Odysseus Drifts: RTW Travel Adventure

Hadong and the Case for Divine Intervention

2011-09-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

"Hey, Noona, look at this!" Jini calls out from the living room.

I walk into the hostel's main room and look at the TV, where Jini is pointing. The news is being broadcast live, but the backdrop on the TV screen looks like a comedic spoof of a storm. Leaves and random pieces of debris are flying in such a way that suggests Dorothy will soon be leaving Kansas. A news anchor tries to stay her ground as she gives a report. The wind, meanwhile, swirls her long, black hair upwards into a sort of electrified-looking bouffant.

"What's going on?" I ask.

"It's a typhoon in Hadong. They're now talking about related fatalities."

Hadong, Korea -- an iconically beautiful village located near the southmost tip of the peninsula. Hadong, Korea -- the place I was supposed to be this evening. In fact, the only thing that prevented me from being there was what had seemed, at the time, to be a dumb mistake.

The night before I had asked DJ, the owner of the hostel in which I was staying, which bus terminal was the right one to catch the bus to Hadong.

"Express Bus Terminal," he tells me, circling the stop on my subway map so I won't be confused.

A bit of a skeptic when it comes to directions, I question him.

"Are you sure?" I ask. "Are you sure it's not a different bus terminal, like Nambu? Some buses leave from different terminals."

"No, no," DJ confidently reassures me. "The bus for Hadong leaves from Express."

The next morning, I make it to the Express Bus Terminal with just enough time to leave on the earliest bus. But when I arrive at the ticket counter, the agent tells me all the buses to Hadong leave from . . . Nambu. It's too late for me to go to Nambu to buy an early morning bus ticket, and what's more, all the later tickets for that day have already sold out.

I fume silently, but there's nothing I can do about the situation. Taking the escalator to leave the Express Bus Terminal, I notice the wall above it showcases an enlarged photo of Hadong's vibrant green fields and a tourism catchphrase: Come visit beautiful Hadong.

"Well, now you're just mocking me," I grumble aloud to no one.

The whole thing seemed like a pointless mistake.

Until I saw the news report and the damage wrought by a typhoon.

Now, I'm not the type of person who calmly accepts whatever happens as my fate. In fact, here's one essential truth about me: I fight for what I want. I empty all my energy into trying to solve whatever problem's before me. Even just minutes before seeing the news report about Hadong, I was on the Internet trying to rearrange my schedule and buy a ticket to Hadong for a different day. But sometimes, the puzzle itself is missing a piece. Sometimes no matter how hard I try, things just don't work out.

I think now not just of one particular city I didn't get to see. I think of all the things in my life that I've wanted but didn't work out, from relationships to job promotions. But here's a kind truth I learned: Sometimes not getting the thing you want is the best thing that could happen to you. Had I gotten everything I've wanted in life, I wouldn't be where I'm at now, which is a pretty wonderful place -- one that can't be pinned on any map.

If you're not happy with the moral of my story, just chant this toilet mantra until you feel better.

Travel the World in 7 Links

2011-07-14T20:08:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Reader's Digest version of my adventures traveling and living abroad the past 2 years.

"Seven Links" is actually a project whereby travel bloggers nominate each other to produce links back to the posts they've written earlier, good posts that may have gotten overlooked in all the webbage that daily litters the Internet.

I'm thankful to Sally from Unbrave Girl (http://www.unbravegirl.com/) and Brooke from Brooke vs. the World (http://brookevstheworld.com/) for nominating me for this project. And I have to say it's kinda awesome to be nominated not by one but two bloggers who I admire for consistently producing high-quality writing on their own blogs.

My Seven Links

1. My Most Beautiful Post

The reasons why I'm afraid to travel and why I travel regardless. This is my most honest post. That's what makes it beautiful, at least to me.

http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com/2011/05/are-you-afraid-to-travel.html

2. My Most Popular Post

My top post at the moment goes to the time I visited the Taj Mahal without wearing any pants. (I like to phrase it that way -- "the time I visited" -- like it's something that happened long, long ago and not, umm, in January 2011.) Of course, the success of this post should surprise no one, seeing as how it draws in the two audience groups: the Taj Mahal enthusiasts and the partial nudists.

It wasn't until an online Twitter exchange with Sally came up that I realized exactly how many times I've forgotten to wear pants in the past two years: 4 and 1/2 times. In all fairness, three of these times were wearing the same "shirt dress" from H&M that actually proved to just be a long shirt, as I noticed after finally perusing the H&M catalog; the time when I absent-mindedly pulled on a pair of woolen long-johns and wandered down my apartment building's main hallway before realizing I'd forgotten to put a skirt on top of them (which only gets 1/2 points since I didn't actually exit the building); and finally, this -- touring the Taj Mahal without pants:

http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com/2011/03/pantsless-at-taj-mahal.html

Mermaids don't wear pants, either.

My second most popular post also is from India. In the latter half of my trip there, I broke my foot and, in a small, very dirty Indian hospital, had a plaster cast put on from my toes to my knee. The pain in my foot was excruciating. But I really wanted to ride camels and camp overnight in the Thar desert. So I did.

http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com/2011/03/camel-trekking-for-broken-legged.html

3. My Most Controversial Post

Pretty much all of my posts are G-rated. Posts that you can read to grandma if you so wish. (Please read them to grandma. I need more followers.) The only exception to this may be my most recent post, the one wherein I am repeatedly solicited for prostitution in Korea. Best not to read this one to grandma; it'll only get her riled up and she can be surprisingly vicious with those knitting needles.

http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com/2011/07/foreign-women-for-sale.html

4. My Most Helpful Post

While all my posts can be considered quite helpful if you process their contents in a "things-not-to-do" sort of way, my packing list post is probably the most helpful.

Okay, to be honest, it's only helpful to read for procrastination purposes.

http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com/search/label/Packing%20List

5. A Post Whose Success Surprised Me

Meh. This category does not amuse me. But don't worry; I've cheated by adding extra links to other categories.

6. A Post that Didn’t Get the Attention It Deserved

I am going to have to go with all of them. Popular travel bloggers can get a page full of reader comments and support for posts about what they ate for dinner in Europe while I can write about really dramatic things that have happened to me in Asia, and I get . . . crickets. But I don't need to be the King of the (travel blogging) World. I just need the occasional person to believe in me. So if you haven't already, you should go ahead and read about how:

A man repeatedly attempted to break into my Seoul apartment during the wee sma hours of Friday the 13th. http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com/2010/08/frightened.html

I was stranded for a week in Japan without money, so I ended up sleeping on the living room floor of a kind Japanese escort.
http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com/2010/08/trouble-with-wishes.html

I fell off a train and broke my foot in India. Or possibly the random man who "reset" it while I was screaming NO broke it. You decide.
http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com/2011/03/rise-and-fall-of-melanie-ehler_10.html

Fighting!

7. The Post that I Am Most Proud Of

The logic behind why I decided to live a second year in Korea. This actually isn't a post of pride -- I'm just putting it here because it amuses me. My reasons amuse myself.

http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com/2010/09/never-gonna-give-you-up.html

So there you have it: 7 links (um, rounded down to the nearest 7, that is) from Odysseus Drifts. The best links from my blog - so far. It's now less than three weeks until I start my around-the-world backpacking trip, so the adventures can only get better!

And to continue this project, I am nominating…

Tim from Good and Lost
(http://goodandlost.org/)
Julia from Mr. & Mrs. Globetrot
(http://mrmrsglobetrot.blogspot.com/)
Kelly from Tales from Heibei (http://talesfromhebei.wordpress.com/)

Foreign Women for Sale

2011-07-06T05:59:00.000-07:00

The trouble with only learning the pleasantries of a foreign language is that they are only useful in situations that are, well, pleasant. Should an insult be offered, this leaves you with no language for reply. Personally, the best I could manage would be to harvest from the sparse stock of pleasant, friend-making Korean phrases I've memorized and add "no" to them. Imagine this being the fiercest retort you are capable of making:

Respected sir, do I like you? No! Respected sir, are you fun? No! Are you cool? No! Are you pretty? No!

There are times when such language is not quite strong enough for the situation at hand.

The first time I am mistaken for a whore is on the subway platform at Namdaemun Station. I am wearing blue jeans, a bulky winter coat, a scarf, a backpack. A Lonely Planet guidebook is in my hand.

"I love you," says the man who, at the time, is just a few feet from me. He raises his arms above his head and bends them in the shape of a crooked heart. He shuffles back and forth on wobbly feet.

"Thank you," I reply, smiling. Just the week before, a different man on a different subway platform had repeatedly proclaimed to me that he loved America and loved Americans. I figure this man's declaration is something along the same lines. How nice.

The man moves closer to me. His face is puffy and pink, an old, bloated, babyish face. His bleary eyes are rimmed in red. His breath emits a hazy cloud of soju as he asks, "Where are you going?"

"I'm just going home," I say, still smiling.

"I want you to come home with me," he says.

Again, how nice. He is inviting me back for tea with his family, I think with a naivety that casts its faint glow about me like a halo.

The man opens his wallet.

He's going to show me a photo of his wife and kids, I think.

He pulls out money.

But where are his wife and kids? I wonder.

"This is Korean money," he says, trying to shove a couple of bills into my hand. I curl up my fingers to refuse the money. Confused, I alter my stream of thought, trying to make sense of this unforeseen happening: Could he be a black market money changer? Is he looking for U.S. dollars? I ponder these unlikely possibilities for a minute.

Then, the fog of innocence finally lifts from me.

I am horrified.

And I only say "horrified" because I don't know a stronger word. There is no kind old man standing before me, trying to become my friend. There is only a drunken lech trying to pick up a whore, trying to pick up me.

A Korean woman, standing nearby on the subway platform, watches the entire situation play out in front of her. She is wearing a micro-mini skirt and 4-inch heels, in line with the aesthetics of modern Korean fashion. But it doesn't matter what she wears: She is Korean, so she is pure and well-respected. A Korean man would never offer her money for sex. The woman begins to laugh at me, laughs at the bewilderment and disgust that I can feel myself projecting through every ligament of my body.

My face crumples. I run away to the far end of the subway and quietly cry the whole ride home. It isn't until later that I think about how the wad of money the man had shoved toward me was around 13,000 won. Not only was I considered a whore, I was considered a $10 whore.

The next few times I am mistaken for a whore are also hard on me, although less painfully so, as I can now understand the signals much sooner.

"How much?" a man will sometimes ask as he passes me.

Now, when a man says something like that, I look him dead in the eye and, with unleashed venom, snarl, "You wish."

And then I run away and cry. Because continuity is always a good thing. Right?

{For those of you still confused about the difference between me and a whore, here is a little photo illustrative.}

{what an actual whore wears for a night out on the town}

{what I wear for a night out on the town}

I have a close friend, another foreign woman, to whom I told about these happenings in whispers. She lives in Itaewon, the notoriously sketchy expat district of Seoul, and has never experienced anything like it herself.

This made me feel even worse. Is it just me? And is this how I look to every Korean man, like a whore? Maybe they all believe I'm a whore but some of them simply don't require my services, I think with what may or may not be paranoia.

And up until about a week ago, I never mentioned it to anyone else. I was too ashamed. Finally, last week, after my third "offer" within the course of two consecutive days, I couldn't contain my resentment any longer. I went to a swing dance and polled the three other foreign women there, rather abruptly asking if they, too, had ever been treated like whores.

"Well, only the one time," one foreigner shyly admitted. "But I was dressed really nice, conservatively!"

"Yeah, like every time I leave the apartment," another American woman said.

"A couple of times, sure," confided the third foreign woman.

I want to throw things. I want to throw things at the heads of the men who try to rent my body by the hour. I want to throw (smaller) things at the one or two guys I have since told about it and who counter with jokes. It's not a laughing matter.

I'm writing this because I'm angry and I'm insulted and I'm tired of feeling ashamed. I didn't do anything wrong. There is shame here, certainly; but that shame is not my burden.

I love so much about my life in Korea and the friends I've made here. I have met some Koreans, both men and women, who shine with pure goodness. It can be a truly wonderful country to live in. But not in this regard. This is a side of Korea that is not funny, not cool, and most definitely not pretty.

The Unauthorized Autobiography of Captain Polyglot

2011-06-27T18:13:00.000-07:00

I am an expert at all things that are not Korean. You may not believe this. And I may not believe this. But all the Korean employees at my workplace unequivocally believe this. They believe it the same way 4-year-olds believe in Santa Claus. And with utter confidence in my far-reaching knowledge of all things not Korean, they ask me for information regarding words in French, German, Portuguese, etc.

Sadly, though, I am not what you'd call a "language person." It's true that while in university, I took one year of accelerated classes in Italian and was always at the top of my class, but in spite of my almost-adequate grasp of Italian while in uni, my knowledge of it has receded in the years since so that now the only thing I feel confident about in Italian is how to order an ice cream. Really, this is the most important phrase anyone can use in Italy, anyway, so that's all good. But to return to the shores of my now-distant main point, my knowledge of ordering ice cream has become the basis for my understanding of all Romantic languages, so that I feel sufficiently informed to take a stab at defining pretty much any foreign word that my coworkers present to me.

Also, I cheat and use the Internet.

"Oh yes, ajdiwureojaksldfj, yes, of course I'm familiar with it. I'm just a little busy now. Give me a minute and {Google, Google, Google, Wiki, Wiki}, yes, it means 'the velvet canvas on which religious icons are painted by Polish farmhands.' And it's pronounced *imitates cat unsuccessfully trying to rid itself of a hairball*."

As you might imagine, this system works very well for me. By which I mean, I still have a job.

Sometimes, though, my coworkers will hand me a paper with a word that's -- not to be judgmental or anything -- totally weird.

I take the piece of paper and squint at it. Pretend astigmatism makes an excellent stall for time.

"That's not an English word. No, it's sure not," I'll observe as I stare at a word in Yiddish? Russian? Something-stan?

"Errm, it's not even written in the Roman alphabet," I'll then point out, in what I intend as a mild protest.

"Yes, that's true," my coworkers will respond, smiling. "And how do you pronounce it?"

The result of which is that one of our language CDs may or may not have a speaker mentioning farflugen where a Yiddish-Russian-Something-stan word would actually be more appropriate. Because farflugen is the most exotic-sounding word I know. I think the Swedish chef from The Muppets used to say it, so I guess that makes farflugen Swedish. Who says you can't learn by watching prodigious quantities of TV?

