Mindfulness and eating

My dinner at Sjávarkjallarinn as a visa commercial:

-Sunflower seed encrusted dark bread with mango sauce and crushed peanuts: free

-Slowly cooked salmon with melon salsa, lime jam, and a lime cracker: free

-reindeer carrpacio with cream cheese, cherry jelly, hazelnuts, balsamic cherry glaze sauce and beer oatmeal crackers: 2900 Icelandic Kroner ($23)

-Salmon with garlic potatomash, carrot purre, and asparagus; tuna with a purple potatomash rolled in mixed nuts and zeshuan pepper whipped cream; blue ling with smoked haddock and turmerick mash and artichoke purre; salted cod with peach purre, polenta, and miso foam: 4900 ISK ($38)

-Gianduja chocolate cake with cherry filling, cherries in syrup, pecan crumble, and cherryblossom icecream: 1900 ISK ($15)

-generous (by Icelandic standards) tip for excellent service from a beautiful waitress indulgent enough to write down all of the descriptions she verbalized: 1500 ISK ($12)

-insight into the nature of experience: priceless

I realize now that I had approached the gourmet food experience in entirely the wrong way up until this dinner, as epitomized by my annoyance at the price to quantity and quality disparity the night before. I had always evaluated food by how much good food you could get for how little money. This night, however, I decided to forget price entirely and simply order whatever looked good. In doing so I realized why gourmet food is so delicious. It isn't really the better ingredients, the expertise put into it, the presentation, the atmosphere, the service, etc. What gourmet meals really do is to get you to think that your meal is worth the outlandish price you are paying. I always did this backwards: I tasted the food and then tried to evaluate what it was worth. The better way is to decide that the food is worth what you are paying for it (or more) and then be determined to get that much pleasure out of it. If you think every mouthful of the meal you are eating is worth as much as an entire meal at another restaurant you don't just wolf down your food and you don't half pay attention to it while you watch TV or listen to your dinner companions or think about what you are going to do later that night; you give your full attention to the taste and texture of the forkful of food in your mouth.

My favorite idea from Buddhism is the concept of mindfulness, of truly experiencing the present as it happens and to completely paying attention to it. Life is so much richer and more enjoyable when you can get into a mindful mindset: you see profound beauty in the smallest details that you would never even notice otherwise. Gourmet food essentially is a foray into mindfulness for non-Buddhists. When I realized this I also realized that I don't need the gourmet price tag to experience the pleasure that a foodie gets from a gourmet meal. A fifty cent mango now brings me more joy than any meal could ever had given me before. The money I spent on this meal was a minuscule price to pay for this new perspective where every morsel, every sip of water, is priceless.

Pilgrimage

As many of you know, I love the movie Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, a film about two monks in Korea. It gave me unrealistically high expectations for Korean Buddhism and gave me an appreciation of ritualized space (see the movie, it's gorgeous and powerful). The movie was shot at Juson pond, an artificial lake created about two hundred years ago that still has several hundred year old trees growing from its depths:Naturally, I decided to visit the location of this story that has had such a large impact on my impressions of Korea (not to mention my decision to come here in the first place) and my search for serenity and mindfulness.

Alanna and I spent an afternoon in the bus getting to Cheongsong, a small city in central Southeastern Korea. The bus stations was absolutely crawling with spiders, which often shared the same webs:

[note: Alanna took about three quarters of the pictures in this post,
not including the ones from the movie]

The town itself isn't particularly noteworthy except as a gateway to Juwangsan National Park, though it did have this great this great 'Tangible Cultural Artifact' number something or other. (Korea has numbered their national treasures, and I've seen some of the highest ranked ones, like a pagoda in Seoul that is national treasure number three. There are also Precious National Monuments, which include things like the Jindo breed of dog. Everything important to the country is categorized and ranked. National Treasure number one was destroyed by an arsonist about six months before I came to Korea.)
Early the next day we entered the actual park.At the entrance was Deajeonsa temple (both it and the city in which I live have names meaning 'great field').
This shrine was for a mountain god:Outside of it were many dragonflies. I've seen tens of thousands of dragonflies this month. I am surprised that the dragonfly isn't a greater symbol in Korean culture and art.
Inside another building at the temple complex were these statues:Past the temple we followed a stream through a valley between craggy peaks.Along the way we detoured to see a couple temples and small caves, one of which held another shrine to a mountain god (you can tell because he has a tiger):More mountains, waterfalls, etc:
We walked along a ridge for a while, and at the highest peak (a modest one, under 900m) we had a nice view over a misty valley.
From that point on we followed a stream along a path that kept crossing the stream without bridges, so that we spent a lot of time trying to find the best stepping stones across. Finally, we reached a far end of the park, where we had to leave and reenter about a kilometer away to get to Jusan Pond. In the movie, the pond had unearthly beauty:In real life it was beautiful, but in a very earthly way:
I wasn't disappointed; I knew that it wouldn't live up to the view of it enhanced with skillful cinematography. Also, the floating temple and the gateway were only placed in the pond for the duration of the filming and had to be removed afterwards (it's ok to have an observation deck for some reason but not the awesome temple...). Actually, the very real earthly beauty of the place helped me to realize how many places in Korea are incredibly beautiful. I had idealized this pond in my mind, and the reality, instead of decreasing my awe of the pond, elevated my awe of everywhere else. I may not have had as great a sense of enlightenment and spiritual journey as the story's protagonist, but I have in my own way become much more appreciative of my life and experiences.

