It's Christmukkah in Korea!

Right now I am sitting watching the sun go down over the mountains. It's Christmas Eve and I'm in Ganseong-eup, a small coastal city in eastern South Korea.

I arrived in South Korea on December 15. The past two weeks have been a blur. I spent the first week in Unseo (a suburb of Seoul) with my cousin Meghan and her boyfriend Dongwon. I ate some traditional Korean dishes, packed myself into overfilled subway cars, practiced some rudimentary Korean, and got a Japanese encephalitis vaccine. On the weekend, Erik arrived (yay!). We spent Saturday with his imo (aunt), imobu (uncle), and cousin. They took us to a delicious Japanese restaurant in Gangnam (yep, like in "Gangnam Style") and then out for coffee on Saebit Dungdungseom, a series of three floating islands on the Han River where part of "Avengers: Age of Ultron" was filmed! You can learn more about these islands and their design here.

Erik, me, and the hippie van in front of Dr. Helen Cho's lab on
Island Viva!

That night, we stayed up late watching "Trainwreck" (with Korean subtitles) and playing the Korean version of Settlers of Catan (it looks wayyyy different!) with Meghan and Dongwon while drinking soju, black beer, wine, and stuffing our faces with chicken, pizza, fries, and nachos (I clearly stuck to the nacho chips and fries). American fast food is really popular here, especially fried chicken and pizza. Every third restaurant is selling fried chicken. Fortunately for me, every fourth store is selling kope (coffee)!

Me playing Korean "Catan". I did not have the cards I needed apparently.
You'll notice the road, settlement, and city pieces are shaped plastic (not
wood blocks) and the resource tiles look different!

On Sunday Erik and I said goodbye to Seoul and started our (long!) journey to Ganseong-eup. The subway to the bus terminal was two hours, and then the bus ride to Ganseong-eup was three hours. During the trip we stopped and got some Korean fast food called "gimbap", which is basically a sushi roll minus the raw fish (they use egg, ham, pork, veggies, etc.). When we arrived home we received our first shipment of goods. It was the small one, with some basic household items like cookware and towels, and some non-essentials Erik packed during a panic moment. We unpacked these and then tried to catch some shut eye on the rock hard mattress we have (we'll be buying a mattress topper ASAP!).

"Gimbap"

Monday was a cleaning day. Unlike in North America where you have to clean up before you move out, in South Korea it's the new tenant that cleans up after the old tenant. Sometimes it can be nasty (just YouTube search dirty korean apartments). Fortunately ours was in decent shape. The worst part was the grey film on everything (I think at some point there must have been a smoker living here) and the sporadic spatterings of stickers on furniture, windows, etc. Koreans LOVE stickers and laminates. They put sticker covers on their windows, furniture, countertops - you name it. In all sorts of ridiculous patterns (we even saw a "Frozen"-themed window covering sticker at the market!). They also put instruction stickers on things. In our bathroom we had two instruction stickers for how to properly brush your teeth. One on the cabinet and one in the shower. I can now say I have developed my sticker-scraping muscles in my hands and forearm - they look awesome. That night Erik took me out for some grilled shrimp at a small restaurant on a back street. It was just okay. The banchan (side dishes) weren't great, there was no rice (WTF?! aren't I in Korea?), and the seafood and meat Erik ordered wasn't the tastiest. Plus it cost like $30! Needless to say I got to pick the next restaurant we ate at and it was wayyy better (and cheaper!). #winning

This is what a good selection of "banchan" looks like.
At the shrimp place we only got three - pickled radish,
garlic stems, and terrible, freshly-made kimchi (just FYI -
kimchi is supposed to be fermented for a long while to be good).

Our second shipment arrived Tuesday, and man was that a nightmare. 65% of the things Erik had in his American home (which was 50% larger than our current apartment) were shipped over, plus a few of my things. Erik described the task of trying to fit everything inside our apartment as "jenga-ing" things into place (super accurate description). We also found out we can't get rid of any of the furniture that came with the apartment, so we have to get creative and repurpose things (e.g. using a TV stand as part of a new bed frame in the guest room). After two days of intense unpacking and sorting and organizing, the space is starting to feel liveable. For those of you familiar with Erik's "room of shame", he now has a "balcony of shame" where all his unorganized military and sporting gear will live for the next year (I just block it out with curtains...).

Last night Erik and I were invited upstairs for tea by Wungshik, whom Erik aptly describes as Ganseong's resident socialite. Wungshik speaks English very well and, since he lives in the same building the US soldiers are housed in, he has taken it upon himself to familiarize the soldiers with the region and its people (including the grumpy ajoo-ma [old woman] on the second floor, whom we have yet to meet!). Wungshik is married to a very nice woman who also knows some English, but is soft-spoken. Today he took us out for gimbap for lunch and on Saturday (Boxing Day in Canada) he is going to take us to Sokcho, the biggest city nearby (about a 20 minute drive south of us). Wungshik's parents are going to have us over on Saturday night for steamed crab (yum!).

Tonight Erik and I will be setting up our Christmas tree (he brought one over - woohoo!), playing board games, and indulging in the pomegranate soju I picked up at the market today. Note: I do not like regular soju (it tastes too much like vodka to me) but I love the fruit-flavoured soju. So if you're ever in Korea, don't despair if you don't like the traditional stuff - there are other options!

Fruit flavoured soju! Blue is blueberry, red is pomegranate,
and yellow is lemon. I've also seen peach and orange flavours!

I'll post a picture of our Christmas tree and Christmas presents and Christmassy us sometime soon, along with a video tour of our apartment! I'm also working on posts about all the feelings I've been processing in regards to leaving Ottawa and about my adventures on the west coast prior to coming to Korea - so stay tuned, folks!

