When I take out the garbage, I worry that I'm not doing it right, and so I always hurry, terrified that I might meet the pigeon lady and get a scolding. If you find that a bit confusing, think how I feel. We can start with the garbage. You have to put it in special pink plastic bags that you get at the grocery, that much we've gathered. Also we know that there's a recycling program. But what gets recycled? How are you supposed to sort it? What kind of bag do you put it in? I have no clear idea. Once I was taking out just the regular trash when the neighboring housewife saw me at it and tried to convince me to reopen the bag and take it back into my house because it was not yet entirely full. This struck me as not really necessary, especially considering the smell of the garbage, but I had to wait until the housewife was gone before I could bring the bag downstairs. And so when it's time to take out the garbage, I assemble various collections of trash that look recyclable to me and put them out with my pink bags of straight-up waste, and I hope I don't get caught by the pigeon lady.

The pigeon lady is an old woman with a bad perm who lives in my building, and who once wrapped her claw around my wrist to drag me to the back of the building and lecture me about the pigeon droppings on the ground. I think the problem was that pigeons would land on my bathroom window's sill and then poop, but what I was supposed to do about this, I have no idea. I really don't have the time to stay home and shoo pigeons all day, and of course the woman lectured me extensively in Korean, completely ignoring my helpless repetition of the phrase, "Ihae mot hamnida," which one of my guidebooks claims means "I don't understand." About a week later I saw her again, and this time when she started in, I simply responded in English. "I know," I told her. "I know about the pigeons, but what can I do? I really don't have any good anti-pigeon ideas. Do you?" She seemed nonplussed, perhaps even a little bit offended, but I slipped quickly by and into my apartment and hoped she wouldn't follow.

"Ihae mot hamnida" has become something of a mantra for me, despite its being effective only about 20 percent of the time. Usually it just leads to a complicated rephrasing in Korean, which helps not at all, but I can't really blame the people I'm not understanding. After all, what would you do if you were faced with a Korean who wanted to buy a heater from you but kept saying "I don't understand" as you explained the safety features? Before I came here, I'd probably have kept trying different English phrasings in the hopes that some of it might get through. By now, I have come to understand that mime is usually much more effective, but not every Korean shopkeeper in my neighborhood knows that. Which is why basic transactions are often fraught, and why what is often the easier option in America — calling a cab, ordering a pizza — is just as often the hard option here, as it involves explaining. And it's little things, things you'd never think of. For example, buying tofu became suddenly problematic when I realized I had no way of asking whether a given package was firm tofu, and I really didn't want the sort that crumbles as soon as it hits the pan. I tried various forms of mime, but "firm" is not an easy thing to demonstrate, and for a while the baffled grocer thought I wanted him to slice the tofu for me. Or the other night I tried to buy peeled garlic from one of the old ladies in the outdoor market. She scooped up two large handfuls, which was just an obscene amount. I gestured no. She dumped out about half. I gestured no. Crankily she hurled the remaining garlic into a bag and handed it to me, and when I tried to pay, she refused the money and scowled. Apparently a mere ten cloves is simply too little to buy. And all too often we end up with about nine times the amount of vegetables we intended to buy, which fortunately still costs very little. Restaurants are similarly fraught, and though we have been largely successful in our struggle to avoid the dreaded ojingeo (cuttlefish, a.k.a. squid, a.k.a. narsty stanky fishy slimy thing), the occasional ojingeo security lapses do loom large in our imaginations.

Considering how complicated it is just buying scallions in amounts less than a pound, I had been dreading a trip to the barber, and so my hair had gotten pretty ridiculously shaggy. Recently I'd begun to fantasize about clippers. I could cut my hair short by myself, and I would never have to look helplessly at a frustrated barber and say "Shorter?" while she cursed my incomprehensibility in Korean. Today, annoyed at my increasingly unmanageable hair, I bought a clipper in a nearby shop, took it home and experimented. Despite the 9-milimeter attachment, I managed in the first stroke to shave a patch clear to the skin, leaving a nasty little bald area at my right temple. It didn't take long to figure out how to use the clipper so that it cut at the expected length, but by then it was too late. Having 9-milimeter hair, or even 3-milimeter hair, is sort of ridiculous when you've got a shaved patch on one side of your face. With Jenny's help, therefore, I just shaved all the rest of it away, and I've now got a stubbly head that I can't stop rubbing, and which requires no shampooing. If you're trying to picture me, keep in mind that I've also got a goatee now. It's actually not a bad look. I look like a balding Brooklyn hipster, which is something I aspire to be one day, or like the singer Jim Infantino, for those of you who know who he is. I'm actually rather pleased with my bald head, but it was an accident, and it gives you an idea of the lengths to which one goes when one can't be understood. Come to think of it, three of the other foreign teachers at my language institute have essentially the same hairdo in various stages of regrowth. Like I said, it's just easier.