Sometimes, to be perfectly frank, I feel I'm not the best person for this job. However, I seem to be the company favourite, as out of the three native English speakers in my office, I am decidedly the one most often chosen to answer questions about all things not Korean.

I once overheard a conversation between a Korean coworker and one of the other native English speakers, Evil Disney Princess (a moniker bestowed for her unique ability to say the meanest things imaginable in a voice sweet as honey), about a certain English word. I didn't hear the whole convo, but distinctly heard EDP advise that "The dictionary is wrong about that word."

Perhaps that is why I've been designated as Captain Polyglot. I never tilt at Oxford or Webster. And as for Roget, I feel absolute adulation, affection, devotion, emotion, passion, rapture, relish, and respect.

Anyway, I was just kidding about that farflugen stuff. But if you ever hear the word "onomatopoeia" seemingly used out of context on an EFL CD. Well, that one just might be me.

Train to Nowhere, Japan

2011-06-17T01:25:00.000-07:00

"I want to go to a small town," I say vaguely. "One that has nice cherry blossoms."

"Where?" the woman at the tourist help desk in Nara asks.

"Where do you like to see the cherry blossoms?" I counter.

She pauses thoughtfully for a moment and then uses her pen to scratch out a name on a scrap of paper. Immediately afterward, I walk to the train station to buy a ticket there. Even though the train stations in Japan are uniformly Neat and Orderly, I still have trouble figuring out which ticket to buy, so I press my finger against the round, red "help" button at the bottom of the automated ticket machine. Instead of a help screen appearing on the machine, as I'd anticipated, a square in the wall next to it snaps open, revealing a sort of camouflaged window I'd not noticed when it was closed, and a Neat and Orderly ticket agent pops his head out the window.

"May I help you?" he asks. It's an Alice in Wonderland moment.

I show the man my scrap of paper and he guides me through the correct series of buttons to push on the machine.

{decorative tiles on traditional Japanese roof}

My destination, whose name I remember as Yashimoto though I can find no evidence of its existence from the Internet or guidebooks, is a tiny town where any visitor can attain insta-celebrity status by virtue of blonde hair! blue eyes! As I slowly walk through the town, a few people come up to me to shake my hand. A few others greet me with, "Hello-welcome-how-are-you?" and then quickly dash away before I can form a reply.

The center of all activity in town seems to revolve around an old castle that is surrounded by a moat and located on a hill. Before reaching the castle itself, I happen upon a nearby temple. On the outside porch of the temple are numerous plexiglass tanks containing small, brightly-coloured fish. This is so curious of a matter, unlike anything I've seen in other temples in Asia, that without thinking I ask the man nearest me, "Why are all those fish at the temple?"

{temple fish}

The man stares at me in concern. I repeat the question slowly, point at the fish in question, smile and shrug. The first man calls over a second man and relays my question to him. The second man deals with me by passing me along to a group of teenage boys who are shyly reluctant to make my acquaintance. After what appears to be a polite debate among all the men of Yashimoto, one of teenagers makes a phone call for an outside opinion about the fish. After about 15 minutes of this, they settle on a conclusion. One of the young men, urged forward by the rest, solemnly makes the pronouncement: "Fish. Good. "

{sidewalk fish tile}

Relieved that the temple fish are not of a malicious nature, I thank the gathered assembly of boys and men (and I honestly am grateful for the amount of effort they'd put into answering my question). We all respectfully bobble up and down, and I continue on my way to the castle.

Lining the stony path to the castle is a row of rosily-striped vendor tents. I stop by one that has a small group of very happy children collected in front of it. I watch as the vendor mixes a concoction of sugar and syrup and colour in a small iron skillet and then carefully dribbles the mixture onto wax paper, swirling it into Japanese characters. He is making giant lollipops with children's names on them.

{a genuine sugar daddy}

The group of children gathered there stops watching the candy making and begins watching me watching the candy making. One of them giggles and whispers something to his friends. With admirable boldness, he then asks if I have a boyfriend and tells me that I am cute. I really want to tell him no, you are so cute and pinch the darling baby-fat of his round cheeks. But such a response would be a blow to the dignified persona he is working so hard to achieve, so instead I point out that I am old, a grown adult, and ask him why he isn't in school on a weekday. He assures me the age difference won't be a problem since he is "also old, in junior high, almost high school."

This is what I get for hanging out at candy booths.

{my name in Japanese, in candy, possibly upside down}

After buying a container of assorted sushi (and an oversized lollipop with my name spelled out in glossy candy form), I settle on the soft grass under some cherry blossom trees and picnic alongside dozens of Japanese families. The sun's brilliance falls across the lawn, adding a glimmer of warmth to the chilly spring day. A few feet away from me, the ancient castle towers.

Addendum:
The lovely Amanda from http://www.notaballerina.com/
has identified the town I visited as Yamatokoriyama with Koriyama-jo [castle].

Bow-Wow Soup in Korea or "What's for Dinner?"

2011-06-09T05:49:00.000-07:00

Seolmi and I angle our chopsticks into the various dishes spread across the table. We use them like tiny extended hands to pick up long strands of fried noodles, udon-infused squares of fishcake, and pieces of delectably tender sushi. Our conversation drifts in and out of various topics. I take a bite of the sushi and rave about its deliciousness.

"Mmm, this fish tastes great!" I enthuse.

"Have you had dog or cat?" Seolmi asks.

"No, no! Never!" I protest.

In the shadow of its other culinary offerings, Korea has a reputation for serving bosintang or meong meong soup (the latter of which translates to "bow wow" or "woof woof" soup) in a few, select restaurants tucked away in some of Seoul's poorer alleyways.

Images flash through my mind of all the dogs who have reached cult-like status via Western movies and TV: Beethoven, Benji, Toto, centuplicate (+service) Dalmatians, and the most classic canine of them all, Lassie. It didn't matter how many times little Timmy fell down that well (being so very accident-prone as to make viewers wonder whether he harbored latent suicidal tendencies), the border collie Lassie was always there to save him. No one should ever have Lassie for dinner.

"I would never do that!" I proclaim emphatically. "I would never have dog or cat. For me, it would be like eating a baby!"

I pause in the midst of my raving and look more closely at Seolmi. She has a strange expression on her face that I can't quite read, and her mouth hangs open slightly.

Quickly, I switch the nature of my speech. I've been so insensitive. Maybe Seolmi's parents raised her on woof woof soup. Maybe her grandparents had resorted to eating it due to lack of better food options during the war and the tradition carried down a few generations. Who am I to judge another person's culture, especially someone who is trying to be my friend?

"It's okay if you eat dog," I amend apologetically. "We're from different cultures. I understand that."

Then there is silence. A long silence.

Finally, Seolmi speaks.

"Not eating dog or cat," she says. "Having dog or cat. For pet."

Are You Afraid to Travel?

2011-05-30T21:41:00.000-07:00

As a child, my shyness and sensitivity were such that Emily Dickinson, that queen of recluses, would have appeared as a raging socialite by comparison. When the phone rang, I would run and hide because if I were near the phone I might be asked to answer it, and if I answered it, there was the chance (oh, horrors!) I would not know the person who was calling. I was almost pathologically shy -- except for when I was with my best friend, Amy. During those times, I would talk too much, laugh too much, and daydream out loud. When I was with my best friend, I acted like the person I would eventually grow up to be.

Amy and I met in kindergarten. I immediately took to her because she wore her hair in princess-like brown braids, sometimes in loops above her shoulders, sometimes pinned above her head. And she was always smiling. I liked that. Amy and I spent nearly every waking moment of our childhoods together, as well as many sleeping ones in what seems, in retrospect, like summer-long slumber parties. As we loped through the awkwardness of adolescence, we had a fight, grew apart, and lost touch. But when I remember Amy, I think of sunshine and fresh-cut grass, picking sweet wild strawberries, dressing in costumes of tulle and glitter, creating worlds of faeries and witches and sophisticated cats who wore top hats and ballgowns, pedaling our bikes so quickly uphill that our legs ached, and racing so fast downhill that it felt like we could fly. She was the other half of my childhood. But Amy didn't make it far beyond childhood herself, dying from cancer at the age of 25.

There have been other friends and acquaintances in my social circle who have died. Though not as close to me, their deaths were sad and unexpected. People who were in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. People who radiated health and happiness. People who had simply gotten in their car at the wrong time, turned down the street just 3 minutes too soon.

Nana, mother to my mother, was the only person on whom I could always depend. Hours after an unexpected heart attack, she spoke her last words to me from a hospital bed. I watched her, the person I loved most in all in the world, as she died. Then there are the other relatives who faded from life -- my aunt and uncle on an icy Christmas Eve, all my other grandparents, a distant teenage cousin. As Elizabeth Bishop wrote, the art of losing isn't hard to master.

When I tell people about my plans to backpack alone around the world, the comment I most often receive is: Aren't you afraid?

Do you want to know the truth?

I am afraid of many things. I'm afraid of not helping others enough, not deferring to God enough, being unable to write a decent story, never finding someone who will love me enough to stick around. I am afraid of simply not being good enough.

And that just covers the internal fears. There are also the more pragmatic fears directly related to travel: the potential of being physically hurt by someone, attacked by an animal, or caught in the path of natural disaster. There are a lot of things that are scary in this world.

Last August, a man tried to break into my apartment in Seoul while I was at home. I was alone in a foreign country and without a working phone at the time. For weeks afterwards, I felt frightened if a man walked too close behind me on the sidewalk. Tears would start in my eyes if a friend ran up and greeted me in surprise. (Some of my Korean friends would then exclaim, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I forgot you were American,” thus starting a strange stereotype that all Americans, in fact, cry when startled.)

I’d walk down nearby streets in the area and study all the men. Was it you? Was it you? Was it you? I’d think. But I didn’t tell anyone the extent of the fear I felt. I even felt guilty for continuing to feel afraid, like I was being a drama queen. After all, the man had not been successful. He hadn’t found a way into my apartment. He hadn’t touched me.

After I moved from that apartment and months passed, I believed myself to have gotten over the scare of that night. But when traveling through India with Katie, the fear of being attacked in my sleep reemerged. Katie would sometimes get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Still asleep, I sensed someone was nearby, moving in my bedroom. Without even opening my eyes, I'd begin to yell things like, "Get out of here! Go away! Leave me alone!" Then, through the haze of my terrorized dream-state, Katie's voice, tiny and frightened, would break through. "It's just me. I need to pee!" she'd softly exclaim. "Sorry," I'd mumble into my pillow and re-immerse in sleep.

In the situation where I’d actually been threatened, I was lucky that the would-be intruder had failed in his several attempts to enter my apartment, that even though he'd pried at my door and opened my windows, there were locks and bars that prevented him from entering. But what if there's a next time? What if I'm not so lucky then? I like to think that God protects me, but the truth is that good people get hurt all the time for reasons I'll never fully understand.

So yes, I'm afraid of traveling alone through the world. The possibility of getting hurt is a valid fear; but I'm still far more afraid of dying before I've fully lived.

I can't believe that we would lie in our graves wondering if we had spent our living days well. I can't believe that we would lie in our graves dreaming of things that we might have been. ~ Dave Matthews Band

Now in Seoul, I'm friends with a dancer who has the words Carpe Diem tattooed in delicate, beautiful curlicues around his wrist. I pursue a friendship with him because of that tattoo and because he goes by the nickname Dreamer.

"We are alike," I have told him several times. "Similar personalities."

I rarely see Dreamer, though, since he spends most days at the office working until late at night, even during weekends. I told him about my plans to take a year off and backpack around the world.

"Oh, that's my dream, too," he replied softly.

"Well, why don't you do it?" I asked.

"I can't," he replied with quiet resignation. "I'm Korean. I need to get married, make a family and a career."

I can't recall any particular negativity I've encountered when telling my friends and family about my plans to travel around the world, except for one fiercely-opinionated woman who flat out told me traveling around the world would be quite impossible unless I were rich.

I smiled at her and nodded.

"Yes, it may be impossible," I said, "but I'm still going to do it."

{What are you doing with your one wild and precious life? ~ Mary Oliver}

A Smurfy Sort of Day: Office Life in Korea

2011-05-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

A smurf has wandered into our office -- Smurfette herself, to be more specific. "Why?" I keep asking my coworkers, but no one seems to know. This makes today pretty much the same as any other day in Korea, when I also don't understand much of what's going on.

The good part to constantly being perplexed by my surroundings? I've learned to let things go, drift along with the currents that are moving through the city and my daily life. Ignorance is Zen.

Smurfette, who is much larger in the real life than the cartoon ever led me to believe, wanders up and down our office aisles. She carries a long yellow stick with a molded plastic hand attached to the end of it. For a while, she seems content with simply using her stick to poke office workers in the back. Then she rocks back and forth in silent laughter as the more attentive workers, who just seconds previously were focused on the computer screen in front of them, leap from their seats in surprise. Soon enough, though, the whole office is made aware of Smurfette's presence. Without the element of surprise, she begins to grow weary of this game.

Next, Smurfette moves on to the ever-popular Korean pastime of "rock paper scissors." Smurfette uses her real hand (well, comparatively real -- it is blue, fuzzy, and more mobile than her yellow stick hand) to play rock paper scissors. My coworkers who win are given what appear to be delicious pasties but are actually fancy bars of soap molded into pastry replicas. My coworkers who lose are given a pretend slap in the face with the fake yellow hand. I can't look away.

Soon enough, Chun Kyung, the office worker who sits next to me, notices my fascination with the smurf and pulls her over to play with me. I am proud to report that my cunning strategy and flawless execution while competing in rock paper scissors allows me to receive a soap rather a slap.

"Yellow hair! Yellow hair!" all the textbook workers closest to me cry, pointing at the obvious similarity between me and the tall blue creature beside me. Even Smurfette herself seems impressed by this parallel in our appearance. She gently thumps her hand against the top of my head, as though I were some sort of exotic pet belonging to the smurf community.

"You're sisters," Ji Hee smirks.

I still don't know why any of it happened.

Cherry Blossoms in Japan

2011-05-16T08:56:00.000-07:00

Although I go to Japan as a solo traveler, I find that I am rarely alone. In Kyoto, especially, I am often approached by Japanese ladies, usually in pairs.

