Here Comes Fancy

Remember the photo essay we did on Autumn? With all the lovely colours and shapes? We decided it was unfair to give all our attention to just one season and so Lara went out with her camera and took a bunch of snow shots. As it turns out, they were pretty good and we decided to publish them. The bonus being that we wouldn't have to actually WRITE anything this close to the new year.

The snow that never drifts.

No one can see their reflection in running water.

The show shoveller is suing me for a million dollars.

I smoked with a guy last December...

What children know.

A road so serious that it can't enjoy the sun.

Some say the world will end in fire. Some in ice.

I'm very partial to an abundant hedgerow.

Escaping nature's snowy den on roads I've seen and places been.

I'm hiding, I'm hiding, and no one knows where.

Korea: Land of Things Inside Other Things

Somehow, Christmas has come for another year and in all the fuss, bother and alcoholic excitement we decided to join forces and write an article about something very important to both of us. Something that may shock all of you, something that threatens the very boundaries of our existence: food and the various ways that Koreans sabotage some of their most delicious ideas.
The Korean attitude towards food can be defined as a “more is more” philosophy. More food, more flavours in more bowls. What we present here are some of our encounters with the restlessly inventive Korean culinary culture.

Pizza Cone

On our second weekend we went with our neighbours to Seoul Zoo and after hours of staring at animals, hunger drove us to the food stalls. Gleaming like a gem sandwiched between churros and corn dogs was a picture plucked from our own half-formed desires. Pizza cone. The base a soft, doughy conical cup for the steaming, glistening pizza filling stuffed inside like ice cream.
Similar to a Pizza Pocket and priced at about 2000 Won, the melted cheese and tomato sauce were most welcome in the autumn cold. Everything was fine. But then halfway down the taste changed, becoming weirdly, sickly sweet. We stopped chomping and started nibbling, growing slowly aware that, yes, nestled in the bottom inch like a slug in a drain was a stiff dollop of fluorescent grape paste. It was so wrong, so disappointing, so unnecessary and unwarranted that we threw the remainder in the zoo bins and resolved to never trust a country whose cuisine attempts to combine dinner and dessert into one. But we would be fooled again.


Marron Bread

Here is a archetypal scene of the foreigner in Korea. The foreigner is hungry, and goes into a business that he seems to recognise – in this case, a bakery. He buys himself a sandwich and emboldened by the relative cheapness, he also buys a delicious looking bakery treat. The sandwich is good but the bread is a little sweet and he has to take the pickles out. He then takes a bite of the top of the crusty, nutty treat and goes “oh wow! This is great!” And then... the horror. The Horror.
What is 'marron'? According to wikipedia, marron is a name given to two closely-related species of crayfish in Western Australia. But as we found out, it may also refer to the French word for chestnuts as in “marron glace”. But the pieces of chestnut baked into these tiny, beautifully rich loafs of sweetbread are more akin to blanched sweet potato. Were they in it for the texture? The horribly mushy texture? Yet again, we found ourselves asking – WHY GOD WHY?

The Red Bean Phenomenon

Red bean is possibly one of the most forceful additions to food in the entire Korean peninsula. Made of boiled, mashed and then (sometimes) sweetened Azuki beans, the resulting paste is present at the centre of a huge number of pastries, cakes and sweets. Which in itself isn't really a problem as the taste is quite nice (though very strange to a western palate where 'bean' does not associate well with the 'sweet' category).
The issue lies in its sneakiness. You buy a dumpling, full of what you assume is shallot and meat flavoured goodness. But no. RED BEAN!
Is that a waffle with honey inside? Of course it's not you damn fool! RED BEAN!
What of the rice cakes that look like they've been rolled in flakes of dark chocolate and coconut? Put it this way: it's not chocolate. RED BEAN!
And don't even think about buying a savoury cheese roll. The savoury part ends very abruptly. RED BEAN!
Our last experience with red bean was at a train station on Sunday where we bought a pack of twelve walnut-shaped Walnut Cakes. Admiring the nutty grooves on its sides, East popped one in his mouth and then screeched loudly enough to alert old women on the street, 'IT'S RED BEAN!' (In its defence, there was a walnut swimming in the determined body of the paste.)
There's no way to ever be sure. If there was a way to put red bean inside another red bean, the Koreans would be eating the shit out of that shit. Or to put it another way, they'd be eating the red bean out of that red bean.


