instead of the sickly, faded pink and green which was starting to drive me mad. And there is far more light and air because the windows aren’t shaded by other buildings.

So the destination isn’t all bad, but I think I’ll try and avoid the experience of moving house in a foreign country again, at least unless I can be absolutely sure that the people involved all speak English and I have a little more time and a little more control. Oh, and just for the record, there is a washing machine in my new shower, too. Only in Korea…

‘Proper’ winter

Daegu, ,

I think a lot of people I spend time with in Daegu are under the impression that I truly and deeply hate winter. They’d be wrong, as it happens. I am quite fond of winter, actually. I find it exhilarating and invigorating and quite often beautiful. The difference, of course, is that I like the winters I have grown up with and grown to love over many years, rather than the torturous cold I’ve experience for the first time in the last few months. This is not to say that it’s been all bad. Seeing snow was great and the ski trip has been one of the highlights of my time here in Korea. Going to work and especially coming home late at night in the freezing, freezing cold, however, has been horrible.

In the last few weeks, though, the weather has begun to change. It’s not the beginning of spring, which apparently is still a month away. The first stirrings of spring, the swelling buds on trees and the first beginnings of green on the hills are nowhere to be seen. Instead, it feels a little like Daegu has passed out of whatever horrible aberration was the iciness of recent months and into ‘proper’ winter weather (like that I’m used to). Suddenly, day-time temperatures are above freezing and the sun shines strongly enough to make you warm if you can find a sheltered spot. And the air is dry, dry, dry and static-y. And the best of all is the light. One of the reasons I have always loved winter is the clear, crisp air and the winter light that make you feel like you can see for a million miles.

I popped out to the shops at lunchtime today and bravely left a good deal of the winter clothing that I normally drag around with me behind. I was determined to take advantage of the slightly warmer weather and wear normal clothes. I stepped out into crisp but not freezing air. Occasional little gusts of colder air swirled past but for the most part it was perfectly still. I turned a corner and found myself walking in bright sunshine. The glorious rays of light and warmth rained down on me and made me feel like myself again – the same person who used to find a sunshiny spot to sit during school breaks in Queenstown, who used to sit in the library quad soaking up the sunshine in Grahamstown, who could spend hours and hours curled up with a book on the sunny enclosed verandah in Rondebosch.

In the clear air, the park I walked past looked pristine and perfect and each leaf of the trees outlined against the buildings and the sky. The sky. The sky in winter fills my heart with joy. The blue is empty and empty and feels like it goes on forever and ever. On the bus, on the way to work, we came over a hill and the view opened up to a picture of mountains and hills stretching to the sky with a white day-time moon hanging above the horizon. Even the crowded skyscrapers that clutter every corner of this city look sharp and sketched and beautiful in this weather.

I don’t know if it will last. Last year’s February temps suggest that it’ll still be chilly but I might get lucky with weather mostly above zero. I hope it does last for a while, partly because I dread the thought of returning to the bone-chilling weather that marked the first part of this month. But also because I want time to enjoy the kind of winter I love and to spend as much time as possible curled up, cat-like, in the warmth of the winter sun.

Missing the sky

Daegu, , ,

The warrior’s now a worker and his war is underground
With cordite in the darkness he milks the bleeding veins of gold
When the smoking rock-face murmurs, he always thinks of you
African sky blue
Johnny Clegg and Savuka, African Sky Blue

Daegu is a city of sky-scrapers. Sometimes when I’m moving around in buses and on foot, I can forget this and feel almost as if it is normal for buildings to tower over roads and buildings, but it’s always there at the back of my mind. I find all cities a little claustrophobic. I once spent a day in New York and my lasting impression of it is that there are too many buildings and not enough open spaces. And I don’t mean little parks in between the buildings. I know that lots of cities have created parks and planted trees and done everything they can to ‘green’ their cities. But a little bit of green is not the same as open spaces. This city is surrounded by tree-covered hills (literally surrounded – it feels like there are dozens of them). It’s hard to explain to someone from a completely different world that the green is sometimes as claustrophobic as the huge buildings.

Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to what you’re used to. The area where I’ve been living in South Africa is a forestry area, with miles of green forested hills and some natural forests of the Tsitsikamma variety. But these exist in between the wind-swept grassland mountain slopes and open hills dotted with acacias and the occasional aloe. And all the places I have travelled to in South Africa, as well as the several other places I have lived, have been surrounded by open space. Farmlands and game parks and open veld stretching to the horizon, or the immenseness of the open sea.

One of the other reasons that all South African spaces seem more open is probably because our cities tend to meander off into the distance instead of being compact (modern?) cities. We seem to build out instead of up. I suppose because a shortage of space is not generally a constraint. Plus, of course, ground that is not hugely stable in places like Joburg make building up a little risky. Here they build up. In order to house the apartments and offices of the millions who live in the small-ish city where I am, massive apartment blocks grow towards the heavens. When I first landed in Daegu, I was struck by the fact that, from the air, the sky scrapers looked like clusters of some semi-wild thing growing straight upwards from the ground. From the ground, from the streets and the little parks, they seem like monstrous hunks of concrete towering precariously above you (though the precariousness is probably just a matter of perspective). In a city surrounded by mountains, the sight of a green hill is actually fairly rare; a sweet surprise when you round a bend or find yourself high enough up to see them, but generally hidden by yet another neon-lit sky-scraper. Even from my fifth-floor classroom window, most of the hills are obscured by much taller buildings.