Where are you going? Are you lost? Can I help you?

It is this seemingly never-ending kindness as I'm passed from one stranger to the next until I reach my intended destination that endears the country to me. While I'm rather infamously bad at following directions, locating compass points, reading maps -- anything, really, that would mark me as someone capable of leaving her own back yard -- I am never, ever lost in Japan for longer than a 5 minute stretch. Any trace of puzzlement on my face or the action of unfolding my map is like a cry for help and the Japanese ladies nearest me immediately rush to express their concern, put me on the right bus, walk me to the sushi restaurant I'm trying to find, plot out my course and quiz me after to make sure their directions are clear. Their kindness is overwhelming.

Often, a pair of them will take it upon themselves to give me a tour of whatever temple I happen to be in. See the tree in the corner of the garden? It is old. See these roof tiles? They are old. *pause for dramatic effect* Very old.

{The Silver Pavilion is old.}

Maybe the information they give me is not quite as precise as that I might receive were I to actually hire a professional tour guide, but even if I was told the exact dates, my memory would sooner or later sort them into the categories of "old" and "very old," so in the end, it's all the same.

{The Golden Pavilion was old. But then a monk fell in love with it -- yes, the building -- and burnt it to the ground so no one else could have it. The rebuilt structure is mostly new.}

The Japanese ladies are also very solicitous about helping me dress. On my previous visit to Japan, I bought a used kimono of coral silk with delicate silver branches embroidered across it and sleeves that drip halfway to the ground, indicator that I am unmarried. I also have a floral, tapestry-type obi (belt) and linen undergarments someone gave me to wear with it. However, in spite of the lengthy instructions I've printed from the web, I'm not entirely confident in dressing myself in these items. If I wrap the kimono in the wrong direction, it indicates that I'm dead. Even worse is the matter of trying to tie the obi, an elaborate and complicated procedure.

At one of my hostels (I change hostels every night because the entire city is booked during sakura season), I meet a friendly Japanese girl named Asuka.

"Do you know how to wear a kimono?" I ask and show her my clothing spread. Asuka drapes the kimono in slightly loose folds around me and carefully ties the obi into an oversized bow in the back.

I happily wander around the city like this and get as much attention as Mickey Mouse at Disneyland: everyone from Japanese salarymen to Western tourists wants their photo with me. But when I get to Maruyama Koen Park, one of the Japanese ladies tilts her head at me and frowns. Without a word, she undoes my obi and reties it into a different shape, a sort of waterfall design, and then smiles. All better.

Next, I visit the Fushimi Inari Temple Complex at the edge of the city. With its hundreds of sunset-orange tori gates spanning the hillside, it's one of Kyoto's most iconic sites. After my long walk there, I must be a bit disheveled, for one of the vendors at the end of the trail grabs my hand and pulls me over by her table. For God and all the world to see, she strips me down to my underthings (which, fortunately, are plentiful) while a group of Finnish tourists stops to take photos of the event.

The Japanese lady then redresses me, wrapping the kimono tightly around my body. She untangles the long obi from its waterfall shape and ties it around my waist, refashioning it so that it is once again in the shape of a large bow. She then smiles proudly at her improvements on my appearance. It does seem tidier, with cleaner lines, now that everything is bound more closely to my frame.

Before arriving in Kyoto, I had imagined how wonderful it would be to see the cherry blossoms in a rural, isolated setting -- rice paddies with maybe a pagoda or two on the skyline. Kyoto is nothing like that. While the city is a living treasury of historic temples and beautifully-tiered pagodas, it's also packed with people. Some of the people are European and (non-Japanese) Asian tourists, but mostly the city is crowded with people local to Kyoto and various other cities in Japan. I unexpectedly love it, the crowds. There's something touching about being surrounded by families, groups of friends, and other solo travellers who are all there for the same simple reason as me: to celebrate some of the beauty the world has to offer.

{The photo does not do it justice. The weeping cherry tree at Maruyama Koen is the most beautiful thing I've seen in my whole life.}

The blush-pink and starry-white cherry blossoms which indiscriminately decorate the city, next to pagodas and homes, in school yards and parks, next to rivers and on tiny, otherwise unlovely, dead-end streets, seem to offer a lesson.

We always have the choice of whether to open ourselves to the world. We've all been hurt in various ways; it's easiest to stay closed. But how much better it is to let our hearts and lives, like the wild white cherry trees, burst into blossom without holding back.

Cherry Blossoms in Korea

2011-05-10T19:38:00.001-07:00

{flower thieves}
{"He loves me. He loves me not. . . . This is gonna take a while."}

Cherry blossom viewing in Korea is met with the same sort of enthusiastic hedonism that I've previously only encountered in American malls on Black Friday morning.

"Please do not pick the cherry blossoms," a woman's voice pathetically pleads over an intercom.

"If you pick the cherry blossoms, we will have nothing for our festival. Enjoy with eyes only," she announces in Korean, English, and Japanese at regular intervals throughout the afternoon.

Meanwhile, young women pull bouquets of white blossoms from the trees, nestle them in their silky black hair, pose coyly for photos. The guys also pick flowers and affix clusters of them to their button holes, or sometimes allow their girlfriends to arrange the flowers on their heads for more photos, this time funny. Some couples walk down the avenue with entire branches of cherry blossoms entwined in their hands. One woman carries what appears to be a small sapling tugged from the earth.

Cherry blossom parties in Seoul are chaotic, noisy, joyful. I estimate there are around 2,000 people at the Yeouido Festival at the same time I'm there, at least 3,000 of which are kids brandishing sticks. (Statistics don't lie, people.)

{monks walking through Yeouido}

I watch as a child rams a young woman in the eye with the stick he is carrying while his mother, right by side his side, looks on. Instead of reprimanding her stick-wielding child before he'd injured someone, the mother waits until after the injury takes place and then apologizes and bows, and the injured young woman, shaking in pain and with her hand covering one eye -- trying to shove the eyeball back into its socket, perhaps -- bows in return.

Rather than be the next victim of the Cyclops effect, as caused by the happy, stick-wielding herds of children, I decide to distance myself from the crowd. Escaping the masses, I pitch myself over the guard rail and tumble a few steps down a small cliff, to a tiny thread of a dirt trail that is partway down the embankment, poised between a highway filled with traffic below and a seemingly endless line of people above. In this middle ground, however, is a singular area of peace.

Another woman, who has also skittered down the embankment, offers to take my photo. She is the only person I see while I'm in this area.

I stick my face inside a cloud of snowy white bloom to see if the blossoms smell. They don't. I emerge with saffron-hued powder that dusts my chin and the tip of my nose. But that's okay -- it gives me that jovial, subtly-clownish air that's always been lacking in my appearance, I decide, hours later, when I finally look in a mirror and realize I spent my entire day thus embellished.

The only other woman leaves the little dirt path. The further I walk along the path, the more narrow it becomes. I crawl back up to the crowds.

There are several bands and other musical acts performing on the cherry tree-lined street in Yeouido, but since the place is so crowded, there is no possible way for the bands to march. So they don't. They stay firmly in place, standing in perfect line formation, and play their instruments this way.

On two separate occasions, attempts are made to lure me into a traditional Korean dance performance -- with a success rate of 50%. I turn down the pumba performer, who breathes the dragonfire known as soju as he leers and invites me to perform with him. No, no, I wave my hands. Too shy.

But when the gold-toothed adjumma in the center of a different musical crowd begins tugging my arm into the midst of musicians and dancers and, taking my hand, swings me round and round closer into the crazy locus of drums and songs, I let her and let myself dissolve into the joyful chaos of it all. At the end of our song, she gives me her gilded smile and pats both my breasts in approval. Or possibly it was a complimentary breast exam. People are very diligent about their health checks here.

The day before, I walked around enjoying the cherry blossoms at Children's Grand Park. !!! I think, as I watch two older ladies pull aside a policeman and dramatically wave their hands in the air, gesticulating excitedly while reporting some sort of crime. I hang back to see what it could possibly be. The park looks so safe.

The policeman leaves the two older women and goes forth somewhat reluctantly. He turns back to them. They toss their arms about in the direction of the guilty party and shout for the policeman to get on with it. So he does his duty, and puffing up his chest with the pride that befits his role in protecting his country, tells a couple on a nearby park bench that they must stop kissing. It's illegal. Or something.

{pagoda at Children's Grand Park}

So, as you can see by the above example, I'm not exactly a rookie when it comes to witnessing matters of criminal activity. Nonetheless, I am very shocked when -- the very next day -- a man runs past me along the cherry-lined path in Yeouido, so quickly and closely to me that the breath of his body ruffles my hair. He flings himself off the cliff without pause. A suicide attempt, I think, horrified, and rush with all the other nearby people to the edge of the embankment. Before the crowd even fully assembles there, however, three policemen come running past and also throw themselves off the cliff. I look down but there are no bodies. It really is rather small, so far as cliffs are concerned, but nonetheless I find it amazing that the entire group of them, criminal and policemen, continue running after flying down it. I quickly lose sight of them and no one can tell me what happened. Therefore, I can only conclude that the criminal in question had kissed a lot of women.

Almost more quickly than the time it took for the running man and three policemen to dive off the cliff, the crowd of onlookers becomes enveloped once more into the task of walking beneath the cherry trees.

A young man jumps up and laughingly grabs hold of a tree branch, shaking it so the white petals loosen and fall all around us.

I reach up then, as well, pull down a sprig of the starry white flowers, and nestle them behind my ear. Life is good, or at least, as always, it's interesting.

{cherry blossoms and blue, blue sky}

Eating and Uneating Live Octopus

2011-05-02T05:48:00.000-07:00

In a number of Asian countries that border the sea, including Korea, seafood plays an immensely important role in the food culture. Freshness of seafood is of the utmost importance. It is sometimes, by my own finicky Western standards, a little too fresh.

"Is the octopus okay? It doesn't look well," J says concernedly. She gently squishes the clear plastic baggie to get a reaction from the octopus.

No reaction.

"Let me open the bag a little to give it air," she continues. "Octopuses need air, don't they?" Then she pauses contemplatively. "Octopuses? Or octopi?"

"Really?" I think. "That's the part you're questioning?"

(It was a snide thought, but don't worry; like all good moral tales, the snide person -- which would be me, in this case -- gets her comeuppance by the end.)

"And its little tentacle looks stuck," J laments.

She opens the baggie and squishes the octopus a bit more vigorously. "Hey, it's still living!"

J shows a surprising amount of solicitude for something she plans on devouring alive in less than an hour, but then again, I'm pretty sure she is drunk. Actually, I'm pretty sure most of the people who soon thereafter gather at the table to eat live octopus have been drinking heavily. I'd even go so far as to wager that the majority of people around the world who eat live animals typically accompany or precede the meal with a large quantity of alcohol. Regrettably, I have not.

While it is not uncommon in Asia for a man to eat an entire small, live octopus by himself simply by putting the whole thing in his mouth, this particular octopus is meant to be shared among a table of people.

W cuts it up. The entire plate full of octopus pieces squirms. Chow down.

"Uh, can I just have a little piece?" I ask.

Someone digs through the writing mass of octopus to find a smallish tentacle end.

"Here you go."

I reach over for it, and the tentacle reflexively wraps itself around my chopstick. I bathe it in the sticky red hot sauce for palatability's sake, and after several false starts, accompanied by a little pre-dinner gagging, place it into my mouth.

"Make sure to chew fast or else the suckers will latch onto the insides of your cheek," someone advises.

"That would suck," I think (and hear a tiny, imaginary rim shot), and I chew vigorously for what I estimate to be several hundred times in a row. However much I chew doesn't seem to make a difference to the animal in my mouth. It is like making a meal of bubble gum. My teeth can make no dent on the thing. I even -- though this is probably just my imagination by this point -- feel like it is still twitching inside my mouth.

I chew it even faster, if possible, while my imagination takes control. What if I swallow it and it's still alive? What if it continues squirming inside my stomach for years? What if the octopus tentacle uses its suckers to latch onto my appendix or my liver? (I opted for botany in lieu of biology as my science requirement in university. In moments of panic, this sometimes shows.)

I can't do it. While those with a biology background (or any other background built on logic, per say, versus a humanities background like mine -- motto: we heart pretending and pretension) may file my reasoning in this matter under the "crazies" category, I just can't swallow the tentacle while envisioning it alive inside me. After chewing the octopus upwards of five hundred times, I spit it out into a napkin and put it away for safe keeping inside a garbage bin.

Just think, a little over a year ago, I received my first serving of boiled octopus in Korea, which I steadfastly refused to eat. I've come a long way since then!

(But not really . . .)

The Grace of India

2011-04-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

The last night we spend on the houseboat, my foot reaches a level of pain just a notch above unbearable. It is so painful I feel scared. I don't even mind the intense pain -- at least, not so very much -- but I mind the possibility of having seriously damaged my foot. I haven't exactly been following doctor's orders. And I'm a dancer, not just as a hobby but as one of the primary ways by which I define myself. Why had I been risking my ability to dance by traipsing through India with a broken bone?

Miserable with pain and regret, I huddle on the boat’s cushioned bench. Barely able to lift my head, I do not eat more than a few bites of supper. I have no more medicine except the last few pills I am determined to save for the 12 hour flight (including a layover in Hong Kong) back to Seoul. After seeing my condition, Katie decides we should skip going to the elephant temple in Alleppey and head directly back to Cochi the following morning.

But the thing is that no matter how poorly I'm feeling, the go-go-go of my personality is still stronger. The next morning in the car, as we speed our way through Alleppey, I feel a tiny diamond of energy left in my body. I want to spend it.

"You know what? I think I can manage a trip to the elephant temple," I tell Katie.

"Can you pass me the breakfast bag?" she responds. "I think I might throw up."

The supper which I'd felt too sick to eat the night before had apparently given Katie the south Indian variation of the dreaded Delhi belly.

I extract our breakfast, pass the bag, and wish her luck. I am disappointed to not have seen any of India's famous elephants during our time here, but even I am finally ready to admit defeat in this matter. They are the only thing on our India "wish list" that we did not get to see.

About 10 minutes later, while watching traffic zip past us out the car window, I think my eyes might be playing tricks on me. Clouds sweep the ground in the morning, so I can't see altogether clearly, but believe I can discern a large, grey shape moving through the white mist.

