All quiet...

What with a trip to South Africa, moving house and getting visa extended I've been very quiet on the blogging front.

To make matters worse, the internet connection in my office has decided not to connect me to anything, even though it shows the wireless network is running, and my computer space at home is not conducive to long stretches of sitting and typing.

So, just to set minds at rest (not that it seems as if I was missed), yes, I am still here and still musing away...

Trains

In many ways I can call myself a railway child - both grandfathers worked on the railways in some capacity, and I've always enjoyed travelling by train far more than any other form of travel.

In a way, all travel is little capsule of people moving through time and space, but for me trains are even more so than buses, cars or planes. On trains, especially long distance trains, you can travel in your own space, the compartment, where you are able to spread yourself out the way you never can on a plane (even in first class) or a bus.

Of course, on metro trains (the ones who serve a city either as a subway or above ground), that does not exist, but still each car has an own dynamic, not similar to the other cars on the train simply because of the people who inhabit it, however briefly.

From where I currently live, a little village close to the west coast of South Korea, an hours bus ride will bring me to either Suwon or Banwol, from which I can enter the metro system of Seoul. From Banwol I catch a train on line 4 - above ground as far as Geumjong, then subway for the rest of the route, while from Suwon I have an above ground option on line 1, or the Mugungwha KTR train to Seoul station or down to Busan etc.

I have caught the KTX from Seoul to Busan three times now, and experienced how truly relative speed is - 300 km/h does not feel like that when you are sitting in a comfortable seat, watching the landscape roll by. Unless you focus on the ground next to the train, you do not get an impression of speed, simply of movement.

One of the things I've experienced a lot on the subway and metro trains is the reaction of small Korean children to the foreigner - especially to my blue eyes. Some duck their heads and try to crawl to safety in their parents laps and bosoms, others stare with wide-eyed wonder, still others will give me smile and play a game of peek-a-boo and some start talking to their parents about this stranger in their midst.

The worst, and most surreal, was a group of boys, about 11 to 14 in age, who were in the next car to the one I was in. The train was crowded, and I was standing next to the door between carriages, which happened to have quite a large window in it on this line. The boys were up agains the door on the other side, and, when I noticed them, were surreptitiously giving me the finger.

The surreptitiousness was shielding their action from the people in the carriage with them, while trying to get me to see what they were doing. They did not, however, expect my action - I tore open both doors and as they scattered before my wrath, let them have it in my best teachers voice: 'You have brought shame on your houses.'

In future posts I'll take you back in time to the years spent travelling around South Africa by train, and share some more absurd and magical moments with you.

Twenty-ten

If this is your optometric diagnosis, you need a monocle.
Ten is half of twenty - how many times has this happened in our modern dating system? Off hand I can think of years 63, 84, 105 etc. Last century? Half of 19...so did not happen, I guess. 1809 was the last, unless I'm mistaken.
SA and soccer fever - good luck, as I see everyone is climbing on the bandwagon of offering accomodation...
The end of a decade.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Johannesburg Daily Photo(s): Hyundai Sky Park

I just had to post this link. Johannesburg is my birthplace, and Sandton was my shopping area for many years. And guess what - Hyundai is there, upgrading waht used to be a fairly ratty open expanse into this....good? Bad? Until I see more than just photos, I won't judge, but for the saffers in Korea, we'll feel right at home in both countries now...LOL.


Johannesburg Daily Photo(s): Hyundai Sky Park

Baking bread

Turning the hard seeds of grains into edible food is surely one of the oldest, and in many ways, one of the most satisfying things to do in terms of nutrition. And, may I say it, the best meals I've ever had have been something simple along the lines of bread and cheese, bread fresh from an oven with a cup of coffee or tea, or simply bread and water.

And of course, there is such a variety of bread - sourdough, rye, milk, ciabatta, pumpernickel...

One of the things that has happened since coming to Korea is the change I've seen in the bakery, or have I? Have my tastes simply adapted to theirs? Sorry, let me start at the beginning of this story.

Coming from Cape Town, with its huge multi-cultural population, you are able to fill a basket, nay a bushel, with bread. Soft, hard, fried, baked - all shapes and sizes. And, dare I say it, some of the tastiest options available in the wheat to bread range. Cape Seed Loaf, white dinner rolls, ciabatta, naan, rye - both dark and light, vetkoek (deep fried rolls) and the good old traditional standby, the sandwich loaf. In Korea, at least at first, my complaint and that of many of my feloow expats, was the lack of bread! See, in Korea you have the word 'pang' - and this covers bread, cake and any other thing made in a bakery!