Which brings us to:

Meta Octopus

Lara was the lucky one to experience the might of the meta octopus. After work one day she went to dinner with a co-worker and ordered grilled octopus. Ten minutes later a plate with a single, cephalopoid mollusc was delivered to the table and Lara sat there wondering how on earth a pair of chopsticks would aid in the eating of an un-sliced octopus. The chef spirited himself from the kitchen to her side and sank a knife into the head, opening it with one long drag. Spilling from its insides came a swarm of tiny babies no bigger than a thumbnail and Lara found herself eating not one large octopus but one large octopus and eighteen tiny ones. And after eating the contents there was brilliantly convenient, edible packaging. It was, in a word, unbelievable. Such things haven't been seen since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and even then there was no delicious soju cocktail to wash it all down.

Pizza Cutlet

As you can see, not all our experiences with inventive Korean cuisine can be classified as bad. In fact, some could qualify as 'Epic Wins' but we here at the Great Affairs acknowledge that this term is constantly under debate.
But I think no-one but a vegan can really question the incredibleness of Pizza Cutlet, a pizza restaurant whose speciality is PIZZA TOPPING ON A CUTLET. You would think that this would be a logical extension of the Schnitzel Parmigiana but somewhere between conquering the Gauls and losing all the World Wars, Italy dropped the ball. But Korea picked up that bitch and RAN with it.
The one you see pictured below also had potato wedges and chunks of bacon on it.


Chocolate Nachos

The general idea Korea has about the food of other cultures is “Hey, that's great – but now we can Koreaify it”. Sometimes these decisions are fantastic (see above). And then, other times...
While we weren't the ones to order this lovely little mess, we did taste the leftovers just to verify it had actually happened. Nachos complete with cheese, tomato, onion, jalapenos, guacamole, salsa and chocolate sauce.
We thought we were imagining things. Was it an accident? Had someone put the barbecue sauce bottle next to the all to similar chocolate? Did the cook just stroke out for a minute there? Probably not. Probably this was a concerted effort of food abuse.

Despite the occasional horrors we have encountered since our relocation to Korea, one powerful impression has remained: Koreans are extremely inventive when it comes to eating. One flavour is never enough and more often than not, opposing foods are combined in a (hopeful) attempt to create something delicious. What baffles us is that when the result proves less than ideal, they continue selling it. The Korean food market is based on a series of lies and desperate delusions. It keeps you on your toes, that's for sure.
For your reading pleasure, here is a short list of some of the stranger combinations we've eaten and regretted.

Some Memorable Munchy Mentions

Squid and peanut flavoured wafers.

Dunkin Doughnuts “Bubble Tea” - black tea afloat with tapioca chunks.

Sugared garlic bread.

Acorn flavoured jelly. We were unaware that acorn even had a flavour. Explains why those squirrels go mad for them.

Real bunches of grapes that taste like fake lip balm.



Lara and East will eat your faces. And love it.

Something Media This Way Comes

“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish” - W. H. Auden.

On March 26 of this year a South Korean Navy ship carrying one hundred and four personnel sank off the west coast of the country, killing forty six seamen. A national investigation concluded that the incident was caused by a torpedo fired from a North Korean midget submarine. On November 23, North Korean artillery shelled an Incheon island with dozens of rounds, damaging houses and military infrastructure and killing four people. These two attacks framed my arrival in South Korea and for the first time in my life I found myself living in a country on the verge of war. At least, this was what the rest of the world was saying. It seemed the further from South Korea I looked, the more sensational, violent and imminent the situation became. Australia's ABC news was terrifying my parents with reports that Seoul was close to being evacuated; The New York Times insisted that the South was convinced another attack was close at hand; and the London Times touted claims that North Korea believed the US was dragging the entire peninsula to the very edge. Here, however, in the midst of what should have been the most tense social environment, people were going to work using the same transport routes, eating dinner in crowded restaurants in the city and barely sharing two words about “the war”. Furthermore, the news came through with a far calmer, balanced view of the situation. This appeared as a complicated reversal of what I expected and I wondered why countries so far removed were causing such hysteria when the one that should have been the most effected was keeping a level media head.




