a tale of two campuses (and a post office)

I'm starting this entry at 5:27 p.m., back after a long day of visiting the post office, taking the subway to Dongguk University, then subwaying over to Sookmyung Women's University (where I taught from 2005 to 2008, and where my mother went to school)—all in search of certificates of employment (경력증명서/gyeong ryeok jeungmyeong-seo).

Some shots from the long and walking-heavy trip:

Dongguk University's main building (bon gwan/본관), where all your wishes are granted

The Buddha's birthday is coming up (5/24), and Dongguk (lit., "Eastern Land/Country") is a Buddhist university.

This is backwards when seen from below. The visible syllable, 법/beop, means "dharma" in Korean Buddhism.

Otherwise, in regular speech, 법/beop just means "law" or even "method."

The famous Buddha statue that got graffiti'ed by Christians (or ostensible Christians) years ago.

Koreans call Shakyamuni "Seokgameoni/석가머니."

The sign right next to the statue advertises the upcoming birthday. Note the pink lotus.

This sentiment strikes me as more apropos for Christians than for Buddhists.

As far as I know, Buddhism doesn't have a loving-devotional (bhakti) strain like the one found in many strains of Hinduism (bhakti-yoga). As a result, the above is just weird to me. The Buddha actually spent a lot of time trying to get people not to focus on him but on the praxis he'd been preaching. There is no "I am the way, the truth, and the life" in Buddhism, with the founder enjoining people to focus on him.

I remember this housing for a big ol' Buddhist bell. I'd forgotten about the steep hill. I walked up that today.

a slightly better shot of the bell

The lanterns advertise the Buddha's birthday.

In relaxed language, people toss around Buddha and Christ as if they were proper names, but they're actually titles: It's the Buddha and the Christ. The Buddha's proper name was Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni. You know those idiots who name their pets with titles? "Come here, General!" Yeah, those idiots. Don't be like them. Treat titles as titles. That said, I reserve the right to say Christ! in disgust, exasperation, or shock.

walking back downhill after getting my certificate from the main building, Shilla Hotel across the way

stairs up to the campus temple

But the sign on the gate doesn't use the literal character for temple, which is sa/寺/사; the final character (read right to left) says weon/院, which could be translated as "temple" in certain contexts. It can also mean a house or a garden, among other things. In fact, read from right to left (and displayed here from left to right, the sign says 正覺院/정각원/jeong gak weon, so maybe it's something like "Temple of Correct Enlightenment." Anyway, the massive number of lanterns should clue you in that this leads to a temple or some sort of holy ground.

a closer look at the lanterns and the sign

Moving on to Sookmyung's campus, five subway stops away...

Sookmyung's face has changed radically

a shot of the Admin Building, where I started my search for a needed document

I was told to go to the Student Center, Room 305

The first thing I did today was visit the local post office to send off my fingerprints to the FBI's center in West Virginia. I told the postal staffer to send the package via EMS, which cost me around W25,000 (just to send six sheets of A4 paper in an envelope). The procedure for sending something via EMS keeps fucking changing. This time around, the staffer led me through a complicated registration process on my phone, and I still don't think it required me to sign up as a member or anything, which means that, when I go back tomorrow to send off my diplomas, I'm going to have to do this shit all over again. I kept a blandly patient look on my face the whole time, though; I'm not normally one of those cranky people who lose their temper when they're made to wait. Eventually, the process was finished after a lot of back-and-forth, so I walked over to Daecheong Station and went to Dongguk University, which is on Line 3; it was a straight shot. Not too crowded on the Line 3 subway at 1 p.m., either.

Dongguk University. I remembered the exit to campus was #6; luckily, there was an escalator out of the station, then another escalator to take you up the steep hill to the campus. That was, alas, all the mechanical help I got: In trying to find the main building, I ended up climbing many more hills and stairs; I'd conveniently (or inconveniently) forgotten how hilly the Seoul campus of Dongguk was. I did eventually find the main building, and several other campus buildings looked familiar to me. In passing through one building, I saw a machine that purported to dispense certificates, but it was being worked on, and the guy working on it was the one who told me to try the main building.

At the main building, I found the very quiet office where two or three female staffers and one much older male staffer were all working. Since I'd been speaking Korean with everyone I'd encountered on my way to the main building, I continued to do so this time, not pulling the same stunt I'd pulled at the police station the other day. The young ladies proved friendly and helpful; they even laughed at some of my remarks as if I'd been joking (which I kind of was); maybe they were giggling at my Korean, but one told me I spoke really well (which is actually something that even foreigners who don't speak Korean will hear when they simply say "hello" in Korean). The staffers were very accommodating; they asked me whether I wanted the certificate of employment in English or in Korean, so I opted for Korean. They also said they had another page specifying which courses I had taught from 2014 to 2015. One awkward thing, though, was that during my time at Dongguk, I taught at the Seoul campus during my first semester, then at the Goyang City campus (waaaaay at the end of Line 3 and much closer to North Korea) during my second semester there, which means I had to move to a temporary residence in Goyang (a region that overlaps with Ilsan). So the ladies gave me the option of receiving two certificates, one for each semester, or just getting one. I opted for the single page plus the extra page showing what courses I had taught, i.e., two pages total, not three. They stuffed everything into an envelope after I'd checked all of the information, and that was that. Luckily, the walk back to the subway station was entirely downhill.

I then trundled over to Sookmyung Women's University, where I had taught English conversation, reading, and even French (extracurricularly*) from 2005 to 2008. Getting out of the subway station meant hitting Exit 10, which I remembered. I did forget that there was a short tunnel to walk through, and the gentle uphill climb wasn't helping my heart any. Back in 2005, twenty-one years ago, that gentle climb was nothing. A stroke and a heart attack and two decades later, and I ended up pausing for breath after making it to the campus gates. I was thoroughly winded.

