The Wizard Has Left The Building

Ferial and I are passionate about books. Both of us are avid readers. We have always loved reading. Since we were young, both were labeled "book worm" and bore the badge proudly.

I remember the day I learned to read. Yes, it happened in a day. Of course my mother had been teaching me to read for quite a long time, but what I remember was the day it all clicked. I had learned to read words, sentences, even short stories, and to comprehend what I read there. However, it was unique knowledge. It was monocontextual, if you will. I could only read, sitting at the table, or on the couch with my mother and the curriculum she had used to teach me. Then one day, it just clicked. I was sitting in the back seat of the car. We were on our way to visit my grandmother in a neighboring town. I looked up and out of the window, and there, full of words and life was a billboard. It was simple, even cheesy. It was advertising a large church, off the highway. It read "Word of Life Church." It took me a second to realize that I had read those words and that they had instantly communicated their intended meaning in my mind. In other words, I COULD READ! I read the next billboard, an ad for McDonalds, and the next, and the next. I spent the rest of the half hour trip with my face pressed against the glass, reading aloud every sign and billboard I could see, driving my parents crazy. I think the next week, my mother started teaching me to read silently...

Ferial is a bit of a speed reader. She reads very fast. She regularly finishes books in less than three days. She finished the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Omnibus Edition (the 5 book trilogy, plus one short story) in less than a week. She gobbled it up. Once or twice, I have known her to read an entire novel in a day. On a side note, she has read all eight Anne of Green Gables Novels more than a dozen times, the Chronicles of Narnia twice and The Harry Potter series, twice.

I am of a different sort. I possess the ability to read quickly. However, I choose not to. I read carefully and methodically. I look for hidden meaning, innuendo and inference. I give each character in a novel a voice, an accent, verbal ticks and stutters. I characterize, as I read. When I read the characters' lines, I attempt to become the characters, to get inside their heads, to glean even the unwritten emotions from their words. In addition to this, even when I read silently, I never read faster than I would, were I to read it out loud. I don't read any faster than I speak. On purpose.

Thus, we are different readers, but both are readers.

As you can imagine, bookstores present a nigh irresistible temptation before us. When we lived in the United States it was easier to resist the temptation that Barnes and Noble posed to us. We didn't go in. We rarely went into bookstores in California, knowing that we could not afford most of what would beckon to us from within. It was cheaper, easier and more convenient to simply order what we wanted off of Amazon, to have our books and afford to eat too. When we moved to South Korea, we brought thirty books, not including Bibles and journals. We've yet to read them all. However, we have bought many more since being here. There are some fabulous bookstores here, and most of them have sizeable English Sections. In addition to this, we have a couple of good friends and family members who, knowing our affinity for books, have bought and sent us still others. We recently had to purchase a second bookshelf, because the one we had was getting overstuffed.

Today, we went for lunch in our favorite area of Seoul, Samseung. After some rockin' fajitas, we walked around in the underground mall, which is part of the Coex Annex. During our walk, we found our favorite Korean bookstore to date. It's called Bandi & Luni's. They had some decently priced books, and some great finds. It wasn't all airport paperbacks, which is always nice, because my natural pretension wants to have fairly good editions on my shelves.

We bought three today:
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. Ever since reading Wicked, I have wanted to read Baum's original Oz. He wrote dozens of Oz books, and I doubt I'll read them all, but I would very much like to read the first 2 or 3.
The Tales of Beedle The Bard, by J.K. Rowling. I've been excited about this one, ever since I saw the hand-drawn, hand-written copy Rowling did, and sold for charity auction as Sotheby's for 1.95 million pounds, on Amazon.com.
The Year of Living Biblically, One Man's Humble Quest to Follow The Bible as Literally as Possible, by A.J. Jacobs. We bought this one on instinct. It looks compelling. I am excited to read it. I assume it will end up being anti-fundamentalist / anti-evangellical-conservative propoganda, but it looks like a lot of fun, and I hope to be surprised, in the end.

I bought Ferial a Nintendo DS for Christmas. It was supposed to be a modest Christmas, since we're trying to pay off bills & the economy is a mess & and we believe there is more to the holiday than consumerism....but I couldn't resist. It's a lot of fun, but it's nice to see that, even with the DS and the Laptop in the house, we're still reading as much as ever.

Cheers.

Update!

So, I'm cheating a little bit. I'm not posting a completely-new blog today. This is an excerpt from an email that I just sent to a friend. But it's such a good update of us that I knew that I just had to blog it:



"Did you have a good time with all of your people for New Year's? John and I both got the cold that's going around here so we just stayed in and relaxed, which turned out to be really fun and just what we needed.

Christmas was also wonderful and simple. We had a Christmas brunch with our American friends (french toast and fresh fruit) and played games and such. We relaxed in the afternoon and then in the evening our "big boss" took us out for Christmas dinner with some of the other Center staff. It was great! We had bulgogi at this fancy place and I loved it.

We had decided to go easy on Christmas gifts this year (meaning we were only going to do simple stuff for each other and nothing for anyone else =) ), but John broke the rules and bought me a Nintendo DS! I can't deny that I love it. It feels so Korean to get on the subway and play Super Mario!

Teaching is also going well. A little hectic right now because our English department is undergoing a lot of schedule changes, but going well. I definitely know now that teaching is NOT my calling, but I really do love my little Koreans and I am so grateful for this experience. We have such a good workplace--our managers and co-workers are fantastic and they have provided so much for us.

Life is very simple here. I really believe that God brought us here for many more reasons than just to pay off debt, and He has been teaching us many lessons in living simply and being content. These lessons have been hard and wonderful all at the same time. We've been here 6 months now and life has become "normal" again. We have routines, we know our way around the block as teachers, we can speak and understand enough of the language to get around (I taught myself to read Hangul!), and we have a great group of friends. Now that all of the excitement, the newness, and the honeymoon feelings have dissipated however, the homesickness has kicked in with a fierceness. Korea is SO different from the US in so many ways. It's funny how leaving the US can make you love it in ways that you never thought possible. I don't just miss the conveniences (the Targets, the Starbucks on every corner, the wide range of deodorants and toothpastes)--I miss the mentalities, the diversity, the politics, the music, the issues, and the people the most. I think I needed to leave, and to "love the leave" (as a friend of mine says) in order to really embrace being an American."