And then there is the rain. A lot of South Africa is way closer to desert than lush green paradise. I love the summer thunderstorms of the Highveld but they don’t deliver all that much rain. Even Cape Town, except when it’s flooding, only gets a moderate amount of rain compared to a lot of other places in the world. I got quite used to regular rain in Cape Town Winters. It didn’t thrill me then, either. This is a lot like that – except that it’s always hot. And there seems to be even more of it. I don’t think there has been a dry day since I arrived. I now don’t ever leave the house without an umbrella and most days I wake up to and/or go to sleep to the sound of rain. Today I was glad that the rain woke me because I had forgotten to set my alarm. But at some point enough feels like enough. You start to wonder how there can possibly be so much water in the sky (yes, I know scientifically that is a silly statement, but that’s how it feels). Particularly in the mornings when I’m walking to the bus stop  in the rain (almost without fail). And everything is always a tiny bit damp. Sometimes, when the rain is light, it doesn’t even seem worth the effort of opening an umbrella – and you know that it’s hot enough that the few drops of rain will dry off quickly. Even if I do get odd looks. But often it pours for hours at a time. This also means that there are always clouds. This isn’t the kind of rain that builds, then pours, then clears. Even on the rare occasions when I catch a glimpse of the sky (behind the dark green mountains and the dark grey sky-scrapers), it is grey and full of clouds and rain.

A friend has posted some stunning pics of a trip he took to Lesotho, complete with wonderful wide open sky. Looking at them this afternoon, I was filled with the first surges of homesickness – a deep longing for wide open spaces and endless blue skies. There is something amazing about the emptiness of the African sky – resting a million miles above an African Winter landscape, pale and dry and stretching forever to the horizon. Dana Synman writes in his book, On the Back Roads, “…Maybe it’s because today most of us are confined to life in the cooped-up spaces of the cities. It’s great to know there’s open space out there where you can just drive, and drive, and drive. Open spaces allow you to dream dreams of freedom.” A colleague and I were talking today about how the Koreans seem to live very ordered, confined lives. It’s an almost perfect foil to the freedom of open spaces. The symbol of that freedom for me will always be the sky – those wide open skies that go on forever and forever, with a depth and an intensity that seems to last until the end of time. It makes me think of the Voortrekkers, taking off across the mountains, into the distance – heading out to forever and a future that was uncertain but free. I wonder if they sensed the amazing weight of that empty sky.

Before this bout of longing for African skies, I had lunch today (with same colleague) at a place called Outback. Apparently there is some sense of the value of wide open spaces here, too, even if the name is (as I imagine it is) intended to appeal mostly to the minds (and wallets) of foreigners. Whatever their gimmick, I was not going to complain about being in a restaurant where I could order a steak – a good, solid, rich, medium-rare steak. Meat makes me happy, so it’s good to know that there are places to get a good steak in town. It may not happen often, but it’s good to know there is the option.

We also drove past a group of about 20 people sitting on the pavement outside a building, each on a square of plastic with some kind of plastic topped thing that looked a little like a plastic fan. I was a little confused. Then we saw them all start tapping their plastic things on the ground in unison and chanting. Apparently they were having some kind of protest. I always have a sense of something wrong when I see people from other countries protesting. I had the same feeling watching protests in the UK on TV earlier this year. I feel like they’re not doing it right. I tried to explain it to my colleague, how I feel that they’re not taking it seriously – they’re just not doing it right. In South Africa, a protest involves people who feel very strongly about their issue and will make that very clear with loud, un-ignorable singing and dancing. My colleague pointed out that if he was in charge he probably wouldn’t take it too seriously if people were singing and dancing in protest. Perhaps I didn’t explain it right. I remember watching a BBC report on protests somewhere (Indonesia?) earlier this year and thinking that the reporter was missing the point when he said that all seemed calm because people were singing and dancing. Perhaps it is because I know only too well (based on my country’s history) that a singing, dancing crowd is fully capable of turning to violence if their voices are not heard, but watching a crowd toyi-toyi, it feels like they’re taking it seriously. Or maybe it is the unique strangeness of South Africa (Southern Africa?) that singing and dancing are not just frivolous recreational pastimes, they’re part of everything – a serious, meaningful part of every serious, meaningful thing.

A serious part of every aspect of my life, too, no matter how far away I am. Like the African performances at the Mandela Day concert in New York, which I loved. Particularly Chris Chameleon and Baaba Maal. And watching Jesse Clegg and Freshly Ground perform Asimbonanga, which felt a little bit (at least from my slightly nostalgic perspective) like a new generation of South African musicians taking the torch. The music I can take with me – even if most people here will never quite understand it. Some days I wish I could do the same with the African sky.