Sookmyung has two pairs of "front gates" because the campus is evenly divided by the street that bifurcates it. The older side of the campus used to be called the Gangbuk ("north of the river") side; the other, newer side of the campus used to be called the Gangnam ("south of the river") side, reflecting the idea that Seoul's older, less trendy districts are north of the river while the livelier, trendier areas are all south of the river (not entirely true these days, but true enough). I knew the admin building was on the Gangbuk side, so I went there, huffing and puffing up the final inclines and steps.

I found what appeared to be the office I needed, but after a long time, this much quieter, less friendly, more subdued staff wasn't able to find my records. That might not be surprising given that departments change names and locations over the course of two decades. In the end, that staff had to admit defeat, and they sent me to the student center across the way to try again. Long story short: The student center also had trouble digging up my records, but they thought they'd found a lead when they called the building where I used to teach, the Social Education Building. So I was told to go visit that building, Room 205.

Room 205 is approximately where my department's (Lingua Express) old office used to be, but the guts of the building had been changed to the point of unfamiliarity. Still, I found 205 (another quiet office) and spoke with a lone staffer who had a constantly apologetic look on her face. In the end, she couldn't dig my records up, either, and according to her, the staffer who could help wasn't there at the moment, so she said that, when that staffer came back, they'd find my record and email me the requested employment certificate. 

I do hope there's no fuckup with the dates or anything. When I got the employment certificate for my most recent job (the Golden Goose in Daechi-dong), the team name was wrong ("Vietnam R&D"??), and so were my dates of employment, so I had to contact the office to ask them to correct the information. To their credit, they made the changes with little fuss, so I came away happy. Sookmyung's document had better be mistake-free.

Upshot: I now have certificates of employment in hand for the Golden Goose and for Dongguk University. I assume I'll be receiving a certificate from Sookmyung (I think there's still a chance that I might not), and I have to check on how the hell I'm going to get a certificate from Daegu Catholic University, where I worked from 2013 to 2014. There's someone that I can write to to ask about how to obtain a certificate from DCU.

Anyway, Dongguk was a good experience today; Sookmyung was so-so. No one at Sookmyung was unfriendly, but all of the staffers seemed a bit quieter and less helpful, and my time at Sookdae (the school's nickname) felt like a wild goose chase. I hope I do get a certificate within a week. We'll see.

It was shocking to see how much both campuses have changed over the years. Dongguk is in the middle of some huge construction project that is altering the shape of the steep hillside that leads up to the campus. Sookdae, meanwhile, isn't constructing anything right now, but many of the spaces that used to be open are now taken up by new structures that include Starbucks and other obnoxious vanguards of corporatism. The shops on the street leading up to Sookdae have all changed as well; I no longer know what's what anymore. Dongguk's basic configuration seems about the same, but there have been subtle and gross changes on campus, and I've forgotten many of the easy paths to get from here to there. One thing I do miss about Dongguk is the vegetarian cafeteria, where I often used to eat lunch, and which offered enough good dishes (it was a buffet at the time) for me not to miss meat. I'm a confirmed carnivore, but I'm really not against going off the path now and again to eat like a Buddhist (and keep in mind that Buddhist meals aren't always necessarily vegan per se, but they are generally vegetarian with some exceptions).

Because I was tired after all of those hills (and the pre-summer heat), I took a cab home. The cabbie was an old guy who talked on and on; I understood maybe half of what he was saying. He talked about how Korea is a rich country where people live well compared to places like Indonesia, where life—according to him—is very difficult. He talked about foreigner-heavy spots like Itaewon, and for several minutes, he concentrated on large, fat Western women, with their broad shoulders and huge asses (he emphasized their body shape with grandiose gestures when we were in slow traffic between Samgakji and Itaewon). Toward the end of my ride, he talked about how he tends to follow the GPS navigation's suggested route instead of going his own way ("I know better routes!") because some customers get angry if he plots the route and doesn't follow it. He said this to justify why we were currently caught in traffic. Overall, a friendly guy, but he didn't ask me any questions—he simply prattled on endlessly. Which was fine by me, frankly. I like it when people don't take any real interest in me.

Okay... I got a lot done today. The day wasn't entirely satisfactory given my failure to come away with a certificate from Sookmyung, but it was Good Enough.

Oh, and while I was writing this, I got a notice from the hospital about Friday's appointment.

More soon.

__________

*I recall that the actual French department had gotten angry when they found out I had my own extracurricular French-conversation club going. Their feeling was that only the French department should be conducting French-language activities, one of many examples of how Sookmyung failed to be collegial during my time there, instead opting to be pettily competitive. Most of the French professors at the time were Koreans who could barely speak French, something I found out from some of my students who were French majors. Those students told me that a typical lecture involved the professor talking about something like French poetry for 90 minutes—all in Korean.

When I took Georgetown University's placement test to see where I would start out as a French major (my 5 on the French AP test wasn't enough for GU; they had to test me as well), I finished the placement test 30 minutes before the second person to finish (yes, I hung around to see who would come out next and when), and I placed into junior-year French, which meant no language labs or any of that basic shit. So from the beginning, all of my classes were taught 100% in French. GU didn't have the 24/7 immersion culture that Middlebury College did, but being exposed to the target language so intensively every weekday was nevertheless beneficial. I had to wonder what these "professors" at Sookmyung had done to get their jobs. Sat around with their thumbs up their asses?