"Katie! Look!" I cry, excitement temporarily canceling the pain in my foot.

"Do you want to see better?" the driver asks with a kind smile. He pulls the car off to the side of the road and rolls down the window to give me the best view.

There, walking down the road through the dream-like mist of morning, is a large elephant and its mahout. The elephant's sinuous trunk swings gracefully from side to side as it lumbers forward. It passes so closely to the car that if I reach out my hand, I would be able to touch it.

I feel this elephant sighting, fulfillment of our final desire in India, is a special blessing, a sort of farewell gift.

Thank you, India.

The Backwaters of Kerala

2011-04-25T06:05:00.001-07:00

For two days, Katie and I drift along the backwaters of Kerala in our own private houseboat, which has been converted from a former trading boat. The boat is small but pretty. It has wicker chairs and faded cushioned benches on the front deck, wood panels carved into reliefs of wide-winged birds and bosomy women, a bedroom with tall windows that open onto the water and a mosquito net into which I manage to completely entwine myself both nights while I'm sleeping.

Woven rattan covers the boat's roof and walls. There is also an upper deck which the boat's captain tells me several times is "very beautiful, very beautiful. But so sad you cannot see it. Your leg." After the third time of his mentioning the beautiful upper deck I cannot see, I wait until his attention is focused on the river and then crawl on my knees up the ladder and onto the top deck. It is very much like the lower deck but without the shade, so I crawl back down again.

{if not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost}

We also have a personal chef on board the boat. Just in case you read it too quickly the first time around – our own personal chef – such luxury! The chef prepares us three meals a day plus a snack. All the food is local. There are flat, disc-shaped fish caught from the river; fluffs of white rice harvested from nearby fields; various sweet-spiced curries; sun-yellow pineapple that drips down our chins when we bite into it; eggs offered before us in various incarnations; hot, handmade potato chips sprinkled with tiny green curry leaves. There is more food than I can remember, more than we can eat. Eating is pretty much our only activity on the houseboat -- unless napping also counts as an activity -- and this is some of the best food Katie and I have been served the entire trip, so we do our best to consume everything put on the table before us, though this admirable goal of gluttony proves impossible to meet meal after meal.

We pass by a number of houseboats in the main canals, but in the smaller ones, we are alone, the boat slowly putt-puttering down the waterways. At one point, the canal becomes clogged with glossy green lily pads. Our captain deadens the engine, pulls out a long oar, and poles his way through the thick vegetation.

We don't see very many people or many other boats until we get approach the towns, but sometimes a long, narrow canoe silently passes by and sometimes women in earth-toned sarees walk single-file down paths by the rivers. They smile at us as our boat passes by them.

Every once in a while, a church appears on the riverside. It surprises me to learn that the apostle Thomas came to Palyar in southern India, where he built the country's first church ages ago . (I can't recall the actual date but remember it struck me as having occurred a really, really long time ago in what can also be referred to as "the days of yore" if you're looking to plot it on a historical timeline.)

At one point as our boat languidly moves down the river, I notice two women on opposite sides of the river bank. They are both hanging laundry on their opposite sides of the canal and talking to each other across the blue divide. I wonder if their lives are always this way, a friendship separated by water, or if sometimes they take a boat or a swim to visit in person.

Children cup their hands around their mouths and call out “Halloooo!” as our boat passes. "Hello!" I call out in return, laughing and waving both my hands. The backwaters are beautiful, lovely, and lonely. The sunshine, an intense, pure blaze of white, brightens the sky and falls in streaks across the uncovered parts of the unvarnished boat deck. Kerala is a place which I dreamed of visiting years before I arrive. Nothing happens while I'm here. Nothing is supposed to happen. I simply am. This life is better than the movies, better even than books. It is. I am.

Wherein I Die and Go to Varkala

2011-04-20T06:28:00.000-07:00

I sneeze and grin at Katie. India is fun! Especially when I get to ride in a wheelchair! And even more especially when I'm on opiates!

Katie uses the airport wheelchair to push me through Delhi's Indira airport. We are now on the last leg of our trip. *ahem* It's time to visit the backwaters of Southern India. But first, we need to take a plane to get there. Katie worries that I will be forced into a cramped seat on the plane or that the airline attendants will not help us.

"Look more pathetic," she commands just before we arrive at the airline counter.

"I have a broken foot and a head cold," I say. "I don't know how much more pathetic I can get."

"You still seem happy."

I rearrange my expression, trying to assume the wide-eyed pathos of little poor children in Victorian lithographs.

It is a cramped ride, as it turns out, and begins with a harrowing start as the tiny airplane we need to board does not connect to a gate. Instead, passengers must walk out on the tarmac and climb aboard the plane via a steep flight of moveable steps. Usually, this is my favourite way to board a plane. Walking down the runway to board an airplane, wind teasing your hair and sun warming your skin, has a slightly glamorous feel to it. But not when you're in a wheelchair.

Four men grab different corners of the wheelchair and carry me up the steps. One of the men is not as strong as the others. I can tell by the way the wheelchair, and I, keep slipping precariously forward and to the left. I make it into the plane, though, and we arrive in Cochi, and then go to our hotel in Varkala, without incident.

Our hotel is not the nicest place I've ever stayed. The bedroom is small and dirty. I shower by sitting on a plastic bucket and splashing icy water against my skin while a cockroach happily skitters around me on the bathroom floor. But there is one truly stunning thing about the hotel: the view. I spend most of my daylight hours not inside the hotel room but lying on the wooden planks of a hutch beside the river. Between a strenuous schedule of napping and eating and getting massaged, I write in my diary:

I've died and gone to Varkala for surely, this place must be heaven. . . . I close my eyes and all I can hear are birds calling, the rustle of their wings as they rise in the air, the low rumble of frog song, the occasional plish as a fish jumps through the water, and the steady ticka-ticka-ticka of the cook's knife as he prepares dinner. Sometimes there's also the sound of a rattan-covered houseboat's tinny motor or the quiet pull of a long oar through the waters as a lone boatman passes by on his canoe.

If, in Varanassi, I felt as though I'd lept into living pages from National Geographic, in Kerala, I feel I'm moving through a series of picture postcards.

Camping in the Thar Desert: Things That Go Grrr in the Night

2011-04-10T23:26:00.001-07:00

"You squish it."

"No, you squish it."

"No, you squish it," Katie and I alternately tell each other, engaging in the age-old argument that so often occurs between two females when a bug makes an unwanted appearance between them. We take turns using our shoes to flip back the behemoth of a beetle that resolutely runs across the sand toward us. Despite our repeated rebuffs, the bug steadfastly comes forward like a long-lost lover running across the sands to reunite with the object of its affection. But we have no love for the bug.

"I can't squish it," I reason. "I only have a flip flop for defense."

Katie hands me her tennis shoe.

Katie is not exactly what you would call a bug person. "I don't like anything with little feet," she solemnly declares, and, when in a particularly candid mood, will even admit this includes small babies. Me, I enjoy the occasional bug, but I have very discriminating taste: lady bugs, dragonflies, butterflies, bumble bees, june bugs, japanese beetles, and sometimes ants (because of their nests) are all on my list of acceptable bugs. These bugs are all pretty (well, except the ants. sorry ants! you have a great personality!) and what's more, most of them play hard to get. If you want a ladybug, you must catch it. It never forces itself on anyone. It's a lady.

On the other hand, my personal bad bug list includes anything with a million tiny feet that it uses to run at me with the sole intent and purpose, so far as I can tell, of touching me. The bug that is now before us only has eight feet but he uses all of them to skitter toward us as though he were prepping to run the 100-yard dash. This causes me to unhesitatingly classify him as a bad bug, a very bad bug, indeed.

The Australian girl who sits across the campfire smugly remarks to her companion, "We have giant bugs in Australia. They [she nods condescendingly towards Katie and me] could never handle it there."

Her companion bobs his head in a sort of awkward acquiescence and smiles at us apologetically.

"Also, in Thailand. They could never handle Thailand," the Aussie girl loudly declares. "They eat bugs in Thailand," she finishes in a decadent confusion of pronoun references.

I glare at the girl. Resisting the urge to offer her the bug as a late-night snack, I use Katie's shoe to squish it (the bug, not the Aussie). Let me add that I immediately regret it. As much as I dislike giant bugs, it just doesn't seem right to kill something on the basis of its appearance. I would have rather scooped it into an empty cup and carried it far away. But moving requires a vast deal of effort and energy now that I'm wearing a heavy leg cast and the bug had seemed quite determined to touch me. Squishing appears to be the only option.

After the dark deed is committed, both Katie and I stare at the sand dimple where the inert bug lies.

About three minutes later, the giant bug resurrects, Lazarus-like, pops out of the sand and resumes its fast-paced creepy crawling towards us.

Ewww, Katie explains to me.

I hop a modest distance from the campfire in order to do "personal business" -- you know, the type of thing that inhabitants of first-world countries fondly associate with toilet paper and a porcelain bowl. Modesty prompts me to go farther from the campfire than I comfortably should have gone.

I crouch and assume an awkward tripod-like position, my cast sprawled before me in the sand, when I hear a low growl behind me. My torch is in my pocket; the air is blindingly dark. I freeze for the length of five heartbeats. The animal, still unseen, growls again. It is closer than before. The growl may have come from a stray dog -- there are several near the campfire -- or one of the many camels wandering the area, but I'm going to hold firm that my original assessment of the situation was correct: there was a monster out in that dessert growling at me. And as it turns out, I can run with a broken leg, in a clumsy, stumbling sort of way, while hitching up my pants. I've always been good at multi-tasking.

Later, leaning back onto the now-icy grains of sands, I shiver and watch the sky. Stars blaze above me. There are thousands of them silently shimmering in the vast, indigo sky, the same stars that have shone down on the desert for millions of years.

Nothing in the universe stands still. The ancient stars are not riveted in heaven, but move like clockwork in the sky. They can save a man lost in the miles and miles of emptiness, if only he knows how to read them.

The night and the stars, delicate transience of the life which whirls so quickly beneath them, make me think of a poem. Then again, nearly everything makes me think of a poem. (Except for when I'm in the dentist's chair. Then I desperately try to think of poems to block out the buzz of the advancing drill, but all that ever runs through my head at that time are the words to the American Pledge of Allegiance.)

Here is the poem that sung itself inside me, a memory unlocked from the times I'd read it before:

The night will never stay,
The night will still go by,
Though with a million stars
You pin it to the sky;
Though you bind it with the blowing wind
And buckle it with the moon,
The night will slip away
Like sorrow or a tune.

~Eleanor Farjeon

Camel Trekking for the Broken Legged

2011-03-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

"He keeps looking at me," I complain somewhat unreasonably to the camel driver.

"Camel is not looking at you. He is looking for other camel," the driver says.

"I am not a camel," I carefully explain to the camel.

The camel continues staring at me. He blinks his long-lashed eyes and snorts in derision.

At a prompt from the driver, who clicks his tongue and tugs the lead rope, my camel faces forward once more and continues walking into the sun. I gently rock back and forth in the saddle as we trek the golden, glowing crests of sand dunes. The dunes seem to stretch into infinity, though in actuality, they only stretch into the border of Pakistan. I am in the Thar Desert, located over 40 km from Jaisalmer, India. But how did I get here?

"Bed rest one week!" the doctor sternly tells me two days prior. "BED REST ONE WEEK," he writes in all caps on top of my hospital papers and X-ray chart. "And move your toes often," he adds seemingly as an afterthought.

I wriggle my toes furiously as I wobble onto the warm sands of the Thar Desert. Two days have now passed since I broke my foot, two days in which my activity has slowed but never stopped. My friend Katie is jaunting through a more distant stretch of the desert on a fast and bumpy 90 minute camel ride. This is what I would have liked to have done, to have spent a couple hours or even a full day on a camel. My own, slow 30-minute walk near the camp, though, is enough to make me happy. I feel it is a fair compromise between how I want to spend my time and how the doctors want me to spend my time.

As we slowly trek up and down the long sand dunes, the camel driver tells me funny rhymes. He claims they are old Indian aphorisms.

No hurry, no worry. No chicken, no curry.

No work, no wife. No chai, no life.

No woman don't cry.

The camels are restless as we ride them. It's mating season and the drive to find a mate is very high. To prevent one especially romantic camel from wandering off last night, the driver had bound three of its legs together with rope. But true love always finds a way. By morning, the camel was gone.

{my other means of desert transportation}

During my time in the desert, I smile and I laugh. I chatter happily to anyone who will listen. But it is not easy for me. None of it is easy for me. Not bouncing over rough and sometimes unpaved roads in an open jeep to get to the desert, not hopping one-legged through sand, not mounting the camel, who nearly throws me off in the unexpected pitching first backward and then forward as it unfolds its long, skinny legs to stand, not riding the camel while carefully holding out my injured leg so that the hard cast does not bounce against the camel's back and spook it. But I do it, all of it, even the hardest bits. I even truly enjoy it.

Anything, now, seems possible.

{clouds the colour of fire in the Thar Desert}

Touring Jaisalmer Without a Leg to Stand On

2011-03-16T02:00:00.001-07:00

Jaisalmer is a city that seems to lie on the edge of magic, a place where any minute you might slip from reality and into a fairy tale. D, Katie, and I are at an elevated plateau overlooking the city center. Before us stretch miles of amber-hued buildings all built from the same golden sandstone. Though the windows, balconies, and doorways all boast unique detailing, the city still has an undeniable uniformity to it. All the buildings have the appearance of belonging together, with homes and shops that continue to be built in much the same way as they have been built for the past several hundred years. It is impossible for me to discern the difference between those structures that are several centuries old and those constructed only a decade past.

As we get in the car, I ask about the intricately detailed tapestries and bedspread in the hotel. Does D happen to know where we can buy anything like that? I have already fallen madly in love with the bedspread in our room.

As a matter of fact, D knows where we can buy items exactly like that. Well, almost exactly – every piece is unique but made by the same people. D drives us to a shop near the center of town. The shop owner smiles at us. He helps me settle on a bench and offers us a tray with three little cups of chai on it.

"Where are you from?" he asks.

"We're American," I say, "but we live in Korea."

"Ah, is that North Korea or South Korea?" he asks.