Of course, language interactions are only the most overt variety of incomprehensible thing we run into. It's an awful cliche to call an East Asian people inscrutable, but there is a kind of impenetrability to Korean culture. Korea presents itself as very modern, with fancy office towers and high-tech companies and a colorful history that lives politely in museums and palace-parks and historical reenactments and traditional arts performances. But last weekend we went exploring in the hills just north of Anyang, lured by the presence of several Buddhist temples, according to our atlas. We were surprised to find that the apartment blocks and little shops gave way to a small area of farms, although upon reflection it made sense considering how rapidly these suburbs have grown up. There are tumbledown old houses, shanty sheds full of farm implements, even shamanistic totem poles carved of narrow tree stumps, and we passed a beautiful little temple that was closed. Then we headed into the hills, and it wasn't long before we heard a most mysterious and beautiful sound: a rich, complex ululating cry punctuated by primal howls. It was clearly human, definitely vocal, but not quite like anything we'd ever heard before, two or three voices mingling in a kind of wordless chant. We guessed that it was a shamanic ritual, but we didn't really know. Eventually we headed back down the hill — it was getting dark — and caught a glimpse of the source of this marvelous music. It was just an old couple, bundled in jackets and sitting on the ground and ululating and chanting away.

You don't read about this sort of thing in guidebooks or see it in Visit Korea commercials. It's too sloppy, too superstitious and unbusinesslike in a country where even Buddhism is something to steer tourists away from — I was told at a tourist information booth at Insadong that there was really no reason to go see Jogyesa, Seoul's largest temple. I found out from my colleague Suky that these kinds of shamanic rituals were simply banned under Park Chung Hee, whose increasingly despotic rule began in 1961 and ended in 1979, when the head of the South Korean CIA assassinated him. Suky explained that it was also under Park that South Korea lost a great many of its traditional holidays, replacing them with Constitution Day and Arbor Day and Independence Day, which have about as much cultural resonance as Labor Day in the U.S.

I have been in incomprehensible places before. India and Nepal were consistently baffling — far more so, in fact, than Korea — but they were completely up-front about it. A snake charmer shows you his cobra; a camel has a swastika branded on its ass; a man with a handlebar mustache is wearing a pink turban; a dreadlocked saddhu walks around in a loincloth and face paint. In Bombay in my first week, I kept passing this little Hindu temple — no more than a market stall, really — where a bald man in white robes and marigold garlands sat on a table, his hand above his head, ringing a bell that hung from the ceiling: clang! clang! clang! clang! clang! This went on all day every day, for hours and hours and hours. That's just so fucking weird. India parades its weirdness at you 24/7, taunts you with it, welcomes you to it, and often enough Indians are interested in explaining themselves to outsiders. After all, simply to communicate with each other within the borders of India, people have to translate across languages, races, cultures, religions. If a Vaishnavite brahman from Bengal, a Tamil Hindu from the scheduled castes and a Muslim from Gujarat walk into a bar, they'll need a translator before they can get to any sort of coherent punchline.

Korea, by contrast, is about as ethnically and culturally unified as any nation on earth. That's not to say that all Koreans look or think or talk the same, but they've got a lot more history and language in common than two Indians or Americans or Chinese people picked at random. Which makes the culture all the more impenetrable. The Koreans want to learn how to talk to the rest of the world — that's why I'm here — but the world is not all that interested in the Koreans, and so far they've done surprisingly little work toward opening their culture to the outside. It's hard to find much Korean literature in translation, for example, or even Korean movies. Perhaps this will change as more Koreans emigrate to the U.S. and elsewhere, but for now, the ululating in the hills is something I will hear at a distance.