The first I heard of further hostilities between the two Koreas was two days after the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island. This information came from my mother via Facebook in a long paragraph where she described a report from the ABC news. Her exact words were as follows:

“News tonight pretty grim. Nth and Sth Korea on the brink of war. Very worried about you both as scary talk of Nth Korea having the capability to reduce Seoul to a fireball!! Please find out what is your best course of action if things escalate.”

These comments prompted me toward momentary panic and I immediately looked up online news reports in sources I recognised, starting with the Sydney Morning Herald. The first thing that caught my eye was a story entitled 'North Korea Gravely Concerns Gillard' and while it differed from other inflammatory news articles by concentrating on Australia's attitude toward the hostilities rather than the acts themselves, the heading struck me as ridiculously suggestive. Was it an attempt to create a bond between leader and people? Perhaps by seeing the concern of a personable figure of government, everyday Australians would start involving themselves in an issue that has been present for decades. What it did was make me realise that a story doesn't have to be directly incitive to disturb the water. An issue that has relatively little social effect on the country where it occurred was being made a social concern over six thousand kilometres away. And to top it off, when I asked Mum what she knew of the attack two weeks later she told me that each day any news on Korea was pushed further and further back to make room for the next big thing on page one. Finally there was just one thin column near the sports section, like an almost forgotten memory. One thin column for an entire country's pain.

Now, almost a month later, The Herald is taking a different angle: 'N Korea's Nuclear Capacity Worries Russia'. My immediate thought was, why now? Why after so many years of conflict and aggression from North Korea was Russia voicing its concern? Surely anything that finally worries Russia should be something I need to keep an eye on, particularly something with the capability to level my city. The text warned of North Korea's capacity to enrich uranium to use in the construction of nuclear weapons but this is information the world has had for years. There have been nuclear tests conducted from North Korea since 2006 and each time it happens we panic, check the state of our bunkers and call for immediate action against the North's leader. What I can't understand is why we don't recognise the threat at any other time. Why is it only spoken of when the North pokes it head clear and calls for attention? Are we that starved for drama that we let it build up to breaking point so we have more to frighten us?


I can only assume that the style of Seoul's media coverage of the North and South situation is due to Korean attitudes toward crisis. My editing position at Open Radio North Korea means that I have contact with an enormous number of reports dedicated to the relationship between the two countries and in each one I am alerted to their factual, un-biased and balanced portrayal. While working I read headlines like 'S. Korean Nuclear Envoy Rules Out Dialogue' and 'NK Leader Kim Jung-il Reveals Intention to Allow IAEA Nuke Inspection' and found the stories within refreshingly informative, dealing with the nuts and bolts of North Korea's internal workings and its connections to surrounding countries. Through these I learnt about its policies on international censorship, criminal justice and the trade embargo, to name a few. Others were focused on the political turbulence within the North's regime with direct reference to Kim Jung-il's lingering illness and his son's, Kim Jung-eun, ascension to power. I was fascinated, so why weren't other countries' media sources informing people about the way North Koreans live with the rest of the world? Where was the other side of the coin in the North's actions? My co-workers believe that the majority of aggressive gestures are the result of Jung-il “flexing his muscles” in preparation for his take-over. I shared a dialogue with the editor of the radio station about South Korean perspectives that was as illuminating as it was touching:

Me: Are you scared that North Korea will attack Seoul?
Hyun-seo: No. Things like this happen a lot but nothing comes of it.
Me: Do you think it could happen one day?
Hyun-seo: Maybe with the new leader.
Me: Would China help the North if they wanted to start a war?
Hyun-seo: They are allied with the North but no, they would not help them.
Me: What do you wish would happen to North Korea?
Hyun-seo: We want to take down the border. It's very sad for us because we want Korea to be one country. Their people are the same as us but they live very badly. It's a sad thing.