The shop keeper then opens up a photo album of the women who fashion and sew his textiles. He points out that the women pictured, some of them bending over long pieces of fabric with a needle, others touching their loom as though they were about to play music on it, belong to a cooperative comprised of Indian and Pakistani women who live in poor villages in the nearby desert. Now that’s he’s gained our interest – point to him for gaining my empathy before the bargaining even begins – he starts to bring out the goods.

Shopping in a traditional Indian store is probably the closest I’ll ever come to feeling like royalty. The sides of the store are stacked from floor to ceiling with neatly folded textiles, which the owner and his son bring out and unfurl before us with a certain regal flourish. What interests me? They are willing to lay their entire store before me. It is a surprisingly effective selling technique. I ask about bedspreads, so the owner pulls out a pile.

The owner takes out one beautiful quilt after another, but I softly refuse the items presented to me. They are all lovely, but none of them are necessary.

"Wait," Katie says, as a coverlet sewn of dreamy blue and green patches is laid upon the floor. "Put that one in a pile for me."

"Would you like to see tablecloths?" the shopkeeper asks.

"No, thanks. We don't own tables," I reply. "Do you have a pink quilt?"

He lays an orange quilt before me, and then a yellow one. I shake my head. Then he pulls out a red quilt. It sparkles from every angle. This is the lure the catches me.

"I want to see more like that!" I exclaim.

"Oh this? The silk patches have been cut from antique wedding saris. It’s a quilt for newlyweds."

{my wedding quilt}

"I could get married," I defensively mumble under my breath. The shop owner brings out a heap of wedding quilts and unfurls them before me.

Glittering things are very much necessary, I decide, but financial restraint prompts me to settle on just one. The owner spreads out a hand-sewn quilt consisting of pink, red, and teal patches. It has sparkly golden elephants, birds outlined in glittering sequins, and delicately-beaded lotus flowers embroidered on it.

Details on my quilt:

It is now the shiniest thing I own. And I own a lot of shiny things.

"May I show you some table cloths?" the shop owner asks Katie.

"No, we don't have tables," Katie responds. "We live in very small apartments, just one room."

Katie buries herself in a stack of decorative patchwork tapestries. I ask to see pashminas.

"Here, let me show you some table cloths," the shopkeeper tells me, pulling down a small pile of them.

"No," I say. "We still haven't got tables since the last time you asked."

With great reluctance, the shopkeeper puts back the table cloths and brings out a pile of soft pashminas, hand-woven and with tasseled ends, for my perusal. I choose one that's a rich royal blue and embroidered with hundreds of starry gold flowers and vines. The shop owner tells me that a woman spent over a month weaving and embroidering it.

Temptations of the shop are many. By the time we leave, Katie and I have amassed far more than we meant to buy but still not as much as we'd like to buy.

"Where next?" D asks. "It will be sunset in less than an hour."

Katie and I both shrug. Our research on Jaisalmer was minimal and what's more, we're not sure which places, exactly, I can physically manage on one leg and a walker.

We get into the car and D drives us to the outside of a famous mansion. Peering through the entrance, it seems long and labyrinthine. Not ideal for my current state. We keep driving.

{Patwa Ki Haveli Mansion}

We turn down one road and up another, just beyond the city proper, and park outside a lake. Gadi Sagar was built in 1367 to act as the main water supply for the entire city. It is surrounded on all sides by cenotaphs and shrines, domes and ghats, all fashioned from the achingly beautiful gold sandstone.

{Gadi Sagar}

We see about a dozen boats on Gadi Sagar, most of them floating empty along the edge of the lake.

"Let's rent a paddle boat," I quip.

"Alright, come on, then," says D.

D and Katie lead the way onto the floating, shifting docks and I hobble-hop behind them. We climb into a three-seater paddle boat that bobbles in the water each time one of us enters it. It is bright green and made of plastic. It reminds me of an oversized bathtub toy.

When the sun sinks into the horizon, the entire area lights up gold, "[nature's] hardest hue to hold."

Not bad for my first day of bed rest. Not bad at all.

Hospital Tour of India

2011-03-14T02:08:00.001-07:00

“Ow-ow-ow-ow-AAYYEEEEEE!” I eloquently explain to the doctor, who simultaneously asks me where it hurts and pushes down on the puffiest bits of my injured foot. He is to be the first of three doctors I will see that night in Jaisalmer, each exam beginning with that same painful introduction.

It was not exactly an easy feat to get me to the hospital in the first place. Oh, the hotel is in possession of a car that can drive me there without problem. It is more a matter of overcoming my fortitude of denial. With my usual combination of stubbornness and optimism, I insist that the lump on my foot is no more than the sign of a bad sprain.

Upon our arrival at the Shahi Palace Hotel, I almost immediately crawl to the rooftop. It has, one of the hotel employees informs me, both a restaurant and a great view. The view is, indeed, magnificent. In the light of the dying sun, the Golden Fort seems to glow from deep within the ancient stone. Long stone benches, covered in an assortment of mustard yellow and ochre red cushions, jut over the sides of the Shahi’s roof. I prop my foot on a bolster and stretch out across one of the benches. I order a large mug of steamy masala chai. Someone drapes a blanket over me.

{rooftop of the Shahi Palace Hotel}

One of the hotel workers offers me a tube of ointment, which I gently and optimistically daub on my foot.

“I think the swelling’s going down,” I lie to both Katie and myself.

Katie looks dubiously at my super-sized foot but amicably nods in agreement.

{"Good luck storming the castle!"}

Jaisalmer is a sleepy town at the edge of the Thar Desert. I feel at peace for the first time in India while basking in the remnants of the sun. From my bird's eye vantage point, I can see the edge of town. Passing on the street are just a couple of motorbikes, a few ambling cows, a young goatherd boy and his charges. There is the faintly melodic sound of tiny bells as the herd passes beneath the hotel. Later that night the silence will be broken by revelers at the Titanic Hotel, which is across the street, as a group of men sings a passionate version of the chorus to "My Heart Will Go On." After the last notes of their song die down, Jaisalmer will return to quietness once more.

It isn’t until I crawl back down from the roof to my hotel room that the hotel owner sees me. He first encourages, then kindly tricks me, into going to the hospital. Our dialogue goes something like this:

D: Oh, that looks bad, very bad. You need to see a doctor.

Me: No, not so bad. (hides wincing) Just need a good night’s sleep and I’ll be ready for our camel trek tomorrow.

D: I don’t think you can ride a camel like that.

M: I’m getting better. The swelling’s gone down.

D looks to Katie for affirmation. She shakes her head slightly in the negative.

D: If you come to the hospital, they can give you drugs for your foot. You’ll enjoy your camel trek more if the swelling goes down.

M: Well, that makes sense. Okay. Let me just crawl to a taxi or something.

And that’s how to successfully lure me into a hospital.

{inexplicably but genuinely happy in the red wheelchair -- before drugs or cast!}

The second doctor I visit takes an x-ray which verifies the worst: I am dead. Okay, maybe I don't get the absolute worst diagnosis following an accident, but possibly the second worst: my foot is broken.

"You know what I miss?" I ask Katie and then answer without waiting for her to reply. "I miss the time when rats were our biggest problem."

I continue on to visit a succession of doctors, each one established at a seemingly dirtier hospital than the last. Now, I'm a messy person, a very messy person. The state in which I kept my bedroom during my teenage years still gives my mother nightmares. "I was looking through a pile of papers on your desk, and in the middle of them was a koosh ball!" she'll still exclaim at times, a shock which has not lessened with the years. "You filed a ball in a pile of papers!" My messiness is very possibly my worst trait. But even by my low standards for tidiness, I am shocked by the hospitals' stratum of filth. At the final hospital I visit, I unwillingly heave myself onto an examining table that is covered by a thin green pad. The pad has dried blood, mucus, and other unidentifiable (to me, at least) bodily fluids spattering it. It is a veritable Pollock of pestilence.

One of the doctors comes at me with a long needle filled with some sort of clear fluid. He holds it, the sharp tip pointing heavenward, while walking quickly towards me. I have not seen him, or anyone, unwrap this needle. I am motionless, trapped on the examination table, unable to run away. But my voice still works.

"NO! NEEDLES!!!" I enthusiastically shout.

Katie folds into herself from embarrassment.

But I am glad to have shouted, whatever social mores I have broken. When I return home from my Indian trip, I read on the Internet (paraphrased), "While larger Indian cities boast some of the finest medical facilities in the world, the opposite is true of hospitals found in smaller towns. . . . It is not uncommon for the same needles to be cleaned with water and used for multiple patients."

After my outburst, the doctors quietly take the needle away. I ask if I can wash my foot, since I have just ridden the train two nights in a row without any means of bathing, but they only let me dab at it with a moistened cotton ball.

"Washing it is bad for your health," one of them says.

"That philosophy explains the state of their hospital," I wryly think to myself.

One of the doctors brings out a big plastic bucket filled with something wet and faintly white, a liquid which looks like watered-down milk. He bandages my leg, nearly up to my knee, by winding multiple strips of cotton and plaster of Paris around it. It soon dries in the air, forming a hard white shell. Only the toes, knee, and upper thigh are free.

After this, we visit a pharmacy of sorts, where I will be handed a fistful of opiates. The opiates pose some danger to me, not from risk of addiction but because, coupled with my fast-flowing adrenaline, they act as a wonder drug. I feel good, really good. There's still a pain in my foot, but it just doesn't seem that important.

At the end of the hospital tour, I am driven back to the Shahi Palace Hotel. I climb into the soft, clean bed and begin to rest as per the doctor's orders. I sleep all the way until about noon the next day. After waking and downing a few opiates, I declare to Katie that I feel fine. I want to go out. I want to ride camels.

{beautiful bed for resting at the Shahi Palace Hotel}

"No! Bed rest!" Katie declares, with as much sternness as her gentle nature can muster. She then distracts me by ordering room service. I eat tandoori chicken, deliciously savory from herbs and smoke, and swallow a tall, lumpy glass of lassi. When lunch is finished, I nestle back into my pillows and read several stories from the Mark Twain book I'd brought with me to India. I am so good, a model patient. Then Katie leaves the room to set out laundry and buy more bottled water.

I only have one functioning leg, but a few minutes after she leaves, I blithely use it to spring out the bedroom door like a deranged version of Tigger. I chance to see the hotel owner in the hallway.

"So. . ." I beam at him, radiant with the success of my bedrest escape. "What's there to do in Jaisalmer?"

The Rise and Fall of Melanie Ehler

2011-03-10T17:35:00.000-08:00

Katie is asleep and I am only half-awake when I realize the train has come to a stop.

"This is Jodhpur?" I ask a man who was carrying his bags down the aisle. After the man nods in assent, I excitedly repeat, "This is Jodhpur! This is Jodhpur!" The train has arrived an hour earlier than planned. My umbrella, alarm clock, journal, and several items of clothing are scattered about my bunk. All the other passengers with Jodhpur as their destination have already disembarked. Katie, whose bag is already packed, deftly exits the train upon waking. I clutch stuff in both hands and follow her.

I jump quickly from the train, but in the short distance between train and platform, something goes horribly wrong. With a bone-crunching thud, my ankle folds beneath me as I touch down on the platform, causing me to land in a position that only Gumby could comfortably assume. I scream from the pain. To add insult to injury, I have fallen into a moist brown patch that has the texture and smell of sh-t. I begin to cry.

About five or six men gather tightly around me and try pulling me to my feet. It is too painful for me to stand. "Get away from her!" Katie yells. She has not seen me fall. All she sees is that I am sprawled on the ground crying, surrounded by a half dozen strange men who are tugging at me.

"It's okay," I tell her. "They're trying to help."

One man, who wears a large white turban and has a tear-shaped crimson tikka dotting his forehead, takes my injured foot in both his hands and rotates it in a circular motion.

"No-no-no. Stop," I plead. "Please stop." Then in two swift, forceful movements that cause a loud, splintering crack to my foot, he resets the bone. (It is also possible the turbaned man had not reset the bone. Perhaps my foot had only been sprained and he broke it. He didn't exactly show me any medical credentials.) As the bone cracks, I scream, once again, from the pain. There is nothing that compares with this pain, no metaphor that would allow you to understand its intensity.

One of the men who had been helping me brings me a little plastic stool on which to sit. Enough has been done for me. They quickly leave the scene.

The remaining crowd turns predatory. Touts push their rickshaw services on me at double the going rate. A lump on my foot the size of a golf ball appears. Beggars and smudge-faced children run up to me with their hands outstretched. "Go away!" I cry miserably.

Leaning on Katie, I climb up one steep flight of steps and down another. Every other step, I concentrate on not vomiting. The fact that I can walk at all is nothing short of amazing. But here’s a little life truth that only people in bad situations figure out: You are able to do whatever you have to do. I walk up and down those steps with a broken foot because that is my only option. That is the only way out of the train station. Katie helps me into the restroom while the restroom attendants yell at us that we need to pay for the privilege of using it.

The toilet is a hole in an unwashed cement floor. I use the toilet and then change into my only other pair of pants. The lump on my leg is now the size of a baseball. Twilight-hued bruises of purple, blue, and brown begin to bloom across it.

We slowly walk into the main area of the train station and I take a seat. All the area taxi drivers smile as they offer us grossly inflated prices. They see my condition and recognize that helplessness doesn't leave much room for negotiation -- but what they fail to recognize is my strength of stubbornness and Katie's resourcefulness. Katie procures a bag of ice for my foot and calls for a fixed rate taxi from our hotel in Jaisalmer. The hotel taxi may be slightly expensive for India, but it’s still under half the rate the local drivers are trying to push upon us.

The road from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer is roughly paved. I feel every jolt and bump of it inside the car. My right foot, which now has an ostrich-egg-sized lump extending from it, is propped on Katie's lap. I apologize again and again for making her ride uncomfortable. She insists that it’s no big deal, but I half-believe that I am only making up the extent of my injury. The pain's not really that bad, mostly just in my head, I convince myself –- a self-deception that helps me. I focus on the scenery, which is unlike anything I've ever seen. As we drive closer to Jaisalmer, the landscape transforms from a lush emerald green to a bare golden-beige. Once I even see a solitary camel wandering through the sandy plains, either wild or lost from its pack.

