InKAS 여름 캠프 InKAS Summer Camp

So I am now back and the very jam-packed trip didn't really afford me the time to blog like my more extended one last year.  Nevertheless, there are a few things that I wanted to write about and I was able to jot down some notes, so as I find time, I'll "hind-write" (I seriously just made that up, can you believe it!?) a few entries.  Sorry.


Wednesday, 6/1/2016

Cast of Characters:

The structure of my trip this time is two-fold:  I arrived four days ago on May 29th and had those days to retrace a few memories and blaze new ones around Seoul on my own before the InKAS program starts, including seeing a few familiar faces.

Pretty much as soon as I landed and checked into my AirBNB in the Hongdae area--one of most popular neighborhoods for young people in Seoul--I met up with three of my friends from last year:

Adam:  An adoptee from the Chicago area whom I met interestingly enough, through InKAS at their Seollal (Korean New Year) dinner last year.  If this trip is Jurassic Park:  The Lost World, I guess he must be Jeff Goldblum, because he's pretty much the only person you'll recognize from last time.  He's actually been living in Seoul for over four years now and just got a job at the American embassy.
Hyeonju:  A Korean girl I sat next to on the plane to Taiwan last year, which formed the basis of our friendship.  She works in social media marketing at a Korean cosmetics company.
Minsun:  Hyeonju's friend that hung out with us last year; she is a phlebotomist at a hospital in Seoul.

We got things started properly with jokbal 족발, Korean braised pork and a cold noodle dish called makguksu 막국수.

This is Adam and Hyeonju.

And this is Minsun and my right shoulder and most of my neck and face.

The girls had then planned for a bike ride along the Han River, but unless you have a Korean ID, it's basically impossible to rent one of the public bikes.  So this is all of the Korean residents trying to figure out how to rent me a bike.

It worked out in the end though and the weather in Korea this time around was beautiful--not too different from Michigan, about 75-85, sunny, and a little humid--a great time to be back.

And to update you a bit on my Seoul-mates from last year:
Peter:  My dear 친구 ("chingu" = friend) is currently wrapping up his intern year in Internal Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, forcing a long-distance brolationship.
Grace:  The awesomest Aussie moved back to Brisbane to finish up Uni (that "college" in Australian) and she has since been accepted to several graduate programs in Korea and will be moving back this fall!
Lee-Jiao:  Our Chinese housemate from last year is also done with her Korean studies and moved back home, where she goes months at a time without signs of life on social media, but is likely amassing a small fortune by starting a black market Korean cosmetics business in China.
Megan:  Our Minnesotan house mom from last year is back in the Midwest, but also has nebulous plans to come back to Korea sometime.  As it turns out, she was only the harbinger of a coming invasion, as the Goos had no room for me this year because of abundance of Minnesotans.
Mike:  The frenetic Baltimorean of yester-집 (yester-house) also went back home since last year, but is also planning to come back to Korea this fall for more studies.

The Goo Crew 2015

InKAS deserves some introduction here, as they not only contracted with Korean Air to get our flights paid for, but also massively subsidized the rest of the trip, making this trip possible and affordable for all of us.  InKAS stands for International Korean Adoptee Service Inc and was founded in 1997 by chairwoman Jung.  It is a non-profit post-adoption organization partly funded by the South Korean government that seeks to reconnect Korean adoptees in 14 different countries with South Korea and help them develop an identity as ethnic Koreans, one of the more prominent of many similar organizations.  More specifically, they provide services for adoptees who are back in Seoul, offering very affordable short- and long-term accommodation at their house 우리집 "Our House," and helping them find education or work in Korea.  They also offer a number of special programs annually, including custom-made tours of Korea for adoptees and their families, scholarships for studying at Korean universities, birth searches for reuniting adoptees with their biological families, and several group trips or "camps" for large groups of foreign adoptees to experience Korea together.

You can check out their website here:  http://inkas.org/en/

This InKAS program then, is a summer camp of sorts which makes up the bulk of my trip and is a tour of Seoul and much of the rest of South Korea for a group of about 34 Korean adoptees.  The group hails from seven different Western countries in all, and I was initially concerned that it would be much truer to its "summer camp" title with me stuck on a bus with a gaggle of 18 year-olds straight out of high school for 10 days--amounting to something like this:

This is one of my students from Guatemala and there was almost nothing left of him after this.

However, the age range ended up being between 20 and 40, with the average being somewhere around my age.  Here's a quick rundown of the 34 of us:

Americans:  There are 15 of us including four from Michigan.

