Ten Years, Ten Memories

 Next Tuesday marks the tenth anniversary of my arrival in Korea as a terrified greenie - a fact that astonished both myself and my Dark Lord and Master (who was the largest part of the reason I was terrified back in those days - it took me a while to realize he was just a big bunny rabbit) when we discussed it on my way through Seoul at the beginning of July.  To celebrate, I'm setting the Wayback Machine to count down a memory each day from each of those ten years to share with you....

The problem with doing one memory for each year you've lived abroad is that unless you moved at the beginning of January, you're really looking at 11 calendar years.  I've solved that problem by ringing in my first memory with the time we rang out 2004.  Another reason Korea was hard for me at first was because I didn't quite fit with the teachers who were at GDA when I got there.  One of the wonderful things about being Mormon, though, is you'll always have a second place to look for friends, and the Seoul English Branch is where I found my first friends overseas.  It was wonderful, because it had the eclectic mix of black sheep you expect to find teaching English in Korea, but with the added bonus of us all sharing the same standards.

We started our New Year's Eve at Bennigan's by Seoul Station, and then packed our way onto the subway to go to Jongno 3-ga.  It's an intersection in central Seoul that has a big bell tower named Bosingak, and that night it was packed with tons of people.  What would New Year's be without some fireworks, you may ask, and that's a great question - we obviously had some sparklers.  What the photo doesn't show you is that lots of people (including my friends) had Roman candles, which we were shooting into the air over this crowded intersection next to an old, wooden pavilion.

There was also swinging.  And swaying.  And music playing.  We were dancing in the street.  Over the three years I lived in Seoul I came to love their traditional drumming and dancing, and it was impossible to resist being swept up into the action.

How much do I love Korea?  SO much.  I've told you so many times you probably want to barf every time I start.  One of the many, MANY reasons is the fact that it's a night owl's paradise.  Not everything is open 24 hours, but it's damn close.  When everything finally ground to a halt in Jongno we went to Hongdae.  It's a university area and the only place I've really ever gone "clubbing."  We found a cafe and warmed up for a while before going to look for a DVDbang.  We picked out a couple of movies and split into the two rooms set up as personal home theaters.  Somehow most of us stayed awake - I remember the movie my group watched being really good.

We ended the night at the 63 building - a skyscraper in the financial district that has an observation deck.  We watched the first sunrise of 2005 from there, and I felt I was finally starting to feel at home in Korea. 

A Great (One) Moment

Alternate title for this post: "Lantern Fest (Part Two)."  I like "A Great (One) Moment" much better, though.  I have been known to call myself The Great One from time to time, although I've done this less in recent years.  Am I getting less narcissistic?  Probably not...have you read this blog at all?  As for WHY it's a Great Moment (other than the fact that I have been waiting ALL YEAR for last night)...  That guy, Buddha - he sure had some great timing.  Did you realize that he was born, achieved enlightenment, and ascended to his final nirvana, all on the same day?  In different years, obviously, but still!  I didn't realize until I started researching last night's celebration that some Buddhists celebrate the three together, a day called Vesak Puja for a lot of the world, and Duichin ("a great moment") in Tibetan Buddhism, which is the religion a lot of Mongolians practice.

I found out about the Duichin Day celebration here last fall, after Fire Marshall took some pictures of sky lanterns being released at the state circus.  Let me go on a little birdwalk for a moment - Disney has restored my faith that there is more magic in this world than we give it credit for.  Did you watch Up?  (Technically, it's Pixar, not Disney, but work with me here).  The place that Carl is trying to get to, Paradise Falls, is based on a real, honest-to-goodness mountain in South America, Mt. Roraima.  And those lanterns Rapunzel watched for each year on her birthday in Tangled are real, too.  Fire Marshall's photo proved it, and when I found out that there was a big celebration with them, but not until May, it seemed like the wait was going to take FOREVER.

As a matter of fact, this school year has gone by ridiculously fast.  I can't believe that nearly all of my friends are leaving me in three and a half weeks.  But on the bright side, Duichin Day finally arrived.  I learned from InfoMongolia last month that it was supposed to take place on the 25th, and so we all marked it on our calendars but didn't hear anything further about it that was solid until Thursday (this is one of the annoying things about living here - a lot of times it's hard to get information about what's going on), in spite of my best efforts.  Tickets were 12,000 tugrugs and the event would take place at the central Naadam stadium.  The next day we went and bought tickets - supposedly they had some for sale at the door, but we decided we'd rather not chance it, and it was a good thing.  A colleague who tried to do so got shot down.  Of course, there are worse things that could have happened - there were lanterns for sale outside the stadium and you would have had nearly as good a view from out there, although you would have missed out on the chanting, prayer, and meditation, which turned out to not be that bad a way to kill time while waiting for dark to fall.

After the prayers and meditations, it finally started to get dark, and we all got to light our torches, which was not only pretty but helped warm us up (because by then it was definitely starting to get cold.

Meanwhile,  people had started to set off smaller, colored lanterns on the outside.  Watching them drift up, two or three at a time, also helped to pass the time and build our excitement.