It's been a couple of years since I last posted. I'm writing tonight because I can't sleep. And I thought about just writing in my personal journal, but this is something that needs to be shared. (I'll apologize in advance for not giving names or details, but you'll understand why I avoid this and hopefully still take something away from this post even without all the context.)

There's this awful quotation I ran across once:

“Heroes. Idols. They're never who you think they are. Shorter. Nastier. Smellier. And when you finally meet them, there's something that makes you want to choke the shit out of them” (attributed to Paul Beatty). 

I never really understood this sentiment until tonight - what could someone labelled a "hero" (especially in your own eyes) do to make you want to choke them? Well, all they have to do is disappoint you.

In my current job I've been fortunate to meet a number of my personal "heroes". I put heroes in quotation marks because these people are not widely known or sitting on laurels or running into burning buildings. But they became heroes to me because of what they thought, what they wrote, and what they advocated for. To me they were gamechangers. Rethinking the way society functions. Challenging the status quo.

It's one thing to watch your heroes from a distance. It's another thing to get onto the playing field with them. Up close I now see the seams in the "do-gooder" image of these people that I spent years cultivating in my mind. They're humans and (shocker) amongst all of their good qualities they also have less appealing qualities like fear, greed, ignorance, jealousy, deceptiveness... the list goes on. 

Tonight I'm trying to work through being angry at my heroes for their actions and human traits. For pursuing things not because they're the best option or the right things to pursue, but because it's safer. For trying to stop things they believe are not possible, before even giving these things a chance to get started. For speaking about half-truths as full truths. For advocating selectively. For putting on blinders and assuming their experience is the only experience. The right experience. The experience everyone should be listening to.

You know, if I didn't have my own experience I wouldn't be so worked up. But the truth is, my experience challenges what some of my heroes are saying. My experience tells me they aren't painting a fair picture. There is some truth to what they say, yes, but it's being generalized as the whole truth. And I disagree. Heck, I know some of the people they're speaking on behalf of disagree! Of course, these people haven't been asked what their opinion of the situation is. And I can almost guarantee that if they were, and if they answered honestly going against what my heroes have said, my heroes would argue they were being coached, or didn't understand the question, or didn't understand what they "really" wanted (even though personal choice is a human right). If their choice didn't jive with the "truth" my heroes would probably reject it.

 Why are my heroes doing this? I keep asking myself this question. The conclusions I come to are equally upsetting:

1. They are innocently ignorant. They simply haven't seen the areas of grey that exist in the topic they're addressing, and as result they honestly believe the situation is black and white. This is upsetting because a) most older, intellectual, well-adjusted people understand that situations are rarely black and white (have I been idolizing people who don't?!) and b) missing out on these experiences of "grey areas" means they've missed out on a wonderful opportunity to better understand human diversity (which makes me sad for them). 
2. They are willfully ignorant. They understand that their stance on the issue is one-sided and does not acknowledge a diversity of realities and experiences. This is upsetting because a) it discredits lived experiences (of those they claim to advocate on behalf of, no less), b) it advocates for a "one-size-fits-all" solution (even though we know this doesn't work in practice EVER), and c) it could result in the destruction of a multiplicity of approaches in favour of a single approach based on a singular (and arguably flawed) "truth". The worst part is that if what they're advocating for happens, it would specifically support the growth of the organizations they run. I'm not against their organizations. They do great work. I would love to see them grow. But not at the expense of other organizations that offer value as well, just using a different approach. That's selfish. And it's the worst part because I never, ever wanted to view my heroes as selfish. 

I can't totally blame them if either of the above situations (or some combination of the two) is true. I'm realizing that as an advocate you're expected to pick a side. Fence-sitting is not okay, because people expect a straightforward "this is wrong, this is how we right it" response. I don't know if I'll ever be a great advocate, because I'm getting worse and worse at generalizing. I don't think this is a bad thing inherently (I'm learning to appreciate that there are a diversity of experiences, perceptions, truths, etc.) but it makes delivering a hardline message really difficult. It makes delivering clear messaging difficult. What's right for one person is wrong for another, so I can't stand up and say "this one thing is right" - because it's only right in a certain context. How will people ever follow what the heck I'm actually advocating for? 

I guess what I advocate for is options. For choice. For creating spaces in which a variety of options can be talked about and realized. Not to the detriment of anyone else, but so that every person can choose the most "right" thing for them. Sometimes this might mean having support to make those choices, but the important thing is that the choices are there and presented to the person in a way that makes sense to them. In our current social and economic environment, what I advocate for is unpopular (to put it mildly). Creating multiple options costs money (and our economy is not doing well) and it also demands that people stop forcing their values onto others to allow room for choice (the ongoing pro-life/pro-choice debate illustrates how difficult this is to overcome). 

So after getting all this off of my chest, where does this leave me? I'm less angry than I was. My heroes are people, not flawless idols - they're bound to do things I disagree with or that make me uncomfortable. I don't value their former contributions any less, but I will absolutely look more critically at the things they say and do in the future. 

It's also a bit of a red flag. Every time I choose to be an advocate I'll have to make choices about messaging. My messages will not always represent everyone. I will likely make some people extremely angry. I'm just hoping I remember to listen to the multiple truths out there when they are raised, and don't jump to telling anyone they're absolutely wrong. If someone is part of a group I'm advocating with or for, their experience is imperative to informed and considerate advocacy. 

Lastly, if anyone ever looks to me as a "hero" I hope I remember to remind myself of my humanity and to forgive myself for it. Before they get close enough to see my seams. And after I disappoint them.