Problem was, it tasted like that as well. The bread was fluffy and too sweet for bread, the cake was fluffy and not sweet enough to be cake. Moreover, if you bought a baguette (if you found a place that made them like the ubiquitously named Paris Baguette chain of bakeries), you got given a tub of the same sweetened cream that got spread on the cakes to have with it.

However, as I say, things seem to have changed. These days the bread is more like bread, and the cakes - well, they look really good but are still just whipped air and cream. In Seoul, especially, there are a lot of places these days where you can actually get some sourdough bread, and in Iteawon is a little pizza place that does proper ciabatta.

As you have gathered by now, I love bread! I also like baking. And if you head over to my other blog, South Korean Experiences, you'll see I recently made some apple jelly. Which called for some really good bread. Without me heading into Seoul.

I decided to try my hand, once again, at baking. Now don't get me wrong, I have baked many loaves of bread and they always satisfy me in some way, even if only in taste, but I usually rush the process and so I never end up with perfectly risen bread, something I'd share with someone else. They taste good, they just don't look very good.

I decided that what I was lacking was patience, so this time I tried it. I dissolved the dried yeast in warm water with a little sugar and salt, and set it close to the heater and waited - yes, waited - until I saw bubbles and foam. About an hour or so? Then I mixed this with my flour (I did half and half rye and white), some more sugar and salt and some olive oil. This got kneaded, then set aside for 10 hours - the time it took me to get to work and get back home again. The risen dough got punched down, shaped into the loaf tin, then set aside for another 3 hours, by which time it had doubled in volume (yay!) and it finally went into the oven for an hour.

The warm end crust was eaten fresh out of the oven with some butter and jelly, and this morning the first slice was eaten with coffee...and it was everything I had hoped for. It not only tasted good, but actually looked like bread.

So, in future, my bread recipe will call for a generous helping of patience, as well as all the other stuff I'll be putting into it.

"tis the season...."

We are, in some way, still in the the season of holly and jolly and as, Terry Pratchett says via Susan Death, other things ending in 'olly'.

I suppose at the back of our minds the spectre that lurks at all feasts lingers, but for many it really is not a merry time, or even a time at all that they want to remember - family dying, hunger, poverty, oppression - and yet they are forced to confront these memories again and again as each year rolls by. What do they do on these days? When all around cheer and they are exhorted in the media to celebrate, what do they feel? Where do they go to escape the incessant commercial pressure of the day and the season?

Even though many have blogged and commented about how, in Korea, Christmas and Easter are not really celebrated to the same extent as in America etc., there is still a lot of it all around - in stores, on TV - enough at least to cause pangs in those who live with loss and grief.

I wish them the waters of the Lethe at this time!

...and selection.

One of the major cornerstones of the faith I was raised in but do not profess anymore is the idea of free choice. We can choose good or evil, etc.

One of the reasons why I no longer profess that faith, or indeed consider any religion to have a claim on what they call my soul, is that while they tell me I have this free choice, they also told me that I had, simply be being born, chosen evil, and in fact, could never, of my own volition, choose good.

OK - so if I'm bound to choose evil, and have already done so, why should I even try to be good? As in a good girl, a good daughter, a good citizen...well, you get the idea that I thought their logic faulty and irrational.

However, enough of the religious implications of free choice, let me rather talk about the exercising of this in the marketplace.

More than any other era in history, we live in the consumer society. We no longer produce simply what we need to keep us warm, well fed and safe, no, the majority of goods out there have the sole purpose of entertaining us.

And here choice really does enter the equation in a big way - rejection of models, books, movies etc. are so much part and parcel of everyday life we are not even aware of the fact that our decisions, our choices, are impacting on someone's life.

The JK Rowling story is well known - truly rags to riches, but how many other struggling writers are there, whose books are also on the remainder piles, and who never get chosen by someone who starts the ball rolling by raving about how fantastic the book is? Similarly, how many movies that are every bit as great as Gone with the Wind end up straight to DVD? And take their director and cast with them into obscurity?

How ready would we be to make a choice if we knew that by rejecting an item, any item, we are perhaps ruining a life?