Make Gorgeously Your Life

This March has not exactly gone linearly from lion to lamb. Instead we are treated the the whole menagerie at one time. This makes it hard to plan wardrobes, outings, and a myriad of other things that would help my days pass in a waft of splendid organization. Despite this, March has flown by with nary a moment to reflect - so I am stealing away this cold Sunday morning while the kids run amok, skipping naps and maybe meals, to spend some time with you.
In our first photo you will find the family at the Korean Folk Village in Gyeonggi-do. In this outdoor museum are 260 historical homes from the late Josean Period. You can watch a traditional wedding (complete with live Chicken in a bag that squirms around during the bowing), enjoy tight-rope acrobatics, and clap (if you are one) along with cartwheeling, tambourine-playing folk dancers. If you are so inclined you can stretch out on the punishment bench in front of government house and your friends can practice administering corporal punishment with various whips and heavy clubs. We enjoyed the handicraft-demonstrations. Jamie dyed some cloth along with a tangible-human-traditional-cultural-asset (the lady talking to Iris middle-right). Iris kicked a cow. Brian attempted threshing. I ate bulgogi. The babies were photographed by many strangers.
Photo number two depicts Iris and her new friend V. at music class and in front of their brothers' classroom (on Wednesdays Mommies can actually go inside now - it is very exciting). This picture serves as an introduction to my Spring schedule. On Mondays I now have a nanny. Iris and V. share her, leaving me one day to explore. So far we have had three Mondays: the first I hid in the office the whole time listening for tears, the second I snuck home and napped, but the third I actually went out as you will see in a moment. Tuesdays I have my maedup class, and I try to catch up on those three hours of paid work I should do weekly. Wednesday is Jamie's short day so, due to non-stop-snow we alternate house-playdates with some of his friends. Thursdays we have baby playgroup in the morning, and then I nap. Fridays the babies have music class and Jamie gets out early so there is no time for anything else. Fascinating no?

I also somehow manage to cram in other things: in picture three I had 18 moms and their babies (SIWA mom's group) over for lunch (potluck) and in picture four I went (with my supper club) to see our friend Lucia Kye, noted clarinetist, give a "house concert." We were seated on the floor directly behind the pianist, facing the audience. Clearly it was not enough to be the only four foreigners in the room, but we also had to be on stage. That is my friend Lucy top right. Although my legs kept going to sleep, we really enjoyed the concert. Lucy was amazing and it was the first time I have been out doing something that attracted actual Seoulites. It felt more like participating in real city-life rather than being a tourist.

Photo five was my Monday outing. I went to Myeong-dong, famed shopping district, to look about (I was actually looking for a new H&M, but although I found the billboard and pointed at it while squawking at some businessmen, I never got there). What impressed me, however, was the various layered life of Seoul. In the same streetscape you will find giant glass hotels and shopping malls, hand-drawn food or waste carts, tent-alley-street-cafes, and tiny crowded shops crammed into whatever open space is left. Travelling without baby and boy is very liberating and I had a brief taste of why some find the city so full of energy and adventure. My adventure was mostly having lunch with Brian. Baby-free, we managed floor-seated-table-cooking and an encounter with the Korean take on American donut chains (we didn't have garlic glazed). I like tables full of suit-clad-shoeless businessmen kneeling before steaming pots of egg, and the fact that Korean restaurants are not afraid to display their insect-repellent along with their carts of side-dishes. Seoul is still crammed with cute mascots, strange English slogans (why is everything a story - does that mean something different in Korean?), and enough coffee shops and bakeries to meet my weekly sugar and caffeine requirements with some to spare. My afternoon ended with a freak snowstorm and a mad taxi-dash to catch Jamie at school pick-up, but Monday comes every week.
In photo six you can see some rice cakes that a trio of upstairs neighbours dropped off at my door one morning. I think they were either apologizing for three months of home-renovation or telling me they had just moved in. I didn't know the proper gift-accepting etiquette, but I think grabbing for the cake with one hand while trying to balance a nearly-naked baby in need of a diaper change with the other was not correct. As you can also see, on my main street soon will be "comeing" "an Oak a wood bumer." I can hardly wait. I will enjoy it after a visit to the nearby "beer pup." Here are some coffee cups inviting us to make gorgeously our lives. This is good advice, though the seasonal change is making it difficult. Along with the continually changing weather, Spring also brings carcinogen-bearing yellow dust. Here are Iris and Brian in Itaewan during the worst "Asian dust" storm in a decade. It is the middle of the afternoon and we were wondering what the strange light was. Luckily, according to the headlines, I am happy here - so that's fine.

Photos seven and eight are Kid's Cafes here in Seoul. One is nearby (Monkey Banana) and more modest (Jamie was invited to a birthday party there). The other is in the new shopping mall Times Square and has many larger jumping apparatus (including a giant bouncy bear) and a train ride (where "kids go by themselveses"). Kids
Cafes are places that attract many Korean families on cold snowy Spring days. For a small fortune you can enjoy a "free" drink as you watch your little ones risk their necks and immune systems on various equipment which probably wouldn't pass Canadian safety standards. They are also very noisy and offer few places to tie up your baby. We will probably see very very many of these establishments over the next two and a half years.

That brings us to yesterday and our final photo. We tried to find a Museum of Modern Art just outside of Seoul in Ansan (Bravo Ansan!). It took us almost two hours to locate. Maps here are notoriously non-specific, and English-language road signage sporadic at best. For some reason city-signers were sure English speaking tourists would want to know where the juvenile detention center and the "drivers lice office" were, but not the newly built Art gallery. We finally made it and spent an hour exploring the small collection, admiring ourselves in a reflective eyeball, and trying to make out why only one kid was allowed in the children's play space at a time, and only if they produced a drawing of an airplane whilst in there. Jamie was confused by the photos of gun-wielding Lego men lying in pools of red paper blood, though it might help curb his mother-wearying enthusiasm for playing at pistolet. Iris, it seems, would rather run like a madwoman directly at artwork than be carried around having it explained to her. Instead Brian and I carried around cups of oddly flavored latte that encouraged us to make gorgeously our lives, and felt pleased that it was only snowing chogum, un petit peu, a very little bit. However, soon will come April's sweet (though dusty) showers that will drive away the March madness, and perhaps induce us to pilgrimages - but that will be another tale.

Thailand

After Singapore, we headed to Thailand. We took the cheap route to Phuket, via Bangkok, which took most of the day, rather than the quick direct route, which would have taken an hour. Note for future reference: when travelling with small children, sometimes the cheapest choice is not the best one.

We didn't stay on the island of Phuket, but just up the coast in the Khao Lak area (one of the areas hardest hit by the tsunami). We stayed half the week at an enormous lavish resort (complete with resident pet baby elephant) and half the week at a small low-key beachside place that featured much shorter walks between the room, the pool, the restaurant, and the sea. The weather was if anything even hotter and sunnier than Singapore, although we did even get a spot of rain once.


Jamie and Iris were pretty much happy to play in the pool or in the sand. The Andaman Sea is known for its sunsets, and the evenings make a lovely contrast to the relentless insolation of the day. Every night is some sort of special theme at the restaurant. (And yes, food is very well-priced -- the resorts are more than the places on the street, but still cheap by any standards.) The guy with the guitar tried hard to come up with songs that both he and you knew. Actually, he knew almost all the words to "Mrs. Robinson" (phonetically, I think, which is that much more impressive), and a couple of lines (kind of) to "The Boxer."

This is the fancy resort (full of fancy people of course... next time, we need to think about dressing better, and maybe not throwing our food all over the floor at breakfast.) Jamie said, "Go away, baby elephant!!", although it turns out he says "go away" whenever he gets excited, so maybe he didn't mean to sound harsh. He really enjoyed the Penguin Club for kids (so-called because it was cool inside?) and probably would have stayed there as long as we let him. He didn't really do Thai kick boxing though; not quite big enough yet.

Later in the week, we did a number of excusions. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to go to Khao Lak, as it is nearer to some forests, national parks, and offshore islands. Elephant trekking (a low-speed activity) is de rigueur anywhere you go, and if you try a bit you can convince yourself the elephants don't have it too bad, although the sticks the mahouts carry do have sharp hooks on the end, rather than pom-poms like the ones at the zoo. I think it's for clearing dense vegetation! Don't worry, the snake around Jamie's neck has its mouth taped closed. And hey, we did skip the "monkey show."

Bamboo rafting goes right along with elephant riding, and it was actually just the right amount of fun for kids -- somewhat exciting without being dangerous, as the water is only inches deep at this time of year. The bridge at the waterfall we went to could use some repair, though.

The top activity in this region, however, by far, is diving/snorkelling around the Similan and Surin islands. We meant to go to the Similans, which are much closer, but due to scheduling constraints and other factors, we ended up going to Surin, which is about an hour farther away by van, although is said to be slightly better for snorkelling. It was a cloudy day, good for being on the water, although a bit windy and choppy at first, which led to about half our speedboat tour being sick. Lovely. But "peeking at fishies" was certainly worth it, at least for us adults. Jamie only went in the water once (with a lifejacket on), and is still a bit too small for the mask-and-snorkel thing. Iris stayed on board and was babysat by our friendly tour guide, to all appearances a retired ladyboy. The Surin islands are all a national park, and landfall is only permitted in one place, where they have extensive accomodation facilities of tents, huts, mess hall, etc. It might have been nicer if our shoes hadn't been back at the dock, but we soldiered on. The format of this tour meant there was more travelling than time in the water, but we were glad we did it, and will try to work in more coral reef exploration to future trips. I found myself dimly remembering that I spent a year and two summers, a couple of careers ago, working with coral scientists in a geology lab, and actually took a fourth-year geology course in the subject at the time.

We did a bit of walking in the rainforest along the coast. Keep in mind it's a billion degrees out.

Finally, the trip wrapped up with "one afternoon in Bangkok," inside a 12-hour layover at the airport. (After all, putting stickers on your face still leaves 11 hours and 55 minutes to kill.) Travelling into the city was neither the most time- nor cost-effective thing we did on our trip (probably the opposite), but it was still better than the alternative, sitting at the airport and not seeing Bangkok. Anyway, it was always our plan to go into the city, but you end up spending a lot of time in traffic and the tour guides that have the concession at the airport are really not good value for money. That said, the things we did see (Marble Temple, Standing Buddha) were great. It's just hard to be satisfied by driving past the outside of sites that one would really want to see. In the past, we've essentially only travelled in one mode (low-budget grad student), but now, as we learn to adapt to different realities in a number of dimensions simultaneously, their are new lessons to learn about what approaches work best, and the converse.

In the end, the whole outing was saved by a longboat tour (still overpriced though) through the canals of Bangkok (who knew that Bangkok even has canals?), which shows off an entirely different and fascinating view of the city, its built environment and how its people live, both rich and otherwise. This is definitely a must-do element of an city visit. (Ok, it might have helped had we done even the slightest bit of research prior to our arrival.)

With that, there were only four or five more hours to wile away at the airport before boarding the overnight return flight to Seoul, bringing our two-week long adventure to an end. There is no doubt it tested us in a few ways (to small kids, being away from the familiar comforts and routines of home is not necessarily "fun" or "relaxing," and travel will certainly reveal any gaping holes in your parenting skills), but the memories are all very positive, or at the least wry, in retrospect.

Finally, if you are interested, please don't forget to devote close attention to the pictures, moreso than to the text. They are far superior, if you click to get a full-size version.

Singapore

Hello! Regardless of what this entry may say, today is March 24, and this is BCS writing. Since our trip to Singapore was now over one month ago, I am relying on notes to describe the pictures below (or wherever on the page they are, relative to this text. Yay, Blogger.)

We were there from Chinese New Year onward, so the city was actually quite quiet due to holiday business closures. It was nice for getting around. Of course the weather is incredibly hot and humid, compared to Seoul. We saw the very exciting Chinatown and Little India; not all that large, but much more active and real than we'd ever encountered before. Keeping in mind we've barely traveled anywhere.

This is the world's largest fountain. It didn't do quite as much as we were hoping, but the laser projection was nice. It's in one of the many many large shopping complexes. Iris' stroller finally wore out, and we bought a new one at Toys R Us while waiting for the fountain display, so that worked out well. Also, beforehand, you could walk around three times and touch the fountain water for good luck in the New Year.



This is the National Botanic Garden. We were only able to see about half of it, but the orchid garden is quite a highlight. You notice that so many things that would be indoors in Canada, are outdoors here. And also that everything in Singapore is "national," because the city is the nation.

We bought a lot of cheap clothes for the kids, some shirts and ties for me, and a Singapore Sling for Aki (bottom left). Aki broke her glasses, but eventually the optical stores re-opened and luckily she could get new frames. Actually, although the shopping is very extensive, it is not particularly inexpensive, at least not in the mainstream Western stores. Maybe it's because of their electricity bill, since they have the a/c on full blast and the doors wide open to the tropics at all times. It's hard to picture a less energy efficient activity.

We enjoyed eating cheap Indian food, Iris so much that she ate part of the spoon (yes, this is a parenting error). Since the remaining bit seemed pretty sharp, we decided to take her in for an X-ray. Apparently plastic dissolves in stomach acid, so nothing to fear. We were in and out of the ER inside 60 minutes, and out of pocket about $90 Cdn, including the exam and x-ray. Sir Raffles was the first colonial governor of Singapore (I think -- memory fading), hence the legendary Raffles Hotel, Raffles Shopping Center, Raffles Hospital, etc.

One of the main reasons we wanted to go to Singapore in the first place was for the zoos. I think Jamie and Iris liked riding around in their little wagon the best. (Pulling those things around turns out to be harder than it looks, though.) Actually seeing the orangutans climbing around in the free-range treetop habitat was very good. As with everywhere though, the heat and humidity made it hard to keep moving all day long.

The Bird Park is another major zoological attraction. Since we did it first, it made a really positive impression. Perhaps the most famous attraction, though, is the Night Safari, essentially a night zoo that you walk/ride through after dark, with very minimal lighting. Jamie didn't stay awake too long, but we want all around the whole thing. Some of the animals are just deer, but others like the flying foxes were remarkable and definitely a novelty, even those who have been to many zoos before. Not very conducive to photos, though.



We spent a week in Singapore, and didn't have trouble filling the time. If you had a larger shopping budget, you could do even more, but beyond that it's very useful as a jumping off point for all of SE Asia. I really liked the British colonial history, the architecture, the flora/vegetation, and above all the multicultural heritage, which is a deeply-rooted rather than recent phenomenon. For us, with little kids who like zoos and sometimes need hospitals, it was a destination we were happy to have chosen.

The IRIS conspiracy

I think it's IRIS' doing!

I was watching the popular Korean Drama IRIS as I was planning my daughter's first birthday, and as the event grew greater and grander I realized that indeed "IRIS' influence has spread far." Although perhaps not a force of chaos and destruction like her literary namesake, she is a powerful agent here in Seoul. She can, for example, compel her shy and reclusive parents to hold a giant party in her honour; and draw over 60 people, including international business leaders, diplomats, and a foreign ambassador to come and celebrate her first year here among us. Just how broad is her reach? We just don't know yet.