French:  There are seven French adoptees including our trip photographer Pierre who has been on the InKAS summer camp no fewer than eight times; true to their nationality, all of them smoke.

Dutch:  There are five Dutch adoptees on the trip, and they unsurprisingly ended up being by far the most proficient soccer players in the group.

Danes:  There are four Danes, including a Danish-Korean-adoptee version of Phoebe and one person with the last name Klug, which comes from the same root as "Kluk"--crazy!

Norwegian:  In addition to being our only Norwegian, Julie (Yoo-lee-eh) is also a second-generation adoptee and her adoptee mother attended InKAS summer camp two years ago!  She's also probably the person with whom I was closest on the trip.

Canadian:  We had one lone Canadian on the trip who manages a ballet company and defended Canada's honor during thunder-and-lightning ping-pong.

Australian:  Our very own Aussie is actually also an actress who has a supporting role in the show Wentworth on Netflix and her own Wikipedia and IMDB pages--check it out!

In addition to all these wonderful people, the staff on the trip was also great and included:

Ray:  the leader and tour guide of the trip; also the chairman's son who lived in the US for a while

Haeri:  the director and behind-the-scenes mastermind of the entire trip and karaoke dark horse

Not the whole group, but for some reason, no one has posted any of the 2138562852 group pictures we took.

Oh yeah, and then this happened!

You can see the indoctrination of Minsoo and Minhook is going all according to plan ;)

Until next time!

Mark

마크는 한국에 가요 부품2: 인턴이 앙갚음을 해요 Mark Goes to Korea Part 2: The Intern Strikes Back

Saturday, 5/28/2016

Recap:

Hello friends!  It's been a long time since my last (and I really thought it would be my last) post and a lot has happened since then:  Prince died, several of you got married, Ben picked Lauren, and the Avengers defeated Ultron and put a stop to his dastardly plan.  As for my life, I'm sure everyone reading this is pretty caught up on the basics, but I'll recap for context's sake and because it makes my life sound more interesting than it's actually been over the last eleven months of working all the time.

After returning from Korea for Match Day after my five weeks' stay, I then went to stay with Brandan in Tubingen, Germany where I would base my forays into Europe for the following few weeks.  

I went to Scotland with Brandan and Charisa,

Paris with Karin,

Barcelona and Andorra (it's a real place! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorra) with Brandan, 

serendipitously stumbled across Delirium tap house in Brussels (a good story for another time), 

almost got shanked by the dirty Rasta DJ from Zoolander in Amsterdam during the Dutch Tulip festival (another good story for a different time, though the cat's out of the bag now thanks to one Brandan Walters), 

and shared Germany's best beer with two of America's best gentlemen in Munich at Andech's Abbey.  

I had never been to Europe before and always wanted to go, so thus passed my second big trip last year.  

Then to celebrate medical school graduation, a group from my class capped off the experience with a trip to Thailand and Hong Kong where we ate some of the best food I've ever tasted, dove the technicolor reefs of the Andaman Sea, and I was carded for admission to a 16 years and older videogame arcade.

And there, boys and girls and non-gender-binary individuals, are where my travels and my bank account ended.  Since then, I'm afraid that the only place I've traveled is through the dark, cold, and decidedly unscenic land of despair known as adulthood (read:  intern year of Med-Peds residency at U of M), where all the beds have MRSA, the food is only good on Saturdays (Kosmo bulgogi and Ginger Deli pho/bahn mi, amirite?), and the drinks are usually enjoyed alone, and sometimes in the shower when you're tired.  Okay, I'm being dramatic, but you get the picture:  Lots of work; Mark not good at adulting.

Anyway, after my seminal trip to South Korea last year, I had no concrete plans to come back, though I knew it would happen eventually.  We get a two-week vacation block during intern year though--mine in June--and as no other plans had crystallized by winter, I started toying with the idea of using it to go back to Korea.  I then received a well-timed email from InKAS (International Korean Adoptee Service)--one of those adoptee organizations from last time--with news that they were offering a summer trip to eight cities across Korea in, you guessed it, just about the exact window of my vacation in June; so I applied, was accepted, they paid for my plane ticket, and here I am.

Thus, this and any potential subsequent blog posts are really more bonus entries than anything, as I'm pretty much just here to visit friends and explore a bit more.  All major plot arcs from my original trip are either completed or suspended for now and this trip, much like any other poorly thought-out sequel, has less than half the budget of the original, will likely feature many of the same jokes, have inferior stories (seriously, how am I ever going to top naked jjimjilbang ER?  I'm not.), and many of the original characters will not be returning on this go-round :(.

