West Coast Road Trip - Eugene & Portland

On the way up to Portland, Liz and I stopped in Eugene for an evening to visit my friend Sarah.  She and her boyfriend took us out to dinner at Sizzle Pie, a pizza place with grungy decor and surprisingly delicious and creative pizzas.  We sat at the picnic tables outside to eat our food, across the street from a pile of hippies on  a public bench who serenaded all of downtown Eugene with numerous songs played on the same two chords over and over again, including the angriest version of "You Are My Sunshine" that I've ever heard.  (After a while the police came over, along with a couple of grumpy old men, and the impromptu hippie band was disbanded).

DESTINATION #4

Portland was surprising--and not in the ways that I expected.  Anyone who's ever seen Portlandia has images of a hippie-hipster (hippiester) Mecca that's all about green living, radically ridiculous ideas about art and life, and people with weird hair cuts.  But Portland had a surprisingly industrial look.  We were couchsurfing at someone's apartment in the downtown area (right by the river), and we were surrounded on all sides by Steampunk-esque metal bridges, elevated highways, construction projects, and not-quite-sky-scrapers.  You can hear the trains booming and blaring all night.

Our first day there was quite lazy.  We didn't sleep very well (...trains...), so we didn't get up till noon-ish, and, after a little internet research, decided to get brunch at a place called Mother's Bistro and Bar.  Doesn't sound like anything special, right?  Imagine Sherlock-style wallpaper (and furniture upholstered to match), glass chandeliers, mirrors, sleek black cabinets, and waiters who sing along with the music while they dash around taking everyone's orders by memory.  On second thought, I'll spare you the imagining--here are some pictures.  

The Spectrum of Sound: English vs. Korean Consonants

When I started studying the Korean alphabet, I found many charts that neatly lined up each Korean letter with its English equivalent.  ㄷ= D, ㅌ = T, and so on.  It seemed pretty straightforward.  However, there were certain letters that seemed confusing at first.  For instance, ㄱ = G/K, and ㄹ = R/L.  These Korean letters were described as being “in between” their two English equivalents.  ㄹ is neither an R nor an L sound, but somewhere in between: a sound that simply doesn’t exist in English.  I found this to be one of the hardest things about Korean—learning to hear and pronounce totally new sounds from scratch.  However, I soon realized that this state of being “in between” didn’t apply only to a couple of letters in the Korean alphabet; in fact, it applied to most Korean letters.  Looking at the Korean alphabet as a series of equivalents to the English alphabet really doesn’t work.  I had to change my whole frame of reference in order to pronounce Korean correctly.  That’s when I really started thinking about language sounds as being part of a sliding spectrum. 

Really, all sounds are part of a sliding spectrum.  This is a very familiar idea to musicians, but one which, for some reason, is almost never mentioned in language classes.  For instance, there might be only 88 keys on a piano, but really there are an infinite number of possible pitches within that range.  In Western music, we have chosen to break up the spectrum into half steps and whole steps to form scales, but there is also space between the notes.  A violin can slide between B and B-flat for instance, covering all the pitches in between.  Those unused pitches still exist, even though Western music is not designed to include them. 

The same idea applies to pronunciation and the sounds that make up languages. 

In Korean, for instance, the letter ㅂis often equated with the English letter B.  This isn’t really accurate though.  There is a whole spectrum of sounds that human beings can make with their lips, and ㅂand B actually fall in slightly different places on that spectrum.

Here is my chart showing where letters in the English and Korean alphabets really are in relation to each other.  Each spectrum is divided according to which part of the mouth you use to make these sounds.* 

*I could use linguistic terms for these, like bilabial and aspirated, but I’d rather put this in laymen’s terms.

With all of these spectrums, the middle sound is actually the gentlest.  The farther to the right or left a letter is, the more tension you put into the lips, throat, or tongue in order to produce it.  For example, ㅉ is a harder, over-emphasized version of J, while ㅊ is like an over-emphasized CH.  The ㅈ in the middle is a very gentle blend of the J and CH sounds. 

Really, the difference between all these sounds is rather slight, so at first, you might have trouble distinguishing between the sounds of ㅉ, J, and ㅈ, for example; but with time and practice you can learn to hear the difference. 

Then, of course, there is also the aforementioned R & L spectrum:

A lot of English-speakers find it hard to believe that there’s much similarity between the R and L sounds—I know I did, at first.  But for the Korean ㄹ, just try to imagine it as a very short, gently rolled R.  It’s not quite like the rolled R’s that you find in Spanish or Italian, but the tongue motion is very similar.  You just roll it once, instead of sustaining the roll like you would in Spanish. 

And lastly, there are all these consonants, which really do have English equivalents:

M = ㅁ

N = ㄴ

NG = ㅇ

S = ㅅ

H = ㅎ

I could talk about Korean vowels, but I think that might be a post for another time.  ^_^  Anyways, I hope that if you're studying Korean, or teaching English in Korea, you'll find this article helpful!  