We stop at a roadside restaurant in the dry, dusty countryside bordering the Thar Desert. I want to press on directly to the hotel because of my pain, but the driver is insistent that his hungry stomach is a more urgent matter that needs attending.

The people at the restaurant show a very open curiosity towards Katie and me. They stare at us, but without any malice. They talk to us, but without an agenda hedged in self-interest. Their kind presence is a balm to the heart. This is what real Indian people are like, not the greedy, clutching people who shadow us at the tourist locales.

As one of the few English speakers in the area, the restaurant owner proudly stands next to us and makes conversation. He informs us that he is soon going to visit America.

"Oh, how nice. Which city?" I ask.

"Switzerland," he replies.

"That's nice," I tell him.

After we finish our meal, I limp back into the car. It will be a total of over four hours until we reach Jaisalmer.

R.O.U.S. in India

2011-03-06T16:52:00.001-08:00

Buttercup: What about the R.O.U.S.?
Westley: Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.
[Immediately, an R.O.U.S. attacks him.]

{a happier moment on the trains}

“Do not be afraid of the rats,” the gentle Indian man in the second class waiting room tells me. “They're just being friendly.”

I look up at the ledge above my head, at the row of tiny, sharp-featured rat faces that fearlessly stare back at me. I see the flash of a thin, straggly rat tail as one of them turns and flees.

“But I don’t want to be their friend,” I reply, with a tinge of panic that causes my voice to rise. I draw both legs under me, crouching at the edge of my seat like an anxious gargoyle.

Katie and I have had only had one small meal all day and were munching on snacks at the train station when I first noticed the movement above us. I freeze in place, marsala potato chip only half in my mouth. I am afraid to finish chewing it. Katie notices my strange behavior and her eyes follow mine. She freezes too. Rats. Quietly, we put our uneaten food back into our backpacks. Let's go to the next room, we whisper, as though we are in a library of rats.

We move to the edge of the adjoining waiting room, which is packed. I am so tired and all the seats are taken. I put my backpack on the floor and slump into it, closing my eyes. Katie sits down the floor beside me. We are only been there a few minutes when Katie jumps to her feet. Some of the rats have come down the wall, scampering around people on the floor and to the doorway that is just a few feet from us.

When the Indian men see that we are afraid of the rats, they laugh. A couple of them kindly offer their seats. It is at this point that one of them tells me the rats want to be my friends. I take the chair, but decline the philosophy.

Katie and I are stuck for hours at the train station, as the "super-fast express train to Jodhpur" (actual title) is running over 5 hours late. Earlier in our trip, when I mention the perpetual lateness of Indian trains, one young man replies, “Ah, well. India is like a little girl. Sometimes she is very bad, but what can you do with her?” The Indian passengers are prepared for late trains. As the shadowy evening darkens into night, more and more people unpack threadbare blankets which they spread across the floor for bedding. They lay across the blankets in piles of families.

For a while, this new room seems safe, so long as we keep watch on the door. Then we notice that the affable rats have moved onto the ledges above the walls in this waiting room. Or else a more undesirable scenario: There are even more rats in this room.

I begin to miss being afraid of cows. Cows! What was I ever thinking to fear cows? Cows bring good things like milk, which, in turn, means ice cream, yogurt, and lassi. Why, cows should have been my BFFs. Rats, on the other hand, bring nothing to the table – except sometimes the plague.

Katie and I gently argue.

"Come to the platform," Katie says while standing in the middle of the room, the place that she feels best enables her to monitor the rats. "There can't be any rats on the platform because there aren't any walls for them to hide in."

"No," I stubbornly insist, though she presents this plea several times. "We don't know that. There might be more out there."

When the staticky intercom finally blares our train's approach, we warily walk onto the platform.

"See?" Katie says triumphantly. "No rats."

I point to the tracks below. There, just before the train's approach, runs a shadowy wave of rats, hundreds of them.

"Oh," Katie says.

Then she says, "When I get back home, I think I'm going to start watching horror movies. They can't have anything on this."

Appreciate Your Life
{train toilet = metal-rimmed hole that empties directly onto the tracks}

Pantsless at the Taj Mahal

2011-03-01T22:24:00.001-08:00

{Front Entrance of the Taj Mahal}

"Do not accept any food or beverages from strangers," Katie translates into French.

In her right hand, she holds the list of train rules the ticket collector had given us to read and sign. In her left, she holds a small cup of Russian vodka that the Frenchmen we'd met 15 minutes earlier had used to toast us.

"Do not leave your bags unattended," she continues down the list.

I glance involuntarily in the direction of our own train compartment, which, though beyond our view, was where we'd carelessly tossed our backpacks.

"Do not tell strangers of your travel plans."

We had both given the Frenchmen the full run down of our remaining itinerary for India. It had seemed like a good conversation filler at the time.

Katie finishes translating the rules for conduct in the train and we all solemnly sign the document saying we read and understood them.

"Was there any rule we haven't broken?" I whisper in an aside to Katie.

"Well, we didn't accept any suspicious packages from strangers," she tentatively replies.

"No, not yet," I agree.

We are riding the night train bound for Agra. Our tickets, the only ones available, are for third class.

Tiny cockroaches, the size of my thumbnail, skitter down the walls of the train, the same walls from which our hard bunk beds extend. The cockroaches do not scare me in the least, chiefly because I am unaware of them. I am rather, shall we say, "unobservant" without my glasses, and Katie makes the infinitely wise decision to not inform me of their existence until after the ride has finished.

It is something of a rough ride at any rate. I begin to understand the train rules and cautions upon waking the next morning. Katie has had her pillow stolen out from under her head while she slept. One of the Frenchman has had his pants stolen in the middle of the night. But how the Frenchman tours the Taj Mahal without pants is his concern. I have my own problems.

{Drawing Competition for School Children}

While still a sophomore in high school, I opened my world history book to a short passage about the Taj Mahal. There was a tiny, grainy photo of it and a few lines about how a heartbroken emperor had built it to honor his dead wife. My teenaged self swooned from the romance of it all. The emperor’s wife had died, but his love for her lived on. Inspired, I wrote a short but very terrible poem about it.

Finally seeing the Taj Mahal in real life is a personal celebration, a sort of secret party for my inner self. I need the perfect outfit to wear for the occasion, but I have only brought two outfits to India. One of my two tops has a boxy shape and boasts a red and pink floral print. The other top is even worse, a blue-and-white striped tent of a shirt, cut into such voluminous proportions that I could use it to smuggle a small elephant across the border were that my intention. Both of these somewhat unflattering tops had been purchased in Korea expressly for their modesty. Visiting the Taj Mahal clearly calls something a bit, well, prettier.

While still in Varanasi, I purchase a new item of clothing, something so bright and beautiful that Katie and I nearly fight over it when we first see it. It has a teal bodice lined with gold and purple ribbons, underneath which flows several filmy layers of magenta-hued cloth. In all good faith, I identify this item of clothing as a dress.

{Looks like a dress . . .}

After further reflection and time spent observing the fashions of India, I have come to the conclusion that this item of clothing is actually a kurtis, or simply a long Indian top. Tragically, I do not reach this realization in a timely manner.

{but it's just a long, fancy top.}

I want to look my very best in all my Taj Mahal photos, so just before disembarking from the train in Agra, I fluff out my curls and don my pretty new top. Thus clad, I happily prance around the world's most famous mausoleum. Without pants.

{Money Shot}

This woman is one of the many people – groups, families, single young men and women – who ask to take photos with me. I try to keep track of how many people ask to take photos with me, but lose count. It's at least 30. One of the world’s wonders is within view, but sometimes visitors turn their cameras opposite the Taj Mahal just to take a photo of me. At the time, I vainly assume it is because I look pretty, or, at least, because I look foreign. Now, I wonder if these strangers are pulling out their photos at parties to laugh over with friends. Hey, Kumar. Look at this! This girl’s not wearing any pants!

{Pantslessness works wonders for making new friends! "No fussy formalities with me" it implies.}

Aside from my questionable attire, the time we spend at the Taj Mahal is lovely. No touts are allowed within its gates, which renders a dreamy peacefulness to the place. The central building of the Taj Mahal is constructed entirely of white marble, though there are floral and geometric designs inlaid with carnelian, sandstone, jasper, and other semi-precious stones. Inspite of being hewn from solid rock, the building looks delicate as a dream. That’s part of its magic.

{Taj Details}

{Side of the Taj Mahal}

Katie and I arrive early in the morning, before there is much of a crowd. We walk around the buildings and into the center of the Taj Mahal where Mumtaz Mahal and later Shah Jahan himself were entombed. (“The emperor’s tomb is not symmetrical. It’s the only part of the whole structure that’s not symmetrical,” the type A part of my personality remarks aloud.) We spend several hours, the entire morning really, lounging about the Taj Mahal.

{Yippee! A pants-free lifestyle!}

After the Taj Mahal, we walk to the Red Fort. More than just a fort, this is the elaborate palace complex where Shah Jahan and a dozen or so wives, including Mumtaz Mahal, spent their daily lives. While not as impressive as the Taj Mahal, it's still a remarkably beautiful place.

{Outside the Red Fort}

When Katie and I arrive at the Red Fort of Agra, there is a group of about 200 uniformed teenage school boys ahead of us. We cut in line. Rather than being upset we haven't waited our proper turn, the boys appear delighted by our sudden appearance in their midst.

{Carrying My Backpack Through the Red Fort}

"Are you a student?" one of the boys asks me. He can't be more than 14.

"NO!" I respond.

"Me neither," he says. "I'm a man. This (putting his arm around a boy who seems about 10 years old) is my son." The 10-year-old looks confused by the rearrangement of their relationship.

"Beautiful!" one of the boys offers to Katie.

"Pretty!" another boy says to me.

The boys try their best pick-up words, but neither Katie nor I respond. It is so, so hard not to laugh.

One of the boys suavely puts his arms around Katie's shoulders. She even more suavely ducks and steps backwards, escaping his tender embrace.

Calling us beautiful and pretty has not worked, so one of the boys is inspired to try out a new word.

"Shexy!" he cries.

This descriptor immediately flares into popularity. Soon the group that is surrounding us, nearly 100 teenage boys, begins chanting: "Shexy, shexy, shexy, shexy!"

Well, of course I'm sexy. I'm not wearing any pants. (Though at the time, I still believe myself to be appropriately attired.) And I can't help but be amused. Involuntarily, a laugh bursts from my lips. One hopeful adolescent takes this as encouragement. Before I realize it, the crowd of boys closes in on me. One of them deftly reaches over and pinches me on the bum. I yell loudly. I yell at them in the tone their mothers would use. I use the same sort of wording I imagine their mothers might use. "You should be ashamed of yourself! That's no way to treat a lady! Blah! Blah! Blah!" Their eyes widen in fear. They scatter and run away.

Katie and I walk through the palace grounds. Here are some of the things we see:

{Women in Sarees and Monks}

{Baby Monkeys}

{Columns Inlaid with Semi-precious Stones}

{Wild Green Bird}

Harboring a deep suspicion of the taxi and rickshaw rates being offered around such a touristy area, Katie and I have forgone their services, choosing instead to walk miles through Agra. Since we don't have a hotel, we carry our backpacks the whole time. We're tired. We're hungry. We have another overnight train to catch, the second one in a row.

"Let's go back to the train station," we tell one another. "It's been a long day. We can eat and relax there."

Boy, were we wrong.

Morning on the Ganges

2011-02-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

We set our alarms early and wake up in the grey gloaming before dawn. The sky is a murky ash blue. The sun has not yet risen, nor have most of the people. It is a rare moment of quiet in the world's oldest city.

A young boy sells us small wreaths woven from orange and yellow marigolds, in the center of which burn white candles. We are to set these fiery marigolds upon the water. They are for saying prayers or securing family health or wealth or whatever might encourage us to part with a few rupees and buy a candle. I whisper a wish into mine and watch as it drifts away.

The candles make tiny pinpricks of light as they float atop the still dark water. There are dozens of them bobbing on the Ganges this morning. I like our young boatman because, whether by luck or design, his oars never knock into any of them.

The sun rises over Mother Ganga. It is like every other sunrise, unique onto the day.

Even the water is quiet, its stillness disturbed only by passage of the small boats upon it.

Varanasi is beautiful this time of day, seems to glow from within as the sun casts its light upon it. A light turquoise sky, with a ruffle of foamy white clouds, appears.

We witness the city as it slowly awakens. Women are washing laundry in the river, beating cloths against the rocks and then spreading them across the steep steps of the ghats to dry. A bright rainbow of wet sarees gleam in the sunlight. Elsewhere, a girl dunks under the water and bubbles back up. A younger boy, her brother perhaps, splashes her and then flops full body into the water himself. Opposite the city bank of the Ganges, fishing men stand in their skiffs, bending and gathering their nets from the river. Moving slowly among these scenes is like opening up the pages of a National Geographic and stepping inside.

Katie and I take our photos in front of an old, reddish palace on the Ganges. It is dilapidated and beautiful.

"The king of Varanasi used to live there," our boat rower tells us.

The ghat in this area, with the large pink pillars, is where special ceremonies are held the first two nights after our arrival in Varanasi. One night we walk there, to a stage with five raised platforms. At the center of each platform is a man wearing maroon and dark gold clothing. All the men repeat the same motions synchronistically, ringing bells as they swing them in a circular motion above their heads, taking large silver holders that gleam with candle flame and waving them in a slow circular motion as well, and -- most lovely -- taking handfuls of marigold petals and scattering them so that the air briefly seems to be raining golden petals. All the while, people chant and pull on strings that jiggle a line of bells strung high above the edge of the Ganges.

But also, people are dying. Varanasi is where the old and infirm gather before death. The Ganges' water is considered holy, and bathing in the waters here is the best way to prepare the soul. All the people who come anticipating death live -- until that time -- in group homes that correspond with their cities of birth.

We pass by the burning ghats in our boat. It is the largest of several cremation sites along the Ganges. I take no photos of this, but we do leave the boat and walk through the area while keeping a respectful distance. The dead are wrapped in white cloth and decorated with marigolds. The bodies are then carried through the city, above men's heads, and taken into the river, where they are dunked three times for purifying. Next, the bodies are laid on bonfires and burned as their families watch. This can take many hours.