FINALLY the time came for us to set off the big lanterns.  I already sent one up back during Chinese New Year in Harbin,so I kind of knew the drill, but these were much bigger - it took at least four of us to inflate it.  I'm sending some home for the Princess and my fam to light this summer, so let me take a few minutes to explain how you do this.  If you're not interested, feel free to skip ahead.  Basically, a sky lantern is a little hot air balloon made out of tissue.  At the bottom, there's a wire that runs across the diameter, with a little loop to attach a small block of paraffin.  You need to fold the loop to go through the hole in the paraffin, then bend the end on the outside of the wax so it holds it securely.  THEN you set the wax on fire.  It takes a little time to get it going, at least when you're only working with a lighter (the torches did a MUCH faster job of it), and as I've looked through my photos it seems that you should hold your flame under the hole.  Once the paraffin is burning, you lower the lantern close to the ground so that the hot air can't escape, and wait a while so that it gets enough hot air to float.  Gradually raise it up as high as you can, and then finally, let it go.  If it bobs back down, catch it and hold it for a little while - it's not supposed to do that and needs more hot air so it doesn't catch anything (some guy's hair, a tree, your car, the nearby hillside, ahem, Dad) on fire.

This was on such a huge scale, it was amazing.  In Tangled, Rapunzel calls the lanterns stars, and when you see it in person, with so many lanterns going up at once, you can understand why.  I've seen people set them off up here, probably from Zaisan, and in ones or twos they are not nearly so misleading, and I have to say, I think the white ones are much more beautiful than the colored lanterns.

According to tradition, Buddha descends to bestow spiritual blessings on the world at Duichin, and along with our tickets we were given a sticker to write a wish on.  If you look closely at the lantern in the middle, you can see the stickers outlined against the lantern.  I spent some of the time waiting for the lighting thinking of my Dark Lord and Master.  After my second Lotus Parade in Seoul, he mentioned that he shared the same lunar birthday as Buddha.  If you know him, you might be able to imagine what sort of inference he was hoping we would draw.  Well, I don't know about enlightenment, but according to InfoMongolia's blurb, "at this time, great expansions of consciousness...become possible," and if there was any period of my life that expanded my consciousness, it was the three years I spent working for him, so maybe there's something to that.

After we'd wandered out of the stadium, bought some lanterns of our own and contributed to the overall mayhem (I mean, really - so many people setting flaming lanterns into the sky at the same time is just a recipe for disaster.  It would SO not fly in any city in the states and I am surprised Fire Marshall didn't hurt himself cringing at the overall atmosphere), we set off for home.  It was a nice night, so Geek and I decided to walk home.  PE, Engrish, and Five were tired and took the bus, and for the first time ever, there was traffic going UP Zaisan.  They still managed to beat us home, but possibly only because along the way stopped to see a smaller celebration taking place at the Buddha park.  People were setting off lanterns there and from the top of Zaisan, which was really nice to watch when I got home.

I almost didn't go to church today, because I wanted to publish my blog before Fire Marshall did.  In the end, I decided I had to go, and as I was walking to the bus stop I came across the wreckage of last night's parties, looking like - well, I'll let you make your simile for what a sad, deflated sky lantern on the ground looks like.  And of course, this made me wonder where our big lantern had ended up, and if the person who found it might be able to read English, and what they would think of our wishes.  Anyways, it truly was a Great Moment, and well worth the wait...the best things usually are.

A-boom, boom, boom, BOOM!

And...it begins again.

So last night was New Year's Eve here in China, the one that really counts - Lunar New Year, or Chinese New Year to most of the world, even though, in fact, it is celebrated at about this time all over Asia and is known by a different name in pretty much each country (for instance, Seol-Nal in Korea, or Osho-gatsu in Japan). People have been intermittently shooting off fireworks essentially since I got here, but the frequency with which your ears are assaulted by their reports has steadily increased over the last few weeks to a fever pitch last night.

Damn, I feel sorry for kids who only get to blow things up once a year.

Being an open-minded sort of person, I decided I would join in the fun - I bought a pack of sparklers and the smallest amount of firecrackers I could (1000) at the stand I came across on Tuesday afternoon. There was one on my street corner, but I passed it by, and never came back to it. Oops. I burned all the sparklers standing on my balcony around 9 last night then went down to set off my 1000 firecrackers in the parking lot...see, I'm catsitting, and I didn't think Puddin would have been too happy with me if I set 1000 firecrackers off on the balcony. I figured it would take a while for them all to go off, and I didn't want her having a heart attack or, worse, diarrhea from the scare, but as it turns out, a thousand firecrackers only FEELS like it should take a long time exploding. In actual fact, that 4-foot string of firecrackers which feels like Rambo ought to be feeding it into his machine gun, when lit, is over in about 30 seconds. Not even a minute. Who knew?


I felt like I'd done my part to ring in the year of the rabbit. I got settled into my apartment and started watching Glee again, but just past 11 it became impossible to continue - there were just too many flashes of light distracting me. I went to my room and tried to read, but this was even more distracting, because I could see them out my window, in the distance. As midnight approached, it became RIDICULOUS how many bursts of light there were going off, some of them directly outside my window. Frickin cool is all I can say. Sometimes I'm thankful for China's lack of public safety laws.

Well, after opening the window long enough to realize how much sound two panes of glass actually DOES kill, get high on the smell of gunpowder, and get these pictures, I managed to fall asleep. I woke randomly four hours later to bug Socrates on Skype, and it was eerily quiet...for about five minutes, and then I heard the reassuring sound, in the distance, of small explosives going off. Yes, even at 4:30 in the morning, somebody in Shanghai was still lighting fireworks. Naively, I thought that perhaps it was going to quiet down after last night, while hoping otherwise, but no - it's 8:30 at night and already the artillery brigade is going. Most excellent! From the window last night I could see the parking lots accumulating a covering of shredded red paper, and although the groundskeepers of our complex had cleaned pretty much all of it up by this morning, it looked something like this:

It's a good thing the Chinese parents don't have the same kind of work ethic mine did growing up, because those kids would have been out there trying to clean up the mess all day.