His words made me think more deeply about the two countries and how once upon a time there was no border or armed walls cutting them in half. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have Australia split down the middle and know that people just like me were tortured and suffering and dying and I couldn't do a thing about it except for wait. And of course I got a little angry. If we are a global community, why are these news stories sensationalising an all out war when they could be concentrating on the inner trauma of the Korean people en masse? Who actually cares enough to forego top-selling drama pieces and concentrate on the little known details that make this such a difficult position?


Now me, I'm not one to buy into unsubstantiated hype. Peer pressure had little effect on me and threats generally fell on deaf ears and so by surrounding myself with largely unconcerned Koreans, I felt that the threat of the North was something I needn't pay too much attention to. It was a learning experience; living in a country classified as teetering on the edge of war but seeing the everyday workings of its people. This isn't a war zone, this is a degree of tension that is ever present and constantly at flux. I personally doubt it will snap any time soon and I base my opinion on those around me. And of course as I wrote these last few words a scheduled air raid siren, one I had no idea was planned, started going off. I swallowed my words and readied myself to rush to the basement of the building only to receive a call from East telling me it was a drill and not to mind the low flying fighter planes. I end this article red-faced but hopeful.


Lara was incredibly frightened by the air raid sirens. Seriously.

Words Blogged in Anger: Some thoughts on accountability

Notes on the ESL teaching experience

“I came here with good intentions. Something changes over time. Your belief that you are making a difference in the students’ lives turns into a lost cause. Your belief that they (students/teachers/admin) give a rat’s ass – disappears. Your belief that they are actually capable teachers – vanishes. You will remain, alone, to spend your year in purgatory. Teaching in South Korea is the midway point of nowhere.” (-some random guy, a blog)

I don't mind being nowhere. Nowhere has no past, no mistakes, no consequences. In Nowhere you're always going somewhere – after all, you're not just going Nowhere, you're leaving Nowhere.

But I don't thinking teaching in Korea is the midway point of nowhere. It feels more like a city that has grown around a transit hub, one of those nothing towns that seems to wither indefinitely like a gutshot heroine in an action movie. Teaching English in Korea is like Newcastle or what I imagine Atlanta would be like.

Newcastle, Australia. Best known for the failboat.

Don't get me wrong. Teaching English in Korea isn't bad but it's not great – the money's good and the work can be rewarding. Some of us have it better than others for sure, and some have it worst than most but this seems to be the way things work everywhere. But foreign teachers in Korea are for the most part an overeducated, stymied bunch of malcontents too savage, starry-eyed or broken down to hold jobs in their own countries. We are travellers, tourists, middle class washouts surfing our language and privilege as far as the dollar will allow.

People make simulacrum lives here. They settle into the job, their homes, their routines but jerks like me always refer back to their origin as if their efforts here amount to nothing. Newbies always ask, “when are you going back?” or “what do you want to do?” because our own lives are in such a state of flux that the places we occupy become transitory because of our mere presence in them.

What bugs me about people complaining in blogs about the job is their presumption to embody their problems and fears as “Korea” and not their own shiftlessness or immaturity. The more you look around for the ex-pat blogging community the more pretentious self-idolatry (yay look at me I'm somewhere new!) and prosaic foot stamping you find. Which seem to me different sides of the same coin – a sustained self-obsession without any sense of propriety or introspection.

I know the ice above the blistering cold irony is rather thin here, but you'll have to trust me. I'm a doctor of journalism for god's sake.

The Angry are the Young

At university I knew an overweight, prickly nerd whose intelligence and acerbic wit really amused me at first. I tried my best to befriend him but the more I tried the less he wanted to be around me. Then one day at the bar (as these things go) I was infuriated with a tutorial group full of high school layabouts who were trying to weasel our teacher into letting us go half an hour early because they hadn't finished that week's readings.