The timber used for burning is giant black logs that are piled in nearly every corner of these particular ghats. Nearby, crackles the fire used to start all the fires. It is called the eternal flame. This must not extinguished for as long as the world exists. Heavy coils of grey smoke rise from the burning log piles and float into the sky. The air smells like burning flesh. Two puppies, romping in an endearingly clumsy manner, catch my attention. They seem to be tussling over something. If it's a bone, it's best not to consider the source.

The Indians we speak to don't view these deaths as sad. The people who died there have spent their final moments in India's oldest and holiest city. It is a triumph, a time to quietly rejoice.

We return to the Ganpati and take our breakfast: warm chocolate and cocoanut pancakes. We eat them at a little table on the rooftop overlooking the Ganges. I order tea made of freshly crushed mint leaves, to which I add several scoops of coarse-grained sugar. I lean over the edge of the rooftop, look back at the river and burning ghats from which we've just returned. I have never felt so alive.

Being Brave. Ish.

2011-02-24T01:35:00.000-08:00

"How do you spell 'terrifying,'?" Katie asks, as we both sprawl across our beds at the Ganpati and write in our journals.

"Just a sec," I reply, flipping the page back in my own diary. "Let me see how I spelled it."

Before arriving in India, I was content in the delusion that, on the whole, I was a brave person. Sure, there are some things in life I’ve always found frightening -- heights (or, more specifically, activities in which one might fall from a great height), tornadoes (ever since I raced one home along empty, rain-slick back roads in Ohio), and casseroles (you just never know what might be inside one) -- but these are universal concerns, I reckon. It isn’t actually until I am in Varanasi that I can fully appreciate the unique depth and breadth of my fears. As it turns out, I am also afraid of:

1. Cows

As someone who grew up in rural Ohio, cows should not be a big deal to me. But in India, they are a ubiquitous presence on the streets, by the temples, grazing on garbage just outside the shops. I even see a couple of cows slowly walking sideways down a steep flight of steps to the Ganges.

Now generally, cattle are docile creatures, leading placid lives dedicated to the fine arts of eating and pooping. However, at one point during our time in Varanasi, Katie and I turn down the very narrow lane leading to our guesthouse only to encounter three cows running toward us. They have long, pointed horns. Perhaps they are bulls. We don’t stop to check.

"I think we can find another way to the guesthouse," Katie gasps, and we quickly turn and run back down the alley. It is like our own, low-budget version of Pamplona's running of the bulls.

2. Monkeys

At the Monkey Temple, there must be hundreds of monkeys running about. They look absolutely adorable. Except for the ones that attack people.

“What if a monkey bites me?” I’d asked a young Indian man before setting out for the temple.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “The monkeys can see if you have a pure heart and will not harm you.”

While Katie and I walk through the temple grounds, one of the larger monkeys voraciously consumes a necklace strung with bright orange marigolds, an offering someone had left on the temple’s altar. I walk a few steps closer to get a better look.

“How cute!” I coo.

The monkey snarls, showing a set of small, pointy teeth, and fakes a lunge at me.

“You have evil in your heart,” Katie chastises.

As we are leaving the temple, we witness another monkey throwing itself onto the silky folds of a woman’s sari. She shakes her skirts and dances, but it hisses and refuses to relinquish its grasp. That is the moment I know: Monkeys are scary, those damn dirty apes.

3. Beggars

In the Delhi airport, just before customs, is a wall which showcases a row of giant copper hands that have been beautifully molded into a variety of mudras, gestures used in traditional Indian dance. A more accurate representation of India, from my experience, would be a row of empty hands reaching out for money.

It seems there is always someone in India coming towards us with an outstretched hand. “Karma!” some of them angrily demand. But they all scare me and I refuse to give them money. I imagine this is not such a problem for people who actually live in India or visit less touristy places, but in Varanasi, Katie and I may as well have our foreheads tattooed with “Many Rupees.” One man, upset we didn’t give him money, protests by saying, “But you’re American. You’re rich.”

In contrast, we notice that the multitude of Korean tourists in India is routinely ignored by beggars and touts. Whenever I tell people I live in Korea, they respond with slight patronage: “Oh, it’s nice for a developing nation.” The wages Katie and I get from our workplaces in Korea put us in the same economic range as well-educated Koreans. But in India, everyone is adamant that Americans are rich and Koreans are poor.

Katie ponders buying a novelty t-shirt that reads, “No tour guide, No one rupee, No come to my shop.”

“Do you think it will work?” she asks hopefully.

4. Traffic

The traffic in India is amazing, in a sort of terrifying way. Katie sometimes closes her eyes as our rickshaw lurches down the street. We’re in the back of a two person bicycle rickshaw, but the problem is that it was really designed for two very skinny people, such as two small children, or maybe one medium-sized child and a puppy. At any rate, it fits us in a one-and-a-half person sort of way, and every time the rickshaw falls into and bounces out of a pothole, we partially levitate from the seat. Besides the danger of potential ejection from the rickshaw, there are cars, trucks, electric rickshaws, more bicycle rickshaws, pedestrians, cows, and dogs bearing down on us from every imaginable side and angle. I watch in fascinated horror. How are we not dead yet?

“How can you stand to watch?” Katie asks.

“It’s exciting, like an amusement park ride . . . one that might kill you,” I explain.

5. Everyone in India Over the Age of 12

Varanasi is a pushing, pulling mass of people, the majority of whom constantly demand money, attention, a visit to their shops. Also, everywhere we go, no matter how modest our dress, men stare at us with blank, unreadable faces. When we sit across from them on the trains, they watch us like we are a movie. During one overnight train ride, Katie claims that the man in the bunk across from her is watching her the entire night. Every time she wakes up and looks around, he is already awake and staring at her.

My fear expands from simply being afraid of beggars to being afraid of everyone over the age of 12. The children, however, with their dark, bright eyes and ready smiles, charm me.

I tell Katie how to spell “terrifying.” I then confess to all the things which I find terrifying.

“Still braver than me,” Katie responds. “I’m also afraid of the kids.”

Arrival in India

2011-02-08T19:15:00.000-08:00

The pungent acidity of urine bows down the air; the flowering smoke of incense blesses it. Scattered across the train platform are men wearing turbans and women clad in bright, glittering saris, many of which have sequins flaring from them or a myriad of tiny mirrors sewn into their rainbow-hued fabric. Almost invisible in the crowd, in the night, are a few Muslim women wearing shapeless black burquas which cover every inch of their bodies except for their hands and a thin slit across their heavily-veiled faces so that only their dark eyes peer through. A man in a formal, Western-style business suit walks past. A large, blood-red tikka dots his forehead. At the end seat in the waiting room rests a legless man whose plastic legs are companionably propped up on the wall next to him. Rich notes from a Bollywood tune spill from someone's radio, almost shimmering like gold through the air.

I am in India.

Immense in both beauty and poverty, it is a country of extremes. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground in India, or in people's reactions to it. Half the travelers who visit India love it. The other half hate it. I made up my mind ahead of time that I would love it -- and I do. Nonetheless, it frightens me. Also, it is impossible to see limbless men crawling through the dirt (those amputees not even fortunate enough to have cheap prosthetics) and not feel bad -- sorrow for their sad state, and also guilt for having been born into vastly better conditions. One of these men erratically yells as we walk past, trying to scare us, I suppose. I don't even blame him. There is nothing redeeming about his situation, just poverty and pain. Still. In spite of its negatives, India fascinates me. Whatever else it may or may not be, it certainly is not dull.

In order to give you a better glimpse into my first impression of this country that is a world unto itself, here's my first diary entry copied verbatim (except for tidying the grammar and mechanics, of course).

January 22, 2011

I'm waiting at the train station in Old Delhi. As an aside, the New Delhi train station is located in Old Delhi. There are other train stations as well, but I'm not sure where those are. This train station resides in an impressive red and white brick building. The inside, though, is rather poor, even the interior of the 2nd "upper class" waiting room. The loud speakers blare an endless succession of announcements about delayed trains, canceled trains, and "the course of inconvenience," whatever that might mean. Katie and I have a wait of 5 hours due to our early plane arrival and delayed train departure.

As we first flew into the city, the plane, for a while, flies level with the tawny sunset. Then the wings dip and we lower into a cloud bank. Then the plane dips further still and we descend into darkness.

From the airplane, the city of Delhi below appears as fluid streams of amber lights -- traffic. As Katie and I discover on our taxi ride from New Delhi to Old Delhi, the traffic here is amazing. Anything with the potential for mobility is on the road. There are taxis, personal cars, buses, pedal bikes, motorcycles, pedal rickshaws, and little green-and-yellow vehicles that I first thought were golf carts (but turned out to be electric rickshaws), and a parade of religious floats that is at a complete standstill on the road, causing all the other traffic to back into a jam. Add to all this mix an endless succession of pedestrians jaywalking (really no point for them to cross at an intersection since none of the drivers stop there anyways), road lines that are viewed as the merest suggestions, intersections where as many as 12 lanes of traffic converge without any signals (or apparently any rules), and random cows that step into the chaos unconcerned, along with the sound of every driver lightly honking, and there you have the streets of Delhi.

Oh, I should also mention the families that ride motorcycles. The first one I saw had a man driving it with a woman in a red sari riding sidesaddle behind him and grasping a young girl in a turquoise and pink sari. The girl didn't seem to have any direct contact with the motorcycle itself, just attached by the strength of her mother's grip.

Now at the train station, I am eating butter masala. It's a hot, doughy bread filled with peppers, potatoes, and garlic cloves. I eat it by tearing off bites with my right hand and dipping them in sauce. There's an ochre-coloured spiced sauce and a white, yogurty-looking one that is cool and refreshing.

Everyone here looks at us, especially the men. They stare in a sort of locked gaze, without smiling. I've brought a large, floral scarf with me, which I use to cover my hair. My blue eyes and snowy skin are harder to hide. A lot of times, I like getting extra attention for looking different. It makes me feel special. Here, I'm scared. I talk to Katie in a quiet voice and try not to make eye contact with strangers. Katie feels scared, too. What have I gotten us into?

Something Wonderful Every Week

2011-01-10T18:37:00.000-08:00

Here is a new blog, a weekly photo journal for the year 2011:

http://somethingwonderfuleveryweek.blogspot.com/

We invite our friends, fellow travelers, and photographers to submit 1 photo to "Something Wonderful" every week by Sunday at noon. Photos will then be grouped according to location and published on our website by Monday or Tuesday of the following week. We ask that if you join this blog community, you consistently submit 1 photo EVERY WEEK for the year 2011.

An important caveat is that photos should be taken and submitted in "REAL TIME," which is to say that each photo you submit should be taken at some point during that same week. For instance, all photos submitted the second week of January should actually be taken within the second week of January 2011. This allows viewers to see what different people in different places in the world are doing at roughly the same time.

Any photo can be "wonderful" -- a photo of you, your friends, your cat, a good meal , a famous landscape, or something close to home. Even if it seems ordinary to you, someone across the world might see it and be amazed. Your everyday life, whether or not you know it, is wonderful.

You, the photographer, retain the copyright of any photo you take.

Please submit 1 photo by Sunday at noon, EVERY WEEK, to our e-mail address:
wonderfulphoto@yahoo.com

The e-mail should include your name, city, country, and a brief description of the item/people in the photo, as well as an attachment with the photo (JPEG preferred).

Korean Mask Dancing and the Traditional Ways

2011-01-04T00:47:00.001-08:00

OUTSKIRTS OF ANDONG

{Lindyhoppers at Dosan Seowon}

Hey, that isn't traditional dancing! Or rather, it is traditional dancing, but it's traditional American dancing. My friends and I (all lindy hoppers) pose in the American "swing out" at Dosan Seowon (도산서원), a Confucian academy, before we reach the reach the autumn maskdancing festivals being held at Hahoe and Andong.

{Dosan Seowon, circa 1574}

{Just a Social Butterfly}

Hahoe and Andong are noted for their hand-carved wooden masks. The regional woodcarving artistry extends to tall wooden figures with carved faces, such as the one pictured above. They are about the size of small lamp posts.

HAHOE VILLAGE

Hahoe Village overlooks Nakdong River, which borders much of its perimeters. The word "hahoe" means "laughed at by waters."

I'm just bluffing. It actually means "surrounded by waters."

Some of the villages in Hahoe live in huts thatched with straw; others live in wooden hanoks with curved tile roofs. The countryside is surrounded by fresh air and the environ is surrounded not only by mountains by also by wildflowers and crops of growing food.

I could wile away the hours
Conferrin' with the flowers
Consultin' with the rain
And my head I'd be scratchin'
While my thoughts were busy hatchin'
If I only had a brain

We see a traditional maskdancing performance in Hahoe. The setting is brilliant ~ an outdoor stage set under tall, ancient pines. Craggy cliffs rise dramatically in the background.

Some foreign visitors don't enjoy the maskdancing. It's all in Korean, and neither my friends nor myself can follow the plot. I love it, though. Most days in Korea, I can't understand most of what's being said ~ so it's just like that, only with bright costumes, music, and candy.

Hahoe Village one of the loveliest places I've visited in Korea, and it is considered by most people to be the most authentic of the Korean folk villages. Sure, electric wiring runs through many of the houses and Hahoe has some tourists, but nonetheless, it is a place where real people live, farm, and raise their families. The government supplements the locals' income to insure they preserve the old ways.

{Walking Through the Village}

{600-Year-Old Tree}

An ancient Zelkova tree has an enormous trunk and many sprawling branches and roots. For over 600 years, it has stood as a guardian to the villagers of Hahoe Village.

{Tying Wish to a 600-Year-Old-Tree}

This ancient tree is perfect for providing shade (in the summer!) and fulfilling wishes (year round!).

{Traditionally Confused}

If you visit the Korean countryside, you, too, will most likely want to find traditional Korean lodgings. To determine the authenticity of a place it should: 1. provide all bedding as thin mats on the floor; 2. the people-to-bathroom ratio should be roughly 60 people for every 1 bathroom. This rustic lifestyle gives outsiders the chance to experience the purity of country living. Why be cooped up the entire morning while readying for the day when you can brush your teeth in the fresh outdoors with a garden hose serving as both sink and shower? Queue up early, though, as there will even be a line for this.