That said, the trip is already off to a great start, I'll almost certainly be back again in the future, and I like the idea of maintaining this blog longitudinally, so welcome to Chapter 2!

Tattoo Story:

So after my very formative experience here last year, it was clear that Korea and a Korean identity were going to be a permanent part of my life moving forward, and somewhere along the line of my time here, I decided I wanted to do something as both a commemoration and a reminder of that deliberate and ongoing decision.

Ironically, I first got the idea from an InKAS member I met who had horrifyingly gotten her adoption case number tattooed on her forearm, in allusion to a concentration camp ID number tattooed on a Jewish prisoner during WW2.  Yeah, fucking yikes.

Now I had never been a tattoo person and was neither planning on or even curious about getting one before Korea, and as drastic and upsettingly negative as this person's tattoo was (you can read my post "An Adoption Story" from last year if you need more context for why some people legitimately feel this way), obviously the image of that tattoo stuck with me, but eventually, I thought more and more about co-opting it into a positive reminder.  I brought it up with Peter, Grace, and the rest of my housemates after ruminating on the idea for a while, and they were all very supportive.  There was only one problem:  tattoos are illegal and largely unavailable in Korea due to their association with the Korean mob, Japanese Yakuza, and other organized crime groups in East Asia.  So no tattoo in Korea for me. 

Nonetheless, this gave me some more time to think about exactly what I wanted and where I wanted it.  I ended up having to wait until after my Europe trip, but once I was back, I went to Name Brand Tattoo in Ann Arbor with Peter, who helped me pick a cool font and made sure I spelled my own name right, and Jenny, who mostly just wanted to see if I cried.  I decided on getting my Korean name "오진규" (Oh Jin Kyu) because it represents my Korean identity and serves as a reminder to continue learning more about Korean language and culture and I got it on my right bicep because I wanted it to be somewhere where I could easily see it, but also cover it up if I needed too.  (Now as it turns out, scrub sleeves are super short and fall adorably, drastically short of covering it up, but my residency program director thinks it's cool and it's permanently on my arm there forever, so tough shit, workplace professionalism.)  Here is some photodocumentation from Jenny's secret facebook album.

Let's be honest the shaving of arm hairs was 99% formality for tattoo artist Nick.

"Are you crying yet?" - supportive friend Jenny

And the finished product in all of its angry, semi-painful-but-not-crying, definitely not in fact hidden  by most short sleeves, not mispelled glory.

Now I didn't tell my family about this until it was already done, mostly just because I didn't think to, so I, in my infinite wisdom, chose to call them up the night before they were going to come up to Ann Arbor for the Auscultations a cappella Spring Concert and tell them, "Hey, by the way, I have pretty big news to tell you when you come up tomorrow--I've been thinking about it for a while and I'm not sure how you're going to react to it bye!"  At the time, that seemed like a completely reasonable way to preface this news, but as it turns out, that is incorrect.  So Stephanie called me back about fifteen minutes later slightly panicked and said, "Mark, what did you do!?  Mom and dad said you did something, but you won't tell them what it is--they are freaking out!"  I told them not to worry about it and that I would see them the next day at the concert.

Now I had anticipated their reactions and guessed that my mom would love it, my sister would look at it really closely for a few seconds, say "Ooooo," and then continue on living her life, and I thought my dad might be kind of mad about it, but I wasn't sure.  To commute their suffering, as soon as they showed up at the concert the next day, I told them right away that I got a tattoo and showed them and I was right about my mom and sister's reactions, but pretty off about my dad's.  Because, you see, shortly after this big reveal and a couple more spell checks later, my dad did this:

It's my and Stephanie's Korean names with a large script C (for Cheryl) around them, of my dad's own design.  It actually says "bravest cheese, yes we go," but don't tell him that--jkjk.

And then a few months after that, he did this:

to celebrate his Polish heritage and in remembrance of my grandfather Ralph Sr., who passed away last year.

And THEN, he did this:

 

Okay not really, but I'm keeping it in mind--the man is hard to shop for at Christmas time.  But let's go back for a second and talk about what my parents, in their stress-plosion of parental anxiety sparked off my by ambiguous and poorly thought-out comment, thought that I had actually done, and more importantly, what this might reveal about their innermost perceptions of their son.

Me:  "So what did you guys think I did yesterday before I told you?"

Mom:  "We didn't know--I mostly thought that you had a new girlfriend or that you won an award or something."

Dad:  "I don't know; I was worried you dropped out of med school or something."

Steph:  "Yup, he was freaking out."

Mom:  "I tried to tell your father that you--"

Steph:  "--Dad thought you were going to become a priest!"

End scene.