Why I haven't updated this blog this week

This week has been a definite test of my attempts to be happy regardless of my circumstances. My late nights out sending off Bo have resulted in some slight illness, meaning that I have been sick more often in my two months in Korea than in my five years in Portland. Being my usual in-touch-with-my-physical-needs self, I of course stayed up all night on Tuesday for Bo's last night in the country. My favorite part of the evening was eating one last bowl of late night ramyen on the roof of our apartment at 3am, looking out over the sea of apartment complexes and neon red crosses. The roof of our building, like the rest of it, is made entirely of cement and is pretty large, so I am considering throwing a huge barbecue there in the summer with a bonfire right on the cement roof.

Wednesday morning was rather rough. Apparently Lindsay had received a phone call from our manager at 2:30 am to tell her that Bo's replacement Will had not made it on the plane because of a 'chemical problem', which lead us to speculate about attempts to smuggle drugs into the country, but really she meant that there was a mechanical problem with the plane. Our manager really had no idea what was going on and made Lindsay figure it out (which is not exactly part of her job, especially at 2:30am on a Tuesday night), making us wonder why the hell she hung up with Will before figuring it out and shoving the problem onto Lindsay. We were already planning to cover the classes so that Will could actually get some training before being thrown into the deep, but the plane issues caused more confusion in the office. Really, they ought to have flown out Will early enough that he could be trained by Bo before Bo left, but they didn't take Bo's written notice six weeks in advance seriously (they thought they could talk him into staying for longer, and counted on that even though he told them that he already had a job lined up in the States that started two days after he got home). The office was already unspeakably hectic because it was the first day of the new school year. You may be thinking that starting a new school year on a Wednesday that is not preceded by a break of any kind is not the wisest decision, and you would be correct. In fact, the whole thing seemed to catch everyone responsible for books and classroom assignments and things completely off-guard, which is odd since it happens every fucking year (I swear some people there are simply incapable of thinking more than a few days in advance). I came early to try to prepare for my classes, but I was unable to do so because many of my classes did not yet have their books. The vocabulary class, in which I didn't even know what page we were on before class started, was ok, but frustrating because I couldn't really get the concepts into their little minds. I now teach the science classes for the kindergarten, and while the books and projects were actually there, they had not been removed from their boxes, much less distributed to the proper classes. I had to spend my time trying to make someone tell me which classes were taught which level of science, and so I had no time to make the teacher's example project. As I put the project together in class I found that it didn't work at all. In fact, even later (before teaching the same thing to two other classes) I could not make it do anything, much less what it what was vaguely stated it would do. By the way, I was never offered any training or explanation of these classes: I of my own initiative shadowed Bo as he taught some of them earlier in the week. Further, the class levels that I managed to drag out of the Korean teachers were inaccurate for one class, so on Friday I ended up teaching the highest level of science to the new babies that can't speak any English. Things were far too chaotic to find the first level science books and kits, and the project didn't work anyway, so I figured if it was ok to waste the time of the older kids on something that doesn't work then it was ok to waste the time of the younger ones too.