West Coast Road Trip - Visalia & San Francisco

After leaving LA, my sister and I drove north through thick, rolling hills that looked like they were covered in dark, yellow velvet.  We were headed to the small town of Visalia to visit my friends Alex and Catharine.  When we arrived in the evening, we had a wonderful dinner complete with homemade sangria.  ^_^

The next day we all went downtown to Brewbaker's bar & restaurant to see the final match of the FIFA World Cup: Germany vs. Argentina.  Now, I'm not a soccer person at all.  I played for about three years when I was in elementary school, but I never followed professional soccer.  I've gotta say though, this was really fun--especially since Catharine's brother is a big soccer fan and he was there to get us up to speed on everything that was going on.  It's always so much more fun doing anything when you have an enthusiast present.  :-)

It was a relatively short visit, and later that afternoon we drove on to...

DESTINATION #3

San Francisco: a suburban city, with rows of delicately painted, life-sized doll houses lining street after street, and a seemingly endless parade of dog-owners who don't believe in using leashes.  It was both self-consciously chic and deliberately squalid.  Fancy boutiques share the same block as tie-dyed tattoo parlors; young hippie-hobos and their half-starved dogs walk right by ladies in expensive, skanky fripperie; scruffy bikers without shoes coast down the street, yoga mats strapped to their backs.  SF can be surreal in the extreme.

West Coast Road Trip - LA

DESTINATION #2

From Las Vegas, Liz and I drove straight on to LA where we shifted gears from being tourists to being visitors.  (Hence the relative lack of pictures in this post).  We have a number of cousins and friends out there, and my friend Whitney was kind enough to let us stay at her apartment even though she and her husband would be out of town for most of our stay.  It was a hot day, so we enjoyed a swim in the pool outside where I did my typical Gemini thing by constantly swimming around, doing underwater flips, climbing out and then dive-bombing back in, and my sister did her typical Taurus thing by clinging to the side of the pool and lounging like a starfish.  

Whitney and Daniel had to finish packing for their trip, but that didn't stop me and Whitney from staying up late chatting.  She and her husband left early the next morning, but Liz and I slept in.  Then met up with an old friend of mine for lunch, where she told us all about her latest relationship drama.

This friend has more relationship drama in her life than anyone else I know, and I'm pretty sure it's not because of her personality--it's because she's gay.  She'd just broken up with yet another girlfriend who comes from a severely homophobic family.  My friend is out of the closet but the other girl was not, and the two of them had been dating secretly for almost a year.  My friend later started to think that this girl was cheating on her with a guy they both knew, and as the evidence for this piled up, she eventually ended the relationship.   This is the second time that she's gone through this exact sequence of events.  The last time, her ex-girlfriend ended up getting pregnant by, and later marrying, the guy in question.  

Now, I don't know if those girls just started dating a guy on the side because they actually wanted to, or because they were just desperate to cover up their own homosexuality; but either way, my friend's life would be a lot simpler if she could openly date anyone she wanted--without worrying about their family disowning them when they find out.  Not to mention that her girlfriend wouldn't be able to get away with two-timing so easily if everyone knew that she was already in a relationship with my friend.  It just goes to show that, even though my friend is out of the closet and everyone in her life is very accepting of it, she's still deeply affected by other people's homophobia--even the homophobia of people she's never met. 

Later that evening, Liz and I went to see our cousins Christina and Colleen.  We ate out at M Street Kitchen in Santa Monica (which is an excellent place), and we swapped family stories about our parents, mostly about when the five Duffy siblings were little hoodlums growing up in the 60's, before they became Respectable People.   My personal favorite story, one of which I was previously unaware, involves the time when they apparently all got high and wallpapered their entire basement in tin foil.  (My father denies having been a part of this.)

West Coast Road Trip - VEGAS

PROLOGUE

For some months, my sister and I had been planning to embark on a 5-week, 4,000-mile road trip along the west coast of the United States and Canada.  Due to money restraints (and because we wanted this to be a Real American Road Trip) we decided to be reasonably ridiculous and drive the entire way.  So, on July 6th, 2014, in a beat-up Toyota Corolla named Wong Foo with 150,000 miles on it, we set out from home at the crack of dawn.  The first day of our trip was not terribly exciting because it involved a 15-hour stint from from Chicago to Denver, CO.  On the second day, however, we came to the deserts of eastern Utah, which have some of the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen.  

You can just barely see me standing on top!

DESTINATION #1

 

When Liz and I first arrived in Vegas, it was late at night and the city was spread out before us, lit up like a circuit board.  One of the first things we saw as we drove in were three billboards: one for diamonds, one for plastic surgery, and one for a divorce & custody lawyer.  Vegas mores in a nutshell.  
I think my sister summed it up best when she said that the entire point of Vegas is to take everything wrong with America, super-size it, glitz it up, and display it proudly.  Example: the Heart Attack Grill, a restaurant that advertises having the fattiest foods in the world.  (People over 350 lbs eat free!)