I threw my arms around, ranged up and down the bar looking for the blackest insults to hurl, screaming in frustration at these myopic, cud-chewing imbeciles. And this guy, this big, abrasive geek, finally warmed to me because I demonstrated what he identified more closely with – petulance.

He was also a fifteen foot, emotionally retarded Bigfoot. Good guy.

There is a purity to our rage that can be charming. When you are angry you don't give a damn about anyone else and are so purely without disguise, so utterly without cool that you can glimpse a person's true self. Well, not their true self – their eight year old self. When someone's mad you see how they were as a child. You see the sulkers and the dummy-spitters, the criers and the pant wetters paralysed with fear. But that's anger – a return to the eight year old state.

Living in the slush

Here in Korea, winter has graced us with her first snows. It's still a novelty for me, so I note all the little details – how the clouds turn pink and the air noticeably numbs; how the flakes spiral and hang in the air like goose down.

So it was in an introspective mood that Lara and I went out with some friends for pork spine soup at a little place in the market up the hill. It was snowing quite heavily and big slushy piles clogged the gutter and the swirling flakes stuck to my umbrella like mud. I was talking to one of our friends about anger, blogs and the foreign teacher experience. Specifically, about the blog that inspired this piece: pages of puerile ranting that I had been mulling over for the better part of the week.

“I just think you should be held accountable for what you write online. Well, some of it.” We weaved in and out of the neon-drenched crowd. “This guy's just venting but a lot of what he says is outright racist. It's morally irresponsible.”

My friend went to reply but had to dodge a parker-clad middle schooler with a mobile phone in one hand and a fish stick in the other.

“Racism's easier. I think about what I say sometimes and I'm like, Am I being racist? But you get so angry and have to blame someone. Racism is a defence. Anger is a way of dealing with your frustration. The problem is, it's too easy. It has negative outcomes.”

Writing from Anger

Some of the best works of fiction and satire have been born of anger. But there's smart and dumb anger. There's having a problem with your job and then there's having a problem with a foreign culture – but the most irresponsible act is to transform the fruits of anger into bitter hatred.

The reason that hatred and anger are depicted throughout our culture as dark, negative emotions is because they separate us from each other. It's a morality play we have seen a million times and we are just too damn lazy to get the point – the reason those goofy good guys win is because they're doing it together. Love (and the subsets of nobility, friendship and kittens) bring people together. Hatred (racism, xenophobia and puppies) drive people apart. I'm not even saying the good guys win in reality, I'm just pointing the moral you've been consuming for all these years.

Kurt Vonnegut said about mankind: “We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard … and too damned cheap.” I'd like to, with modesty and with an acute sense of the irony involved, to point out that hatred is just too damn easy. That writing in a public forum without self-observation or due accountability is NOT venting. It's misrepresentation and slander. Reader beware, sure. But you are responsible for exercising the power of your freedom of speech.

Come on people. It's not that hard. You know this stuff already. From Star Wars.

Daniel East is not a substitute for real human interaction.

What to Watch When You're Not Watching British Television

WARNING: this post contains sentiment. What with experiencing my first thanksgiving just last week, and Christmas rearing its head round the corner, perhaps it's called for?

Someone once told me that being around my family was like watching a British comedy. This someone, of course, was East. I took his words as an unmitigated compliment because I love British comedy and just by having this said to me I realised how much my family of three embodies the madness that is a British script; we talk over each other, are suddenly and violently flabbergasted and use words like 'rubbish' or 'bloody Nora' as though they are legitimate curses. Our bickering is a way of expressing our love and because I've spent so much time in such a specialised environment, this has become the way I interact with people I meet who, after time, make me love them. It's never the same, though, as with my parents and the only contact I have with them is over Skype where the slight delay puts a stop to our usually smooth banter. Living overseas has taken my biological family and in moments of homesickness, culture shock and language difficulties, it's hard knowing that those I'm closest to, bar East, are thousands of miles away. We all need a support system and as a westerner in Korea, where millions of voices may as well be silent for how well I understand them, a lifeline is very welcome. So I found friends to fill the gap my parents had left.