Most of my afternoon classes were continuations of classes that I had last month and while their books were new they were actually there for the most part. The exception was a class on tiny children who know absolutely no English. I spend the period naming them and trying to get them to understand that those were their names. We made name tags, and in the process of them cutting out the nametags (not my idea to give them scissors, for the record) one of the students cut off a chunk of his neighbor's hair (I found out later; I was across the room helping someone else) and the neighbor went ballistic, bawling and pulling the first kid's hair. Of course one could explain what happened since they don't know English. I sent the one kid who already had an English name to go get another teacher since if I wasn't between the two kids the haircut-ee would pull the hair of the haircutter. I did manage to get them all named by the end of class (which was already supposed to be done since my co-teacher for the class had them first and told me that they would all be wearing nametags when I came in, but the didn't understand her [even though she speaks Korean?!] so it fell to me) and even managed to get them to write their names in their workbooks. Fun times. Other interesting parts of the afternoon were that whoever organized (and I use the term loosely) the schedule and classroom assignments did not take into account factors such as numbers of students and numbers of desks and chairs in the room or that the classes that have video tapes as part of the curriculum should be in one of the rooms with TVs instead of leaving those rooms empty. Oh, and about those videos: the videos and the cassettes for a book made by CNN are in a cabinet, which is locked. I told them before that it is locked, and after spending my free period trying to my academic supervisor she finally told me that they don't know where the keys are and she seems unconcerned (and she won't let me break it, which by that last class on Wednesday I was about ready to do with permission or not. Obviously I am not yet a Zen master who can be happy regardless of circumstances. It is a difficult balance to not care to the extent that I can be fine when my managers will not allow me to be prepared to teach, but also to care enough that I can be prepared when it is possible). I ended up reading the script instead, which was fun since I haven't had a voice all week due to my cold. After my classes I spent an hour doing evaluations, which were conveniently due on Thursday, and then I went downstairs to The West Wing and ordered a hamburger steak. I've been saving Western food for a bad day, and spent the latter half of my week going downstairs between classes for pastries, skittles, and ice cream (there is also a Baskin Robbins in my building). As I walked home after dinner I saw hundreds of high school students, who were apparently just getting out of school at 10pm. The students and I walked past a man in a suit so drunk that he was lying facedown on a cement pylon puking his guts out. No one but me batted an eye, making me wonder about the home lives of the kids (we read a lot of journal entries about how dad smells like soju [like vodka but worse tasting, I've heard]. There was one Jeff saw this week that nonchalantly talked about how the kid's aunt and mom got so drunk they vomited).

On Thursday I taught arts and crafts, where the students also didn't have books, but I could just hand them 11"x17" sheets of paper and colored pencils, so that was fine. After art on Wednesday I taught two forty minutes of a class called 'theme' which focuses on one topic for a month. I had already tried to talk several teachers into letting me skip ahead in the book because I am teaching the class to one of my smarter classes that is pretty far along in English, and the first month-long chapter is all about teaching tiny children who know no English what their names are. The teacher in charge of kindergarten told me that we couldn't skip ahead because the parents would see blank pages in the book and complain. This class could easily do the first month's work in the eighty minutes I was with them on Thursday but for some reason that wasn't acceptable either. The parents and managers here are far far more concerned with the appearance of learning than actual learning, and it rather turns my stomach. In the afternoon I was already so used to the chaos that it was fine that the kids in my highest level class had different books than what I was told. They are actually a fantastic class, smart and willing to participate, and I'm looking forward to teaching them. After classes I sat in the office with a box of tissues doing evaluations when Lindsay asked to have one of the classes that she had subbed for and which she had asked for earlier too. She was told that our manager wanted the girl teachers to teach the younger students and the boy teachers to teach the upper level students. This wasn't implied, it was flat out stated, and stated without euphemism or apology, and wasn't even necessary to say. We've suspected sexist motivations for assignments before, but we didn't even ask if that was the case; the sexist motivations was offered up voluntarily. Lindsay and I looked at each other shook our heads with the realization that some problems are beyond fixing. Afterwards we went to dinner with Lauren and Will got into town and ate with us. He seems like a pretty good guy, thankfully. I don't know if I could have taken this week if the new teacher (and my new nextdoor neighbor) had been an asshole.

Friday was the fun morning of three science classes where I had to first acquire (partially correct) information about which class was at which level and then rush out and teach them. In the process the kindergarten teachers were shocked and flustered to realize that one of the classes had no science classes scheduled, so I will probably be getting a call five minutes before class starts telling me that they have given me a new science class in the morning on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. I had fun trying to round up the correct number of science kits and books for each class by digging them out of the massive box that they were shipped it, and which were separated by class size but improperly labeled so that I had to leave two of the three science classes to go find more. After the kindergarten classes I actually reverted to my usual non-irritated self. I came to accept that the school is massively incompetent and am lowering my standards for myself as a teacher so that I am not disappointed when I am not given the resources to be better.

And that is why you should come to South Korea to teach English with me.

Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die

(Hat tip Darksyde on Daily Kos)

Zen and the art of destroying household items

This is gorgeous:


(hat tip Andrew Sullivan, as usual)

I especially like the parts with water balloons. I love anything that reminds us how amazing and beautiful the ordinary things around us are. Though my ascetic tastes still tend towards the epic, I am learning to appreciate the little pieces of awesomeness around me, and it has made me a much happier person (I'm on my way to Zen mastery, I swear). In the mornings when I shower, light comes into the bathroom from the window and there is so much steam that breathing in there is like the inverse of breathing in cold weather: I can see my breath in the absence of steam. Watching the water molecules swirl and dance in the sunlight makes my morning.

Late Update: This video adds an interesting twist to the general awesomeness of slow motion destruction: