No Smoking: Day 9
Well, this was supposed to be a daily thing but… erm.
Today is day 9 of no smoking. I suppose I should clarify one thing by the way. Technically I am still smoking, just not cigarettes. When starting this “stopping” plan I went in with one exception to ease myself into this a little more. My sister had brought me back several packages of Clove cigarettes from Indonesia. So, while I have completely stopped buying and smoking regular cigarettes I have been allowing myself ONE clove a day to help ween myself off until they are gone. I think it is working actually. They are different enough from actual cigarettes that they that they… well they help in any case.
What it feels like
Nine days in and the cravings are beginning to gradually disappear. So far so good.
It’s not, however, all good. It hasn’t been easy. My temper has been much more on edge. I have been struggling with anxiety and stress (in case you didn’t know, cigarettes are a huge stress reliever), I don’t think I have had a good night’s sleep in, well, nine days, and my mind sometimes feels incredibly like the above picture.
No Smoking: Day 1
March 19th, 2012
Here we go again.
I have been smoking regularly now for about 2.5 years. I actually haven’t really thought about how long it’s been until just now while putting it into print. It certainly doesn’t feel that long. Returning to the point, it has been a long time that I have been smoking regularly. To qualify (I suppose I mean quantify in the literal sense) the use of ‘regularly’ I should explain that I mean that I smoke about a pack about every two days, although this figure changes dramatically on some weekends.
I smoked occasionally during college but rarely ever bought cigarettes. Not only did I not have the money to indulge during those days, I also didn’t really need to. I would smoke a cigarette or two on the weekend or when I would be at the bar with my friends. If I bought a pack they would often go stale before I could even smoke them all.
After I graduated I stopped smoking cigarettes at all for a while. During this time I smoked a pipe, albeit fairly infrequently.
Once I arrived in Korea things began to change, however. I suddenly had a lot of money to spend it seemed. That, combined with the fact that cigarettes are very cheap here, and an increase in social bar-going meant that I started buying packs a lot more frequently.
Still, for the first year here I rarely smoked when I wasn’t out with my friends. I never smoked at work. I never even really felt the need to light one up as soon as I got home, either.
It hooks everyone.
Of course things didn’t stay that way. The longer you smoke the more you want to and the more you feel the need to. I won’t talk anymore about the slow and subtle transition from occasional social smoker to having-a-cigarette-in-the-bathroom-smoker because I can barely remember how it happened. It just does. To everyone. I defy anyone to remain just a social smoker. It just doesn’t work that way. It gets everyone in the end. There isn’t a difference between a social smoker and a regular smoker, you just haven’t been smoking long enough, yet.
Enough about that though. Let’s talk about quitting. I have seriously tried twice now. The first time lasted about a month. A friend and I (who was also the main reason I smoked as much as I did) tried to quit together. We both cracked before the month was out. And the backsliding actually made me start smoking more. The second time I tried I was all by myself. It was my new years resolution of 2011. This time things were actually more difficult. I was smoking after breakfast, I’d have another during the course of the morning, one after lunch, another one or two in the afternoon, as soon as I got home at night, after dinner… you get the idea. Suddenly quitting was rough. I lasted through the worst of the withdrawals only start up again about half way through February. I don’t even remember why.
Third times a charm?
Well, I am quitting again. We’ll see how this goes. First day in and I am already getting the cravings.
Suwon Immigration and Climbing Pee Bong Mountain
Thursday, October 8, 2009
So, while I decided to stop waiting to post current things until I had gotten the backlog out of the way, I still want to go back and document some of the things that happened a while ago.
This happened a day or two after I got here.
I was told to bring my passport and stuff with me to school shortly after my first day at school as we would be going to to take care of my immigration stuff in Suwon (kind of the city of bureaucracy here). In the morning I went with the Vice-Principal to visit a nearby school and to both meet another English teacher and kind of get some pointers from her. It was very helpful and yet still somewhat bewildering. At first it just seems like there is just so much information that they throw at you. Now it seems pathetically simplistic (at least the terrible government mandated curriculum) yet still fatiguingly hard. It is hard to make a 40 minute lesson out of what they want you to teach.
I should mention Lisa here. She is an extremely nice 40-something year old woman from California who has been teaching here in Anseong for about 7 months now. She was the first foreign teacher in Anseong that I met and really did help me a lot. She gave me materials, copies of the English teachers guide to the curriculum (something my school didn’t think about giving me for a couple of weeks), showed me around the town some and even fed me one night with an avocado omelet and toast when I was starving. She really made my transition here a lot smoother than it could have been. Sadly I have lost contact with her somewhat as our paths rarely cross downtown and she lives on the other side from me.
After sitting in on a couple of her lessons and talking with her for a while her vice-principal and mine took us out for lunch at a traditional noodle restaurant. After this, and I barely got to finish the food he drove me to Suwon to take care of my immigration. This is one situation was one situation where I
The Suwon Immigration builiding. Hmm... but I guess you can see that from the picture.
was glad that my school is so bureaucratic and officious. We got there and because they had made an e-appointment or something we got to skip ahead of the line of about 40 people that looked like they had been sitting there already for some hours. Soon the paperwork and my passport were turned, the money paid for it to be sent back to me, and we were on the way back to Anseong.
It was funny, aside for the big letters on the building declaring it for what it was it was a really non-desrcript and unofficial and we had to walk down what amounted to an alley and past a garbage truck to get into the stairwell (no lobby or foyer just stairwell).
After we got back to Anseong, and maybe just because it was only late afternoon and we were passing the entrance area, he decided to take me mountain climbing up Pee Bong Mountain. I thought at first we were just going sightseeing a little way up but soon we were passing people with laughably serious
Outside of Suwon: One of the "home" forests as they call them. It is just one apartment building after another like some weird tired community housing.
mountaineering apparel complete to sets of those extendable hiking poles. We got plenty of strange looks, partly, I think, from me being a very white white-boy and partly from the fact that my Vice-Principal was wearing a suit and I was wearing a button-up and dress shoes. We looked quite out of place. It also may have been due to the fact that we seemed to be effortlessly gliding past many of those “professional” hikers. I think my Vice-Principal only has one pace. It was at least 2 miles up a very steep trail but the scenery was more than worth the uncomfortable shoes. It was beautiful up there and perched near the very top was a traditional octagonal structure (I forget what they call them) that you could climb and look out over the city below.
One view from the top. I live somewhere near the middle but closer the the bottom left.
It was really pretty and it made Anseong look al lot better than it usually does closer up. On the way back down we stop to get some water at a natural spring there that is supposed to be very healthy. The part where everyone drinks out of communal dippers might negate the health benefits but who knows. Koreans share everything, right? There is also a place for Badminton too. Right next the Buddhist temple. It is funny how the old and the new are intermixed so much. We also passed quite a few burial mounds that didn’t really seemed to be separated from the public land in any way.
The spring. Down below and the other side there was a place where the used water came out and you could wash your hands or even bathe there.
After we finished the climb down he decided to take me out to dinner. Oddly enough he took me to a chinese restaurant. The first course was really good, a huge plate of sesame chicken. The second, individual plates of an incredibly spicy mixture of tofu and what looked like ground beef, I couldn’t eat. It was just too hot, though I did my best, and may have done irreparable damage to my mouth and tongue from trying so hard.
Another view from the top. I think it might be the same as before but just lighter.
No News at All
Sunday, December 6, 2009
So, I have decided that I am going to stop waiting to write new and current posts until I write about some of the things that have already happened. My sister gave me the advice that if I won’t ever write anything if I wait to start at the beginning. I did that already and now I have been here for 2 months and only have 2 legitimate posts. Maybe if I am okay with writing short little notices I will be more faithful in keeping up with writing things here.
Not much has happened this weekend. I had felt kind of bad ever since getting back from the GEPIK teachers orientation that was held from Monday to Wednesday. (More on that later – I think it deserves its own post) and Thursday and Friday at work were kind of hard. I got back from classes on Friday with plans to meet a fellow English teacher downtown for a drink around 8:30 and had plans to go running first while it was still warm out. Well, I came tired from work as I usually am and decided to sit down for a minute and read some of the current book I am reading. I also had an intense desire to curl up under my comforter for a few minutes as I had turned the heat off in the morning and it was about 50 degrees in my apt. The next thing I know is that it is 7:30 pitch black dark outside and about 36 degrees, so much for the warm.
I stubbornly decided to go for a run anyway, however. It had been a while and I had been feeling unhealthy (especially after eating loads of greasy quasi-western food at the orientation meeting) and I refused to give in and put it off for another day. So, I called the girl and told her it would be a little longer and staggered out into the cold in my thin sweatpants, jacket, and earmuffs. Despite the weather I got in about 2.3 miles in 19 minutes. (good enough I suppose and I could no longer feel my thighs) I came back, showered, and got dressed and ran up to meet her. Due to the delay I had asked for some plans had been messed up and now I had to wait for her for about 30 minutes. It turned out to be a good thing, however, because some other friends called and said that they were on their way up to Seoul in a few minutes and wanted to know if I wanted to join. I probably would have gone as I was feeling kind of reckless at the moment and that would have made for a very long night. You kind of get stuck there until the public transportation opens back up at 6. I only stayed out for a short while and went home early instead.
Saturday, I had had week long plans to go up to Seoul in the afternoon and meet some people I had met during orientation and go out with them at night. I had actually been thinking of going up in the morning with a couple of people from Anseong and seeing some touristy stuff with them too. That didn’t pan out. I was just not feeling well during the day and never really got to feeling better so spent most of the day in bed or cleaning my apartment. Finally, around 8pm or so I formally canceled my plans with the people in Seoul. (A two hour long skype convo with my parents put a dent in my getting ready time) So, what with the advanced hour and my fatigue I decided not to go. Instead I hung around cleaning and what not in my apt until around 10 when I walked downtown to meet a friend. It was nice and much more relaxed than Seoul. Two other people showed up as well. The funny thing was we went, in the end, to one of the more frequented bars by foreign teachers here in Anseong and the owner came over and joined us. Then not long after, her friend, another bar owner (and one also known as the western hangout) came in and joined us. It was a fun and slightly bizarre experience, sitting around a table with two forty year old Korean women eating fruit (among other things) with chopsticks, occasionally being fed by one of them with chopsticks. They would sometimes just reach over and try to shove something in your mouth.
Today, I have spent nearly the whole day in bed. I woke up with what seems to be a pretty severe sinus infection and cough. I am so glad I didn’t go to Seoul last night. I don’t know what I would be feeling like today if I had. Last night I went out for a very short time and had relatively nothing to drink, just basically a walk, some company, and some food, and I’m feeling like this. Ugh.
I just got off the phone with my co-teacher and may not be going to work in the morning. I am not sure yet. I left my insurance card at school and am not sure if I will have to go out there first before going to the hospital or even whether or not I really want to take tomorrow off. The last time I took a sick day they had a fit.
A friend is going to bring me over some medicine now though so I might have a better night’s sleep. What will tomorrow bring?
My First Meal in My Room
Yes, room not apartment, I don’t think I could bring myself to call this an apartment. It is slightly bigger than my dorm-room in college with Kitchen cabinets and a sink stuck against one wall and a tiny bathroom. Well, I think it might still qualify as a bathroom, but I think the European word Water-Closet is much more apt. I never really thought it made sense until now. It is the size of a large closet with a toilet and a shower spigot. The entire water-closet gets soaked when I take a shower and I can’t use the toilet for hours afterwards. But that’s enough on the “bathroom.”
I saw these pictures tonight in my iPhoto and I thought I would put something up about my apartment. I have changed things around a little since I took these you still can see what the place sort of looks like.
So, here is what the place looks like. It's bright, sterile white.
It was a little sad when I first got here. I didn’t take a picture of the way that the things were set up but it looked pretty terrible. It is somewhat better now but even still.
There is a little balcony thing outside where I have my table as you will see below. Now that it has gotten so cold I don’t even use that area but perhaps to dry clothes. Tonight, however, I actually have the drying rack inside becuase it is so cold out there that it takes days for the clothes to dry.
Cooking my first Meal. If you can see the sink makes no sense for an apartment or kitchen area this size. I think I could probably bathe in it.
So, my first meal in my apt. I sautéed pork strips with some kind of spicy chile past and the strangest mushrooms I have ever seen. It is really good and have made it several times. DK is like Sprite.
My tiny table.
The Korean Connection 