When East and I first arrived here we had no idea what to expect of other English speakers. Would there be many in our area? Would there be another at East's school? What countries would they come from? Would we be friends just because we spoke the same language? As it happened there were three Americans who lived on the exact same floor as us in our apartment building and they greeted us like old friends; took us to dinner to show us what and how to eat, introduced us to soju and its many sugary mixes, leant power boards and adapters and gave us never-ending advice on places to go in the city. It was wonderful, having so much help so close to our door, but after a while we realised that we weren't doing things for ourselves. We didn't know where to buy train tickets, how to ask basic questions or what food was what. We'd been handicapped by friendship and it took striking out on our own to rediscover these skills. It felt much like breaking away from parents for the first time: out in the world, only a vague clue on how to get by and full of questions you decide not to ask for fear of looking like you can't deal with so much responsibility. Not only were we missing out on first hand experiences, we were limiting ourselves to a very small friend base. The kindness of our neighbours meant we had stopped searching for others with whom to share our lives. Luckily, proximity had another card in its sleeve. East met two very amusing men at his orientation, one of which lives just up the road from us. We have dinner with him once a fortnight and talk about the differences of travelling through Europe as opposed to South America. A gathering of Gwangmyeong teachers gave us an opportunity to meet people in our area and from that evening I befriended a girl who once lived in the same British county as I had and another who warned me away from Trinity College in Dublin because she had gone there and found it pompous. East got friendly with a guy who designs computer games in Seoul and they spent an hour talking about codecs and story lines. We had found another nest in which to fluff ourselves. A nest away from our nest. And we still had our neighbours, though one had been replaced with a new intake, and you can be sure we still loved them. Their Thanksgiving feast was proof entire of that fact. If Robert Lindsay had been there we could have filmed an episode of My Family.


What about organised activities, I hear you ask? Surely if you were looking for like-minded people you could go to some kind interest-inspired gathering. Not so easy over here. There are plenty of social events tailor made to westerners but finding out about them proved tricky, particularly when we hadn't made many friends to hear things from. So when we heard about a performance of Julius Ceasar at a station near our house, we went to have a look. The performance was short and sweet but the thing that really got our attention was the sentence written on the back of the flyer: 'If you would like to join Actors Without Bard'ers, please email us.' Bingo! Our chance at spending time with a group of people all interested in reading and acting. So email them we did and two weeks later we walked into a room of people who would quickly become some of our best friends. People who had read books I studied at university and knew who Magnetic Fields were and loved that I sat in the back of the room writing poetry on scraps of paper. Before meeting them I thought that living here had narrowed my choices to such an extent that I wouldn't be able to find anyone in whom I could see something of my own joys. Someone I could banter and argue with. I thought friendship had become a matter of take what you can get but it turns out everything I had at home I could build here. Minus my parents, I found a family that loved me and loved my interests. Moreover, everyone had a place in our chemistry; someone to organise professional meetings to keep us on the straight and narrow, another to work us up into going out and staying out far later than sensible, someone else who brought down the guilt for our previous night's revelries, another who brought cake or sweets to rehearsals to soothe our pain and one more who, silent, looks so perfect at the back of the room that you want to aspire to their calm, benign presence. Think the crew of Phoenix Nights without the wheelchair. And they read Shakespeare like bloody demons.


They say the family of the 21st century is made up of friends and not relatives. You know who else said that? Simon Pegg in the final episode of Spaced. And who is they? People who don't know any better. Surely we've evolved to the point where family is a very loosely defined term? We have families of mothers and fathers, those of adopted children and step-parents, orphaned children finding a place to be together, couples moving out for the first time and the many victims of tragedy who group for love and comfort. Of course the 21^st century has family not entirely involving relatives but if you're lucky enough to have them, and even luckier to like them, these biological families take a very special position in the world. Mine is my own personal British comedy but while I've been away I've created another show: part American sitcom, slightly Canadian absurdism, frank and honest South African wit and perplexing, enthusiastic Korean hilarity. And they are, in a very real way, my new family.



If Lara were to be reincarnated, she would definitely return as the second coming of Zoe Wanamaker.