First birthdays, dol or doljanchi, are very important here in Korea. The baby has passed the most dangerous period of her life, and now we can fully accept her into our community, offer our blessings and begin to think about her future. Since Iris has passed half of her life here in Seoul, we decided that we should embrace some of the traditions of her new homeland. We dressed the children in hanbok, hired a photographer and a caterer, and invited everyone we knew to our home to help us celebrate this important life-stage of our baby girl. Above you may see many of our guests enjoying the festivities; below are some of the preparations for the event.
The dol and doljabi table were created for us by my friend Sun, who helped me with many of the preparations. On the dol table (dol-sang) you will find the following: Cooked white rice and noodles for wealth and longevity respectively; three kinds of rice cakes: coloured for harmony, white for purity (and tidiness!), and red to ward off evil and bring luck; green herbs (tied with red and blue string) for vitality and longevity and prosperity of descendants; dried dates as an extra call for prosperous descendants; and fresh seasonal fruit and artificial flowers (Sun made ours out of modeling clay) for beauty and bounty. The dol table, laden with all this symbolism, is mostly a display piece and for sitting behind and being photographed (Iris was very good at this - she really liked her princess role). More fun, perhaps, is the doljabi table.
The doljabi is the highlight of a first birthday party. An assortment of items are laid out and the child picks one or two that are supposed to foretell her future talents and profession. Many families today include on their tables things like golf balls, microphones, judge's hammers etc., but we stuck (mostly) to traditional items. On Iris' doljabi table there were: Calligraphy brush, ink block, ink stick and book all representing scholarship and academic pursuits; embroidery thread, thimble and pincushion to convey dexterity and versatile talents; brass coins for wealth; a horse-tile for leadership and authority; cotton thread for health and longevity, and we threw in a stethoscope just in case. Iris selected the calligraphy brush first (artistic scholarship?) and the embroidery thread second. I guess she will need to be versatile if she follows her parents path of study - I was really pushing the horse tile. You can see the slide show recap below (at the beginning I am explaining the table items - please ignore my strange faces, It's a curse).
Before the event we had all the guests pick what they thought Iris would chose, and put their name in the corresponding party hat. Afterwards we drew names from the lucky hat for some small gifts. You can see the ballot-hats below. The white boxes contain thank-you gifts: towels with Iris' name embroidered on them. We were told this was traditional, but I'm still not sure what our lovely friends want with such things. If anyone desires one, tell me - we have lots.

I did, for a moment, consider making the food myself - but it didn't last. For the first time in my life (no wedding remember) I hired caterers (and servers!) and it is my new favorite thing. I found an ad for Indian restaurant chain Chakraa in an open copy of the Korea Herald that was sitting on my desk as I was sending emails looking for a caterer. Turns out they cater, (and very reasonably) so we were set. They came with food, and tables, and tableware, and labels, and men to serve, and deliver drinks and tidy up. Everyone enjoyed the meal, and we got to chat and eat and play with our friends. It's a great way to have a party.

In addition to the caterers, also "under the command of IRIS" was Mr. Lee, a photographer (dollsnap.com; click on baby and Iris if you want to see more). With the help of Sun, and a little English, he managed to take over 900 pictures of my smiley baby and her birthday party. He gave us around 200 prints of varying sizes, a small album, two mounted photos and the CD of all 900+ pics. If anyone is looking for a photographer here in Seoul - he is very good. It is strange to have us in photos that look like magazine ads, and he was much more creative with his shots and lighting than I was expecting. I was less self-conscious than I thought; Iris was her usual incredible Iris self; and only Jamie needs to work on the smiling-on-command that is so crucial to the photo-shoot. It was pretty fun though, and I think we might try to convince him to do some outdoor family shots in future years. In two videos below, you can see Mr. Lee's attempt to have the family do his favourite poses of "family walking" and "airplane baby." Clearly it isn't so easy for the non-Korean babies to walk in hanbok and fly through the air, though on dollsnap you can see Korean babies pulling these poses off with flair.

"What exactly is IRIS?"

"IRIS is preparing to terrorize Seoul"

"It makes us more certain that IRIS is on the move"

And so my baby girl turned one year old, and was duly celebrated, blessed and embraced. We have loved having her in our lives this past year, and are looking forward to sharing her smiles and spirit and joie de vivre with many more nations in the years to come.

"This mysterious organization called IRIS - the more we find out about [her], the more we can be certain that [her] influence spreads far . . . how broad is [her] reach? we just don't know yet"