{Hahoe Traditional Fireworks}

For a traditional firework display, ropes are strung across the river and then set on fire. Groups of people sometimes yell things in Korean, and shortly thereafter, a large object is set on fire on and tossed over the mountain. It's dark and confusing, unclear as to what's being tossed off the mountain, too ~ unwanted pianos, sacrifical virgins? I didn't understand it, didn't even understand that it WAS the actual fireworks festival until I asked someone when the fireworks would start.

After returning home, I did research on the web about it (and by "research" I really mean snooping through another traveler's Facebook comments about the festival). Here's what I learned: The blurry shape beneath the ropes is a boat containing poets. Whenever they finish writing a poem, everyone yells "drop the fire" and then a burning pine is tossed from the mountaintop. I'm a very slow writer, myself. If I were on the boat, fireworks would only occur every other week or so.

ANDONG CITY

Andong has a bigger maskdancing festival, with an interesting variety of shows, but it's a modern city, large and charmless compared to Hahoe.

The inside stage at Andong, which must be entered by walking through the mouth of a giant mask, features a variety of performances from dancers across the world.

{"Buy a Pretty Flower" Korean Maskdance}

{Chinese Magician Maskdance}

{Traditional Korean Maskdance}

{Thai Dancers "Cock Fight"}

Our Wall Is Greater Than Yours

2010-12-12T18:19:00.000-08:00

Through Korea's turbulent and sometimes violent history, many of its ancient relics were destroyed, which is perhaps the reason why national pride for their surviving landmarks is so great. Take, for instance, Hwaseong Fortress, which encloses the old part of the city of Suwon. It was built in 1794 and has been kept in excellent condition for the past couple centuries. In 1997, it was designated a UNESCO world heritage site.

The fortress's origins stem from a rather seedy history, a real-life K-drama. King Jeongjo built the fortress both with the intentions to move Korea's capital from Seoul to Suwon, and also to honor his father, Prince Sado. Prince Sado, despite the filial affection he inspired, was what would most likely be diagnosed nowadays as "pyschotic" and went on the occasional murderous rampage against his servants and royal staff. As a result, Prince Sado was eventually murdered by his father, King Yeongjo, by being locked inside a rice chest for 8 days until he eventually suffocated or, ironically, starved. This is only tangential to the building of the fortress, but nonetheless is far more interesting material than you find in most history books.

One of my expat friends lived in Suwon during her first year in Korea, her apartment and school being just a stone's throw from Hwaseong Fortress. One day, as she and her Korean co-teachers were passing it, they asked for her impressions.

"Oh, I think it's lovely," she answered honestly.

"Do you think it's better than the Great Wall of China?" they pressed. "We know the Great Wall is supposed to be special, but some people say that our wall is quite nicer; it's better preserved than the wall in China. What do you think?"

"Ummm, well, yes?" my friend answered, or something equally dubious and polite.

While it certainly can't boast the colossal size or venerable age of China's Great Wall, the lovely Hwaseong Fortress, even with the purple prose overtones of its origins, remains a point of pride among the Korean people.

"Behind the Eight Ball" and Other Synonyms for Unlucky

2010-12-06T00:20:00.000-08:00

"I love you," said the Korean woman solemnly, but while swaying slightly, as she tipped her green glass bottle of soju above an empty plastic bowl. When presented with the offering, I smiled, bowed, and attempted to drink the soju quickly enough to preserve what few of my tastebuds remained after a year in Korea of consuming red-chili-based spices and alcohol strong enough to remove varnish. Soju is certainly not my favourite beverage of choice, but I take pretty much any food or drink that's offered to me, which in the past has included kimchi, gimbap, tteok, odeng, candy, hot chestnuts, a raw chestnut with a live worm in it, and probably other stuff I can't remember. I don't always like what I'm given, but I am always appreciative of the kindness that prompted the gift.

The woman filled the bowl with more soju and handed it next to Josh.

"I love you," Josh told her, dutifully echoing her proclamation. Alice silently gulped down the painfully raw alcohol when her turn came and made a face. None of us was quite certain about the social protocol for such a situation.

(lanterns floating on the Namgang River)

We were at Jinju, at the Lantern Festival, which was packed with Korean revelers. Our tiny group consisted of three Americans living in various areas of the country (me = Seoul, Alice = Busan, Josh = country village nearish Gwangju) and after we had assembled in Jinju we went to an outdoor booth to get food. Foreigners apparently being a somewhat unique phenomenon in Jinju, our table had a rotating variety of Koreans pull up a chair and join us briefly to speak the few mutual words we could share (simple English, simple Korean), offer some of their food and drink, or -- for at least one man -- just to stare in a not unfriendly manner.

Josh and I had arrived in Jinju, located at the southern tip of South Korea, at roughly the same time, and had decided beforehand to wait for each other in the bus terminal. This predestined meet-up had been -- I pause a moment in writing this to find the appropriate word in the online thesaurus -- calamitous, cursed, dire, disastrous, hapless, ill-fated, ill-starred, inauspicious, and unsuccessful. In short, we could not find each other when we first arrived.

I jumped off the bus and looked around the station. It was small. Tiny. Looking around both the outside and inside of station, I knew that Josh was not there. I still did not have a working phone, but I found a payphone booth just outside the station. "Where are you?" I asked Josh. "I'm just outside the bus station." "I'm standing just outside the bus station, too." Small pause. "Does Jinju have two bus stations?"

It did, and we had ended up at opposite ends of town.

I quickly tried to think of a way we could meet. "There are festival ladies in front of the bus station here. They can't speak English, but they have maps of the town."

"Yeah, they're at my station, too," Josh replied.

"Great," I said. "Get the map with the photo of bibimbap on the cover. That's the map I have. We'll just have to open it and figure out a new meeting place."

I opened my map to study the locations listed therein. I tilted my head. I squinted my eyes. I crinkled my nose. No, none of those thing better enabled me to read Hangul. But wait! There were numbers by many of the mysterious places listed. We just needed to settle on a number.

"What about site 156?" I asked. "It's near the festival and not too far from my bus stop. I still don't see your bus stop on the map. Or maybe site 166 since that one looks big?"

"How will we know what the site actually is?" Josh asked.

"Well, we'll have to ask people and figure it out on the way." I said, talking quickly since the payphone was beginning to make gurgling noises and I was running out of change to feed it. "Site 156 sounds good to me."

"Ok," Josh replied. "I'll meet you at site 166."

"See you soon," I replied, an optimistic lie.

Reading over the dialogue, it's obvious what went wrong. At the time, however, we both marched away from our respective bus stops in complete faith that we would soon meet.

For the first order of business, we both needed to locate our current positions on the map. (I did this by going up to some Korean women and asking "yogeyo [here]?" and pointing to different probable locations on my map. Josh later reported that he asked some Korean women, "Where am I? Where am I?," to which they justifiably looked confused.) Although I managed to discover my general location on the map, I still wasn't sure which direction I was facing, so I approached a college-aged man (college-age = most likely to speak English) who was waiting in line to buy tickets and asked him for directions. He promptly left the line and walked me most of the way to the site. "Um, don't you need to buy your bus ticket?" I asked. "Yes," he said and continued to walk with me. That's the thing about Korea. When people here show kindness to strangers, they are so kind. Shortly before reaching the site, it began raining, so my new friend popped me into a taxi and then returned to the bus station.

I got to site 156 and found it to be a seafood restaurant. The rain, which had started out as a glimmering drizzle, had at this point reached a build-your-ark-now level of heaviness. I did not want to eat in the restaurant since I knew Josh would be there soon, but at the same time, I wasn't a huge fan of standing in a deluge. I ducked under the awnings at the front of the restaurant, hoping to take shelter unnoticed there, but the restaurant owners saw me and waved me in. Even though I wasn't a customer, they were delighted to see me.

I was settled on a little wooden bench and someone handed me a steaming cup of hazlenut coffee. A small crowd perched around me. The women took multiple photos of me and repeatedly told me I was pretty. So much attention might lead to vanity, except that by pretty they really just mean "different." Still, it made me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside (though maybe that was just the coffee) and I basked in their praise. A woman rolled open the lattice-work doors to a private room and beckoned one of the customers dining there. He was one of their regular customers and the only one who had visited the U.S.! So he gamely left his meal and chatted with me, acting also as an interpreter for the curious crowd.

I was asked my name, country of origin, age, job, marital status (good news: the only English-speaking Korean in Jinju is also single!), and blood type. After questioning why I was there and who I was waiting for, the crowd then became very concerned with helping me locate my friend. Someone handed me a phone and I used it to call Josh, after which two of the men posted themselves by the door. When Josh finally did arrive, they called out to him by name.

(This is not Josh. This is just a gratuitous lantern photo.)

After finally finding each other, Josh and I easily found the festival, squelched our way through muddy paths lined with food stalls and cartoon sock vendors, and took photos of the hundred or so lanterns lit upon the river. Alice found us in a makeshift teashop along the river, where we were sipping jujube tea and waiting for Josh to dry out. Later that night, we ate and drank in the good company mentioned at the beginning of this story.

(This is Josh. And tea.)

Everything went smoothly until it was time for us to sleep. Every place was full, even the seediest love hotels. After wandering the dark backstreets for an hour or so, we gave up on finding proper bedding and crashed on a jimjilbang (bath house) floor. Alice and I had a restless night’s sleep, due to the fact that we were sleeping head to toe with about a kerbillion Koreans in the jimjilbang’s special heated pine room. (The pine effectively blocked all nasal passages.) Josh also had a restless night’s sleep, due to a rather cuddly man lying next to him and Josh’s inclination to not be cuddled by a strange man. (They hadn’t even exchanged business cards beforehand!) In the morning when we woke, we saw that every inch of floor space in the jimjilbang was full of Jinju lantern revelers; even the stairwell and elevator hummed faintly with the snore of heavy sleep.

I feel like there should be some sort of moral to this story, but there isn’t really, except . . . solid travel plans make for a comfortable experience but a dull story; you, too, should travel haphazardly in a land where you can barely communicate. And as a vintage tribute to the writer I used to be, this is the way I signed off my papers in 2nd grade:

The Very, Very, Very, Very, Very, Very End.

Having My Sushi and Eating Spaghetti, Too

2010-11-01T22:02:00.001-07:00

It's hard to flirt with a waiter while dining alone at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Cute Waiter: You're pretty.
Me (coyly): Thank you. Umm, I don't really know how to say this, but . . . can you bring me another plate?
Cute Waiter: Another plate?
Me (looking fixedly at the floor): Thanks.
[The Cute Waiter begins to leave.]
Me: Oh, wait. I forgot to tell you something.
Waiter: Yes?
Me: I might also need a bowl for dessert.*

Really, I should never be allowed in buffet-style restaurants for the same reason that I should never be allowed to play putt-putt golf or become involved in a game of musical chairs. Those situations trigger my usually latent competitive streak and at such times I really, really want to win. You can't even imagine the amount of "reallys" I would have to pile into that sentence to modify how intent I become on winning. To me, the phrase "all you can eat" is a challenge, the words dyslexically transforming into a taunting "How much can you eat?" The diner stacking up the largest pile of empty plates wins.

(Last time I played musical chairs. . .)

The Cute Waiter, noticing the big gulps with which I consume my meal (or maybe he just has a prediliction for girls with a hearty appetite), brings over a plate of something. Just for me. Special. I didn't order it.

"Spaghetti!" he proclaims. "It is very delicious."

"Mmmm, yeah," I return with as much possible fake happiness as I can muster. Tomatoes are my least favorite food in the world and spaghetti, covered in their blood red sauce, seems just like a first cousin to them. Out of the food I dislike most in the world, spaghetti has to hit the top ten list. But my personal rule for eating anything given to me trumps my dislike. Besides that, it's free, and I do love the free.

(I also become competitive during events involving dancing, drinking, and/or Omar.)

After the Cute Waiter leaves, I poke the pile of spaghetti tentatively with my chopsticks. It is delicately coated in thin fish flakes, the type that visibly quiver while resting atop hot food items, leading me to believe, the first time I saw them, that the food was still alive. It's not. But a certain "Fear Factor" stigmata remains attached, in my mind at least, to the fish flakes.

I begin awkwardly gathering the spahetti strands into my chopsticks. They're thicker than normal spahetti pasta -- udon! I quickly verify as I take a bite. The bright red sauce that I was dreading turns out to be a type of hot sauce. There's probably tomato in there, too, but what with the intensity of the hot sauce and the little specks of chili freckling the strands, my taste buds have been bequeathed with a certain amount of numbness and can process little more than HOT. What's more is that the quivering fish flakes, which I still taste faintly, add a subtle tang to the whole thing. Tiny, surprise octopus tentacles make their way into my chopsticks as I continue to eat my spaghetti. The Cute Waiter was right: This is delicious spaghetti! Or delicious something. It definitely looks like spaghetti, especially if you take off your glasses and kinda squint your eyes at it.

(Photo of Sushi and Delicious Something)

Now divested of spaghetti obligations (I ate half and arranged the rest into a smallish-looking pile on my plate), it is time to take a new plate to the buffet and select my main course of sushi. There is a wide variety of sushi and thankfully the large number of patrons eating here ensure that it is fresh, not like the less popular sushi restaurant down the street where the chefs use spray bottles to squirt water on the dry, wilting sushi being presented in order to make it look more palatable, or maybe just to clean off the dust that has accumulated there.

I get orangey-pink salmon, eel in a sweet brown glaze, salty yellow fish roe that crunches when my teeth bite into it, fake crab which is rosy and bland except for the bitter mote of green wasabi used to adhere it to the rice ball, and several other fish I can't identify. I also get two pieces of egg sushi, which is a way of cheating at sushi, but it also tastes like the best omelet in the world which makes the cheating seem not so bad. And fries. They have thick-cut, seasoned fries in a hotplate, which make a satisfying, if unconventional, accompaniment to the sushi. Side soups include miso, mushroom, and soba noodles. I only get the first type of soup. Even a girl with high eating ambitions can't manage everything. Besides, I notice a dessert bar which offers, among other treats, patbingsu (red beans and ice), pastel balls of tteok filled with red bean sauce, and a sugar-coated dry ramen and chocolate mix. Who's up for thirds? Oh, waiter . . .

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Dialogue may be exaggerated, ala A Million Little Pieces memoir style.

The Worst Movie Review Ever: Eat, Pray, Love

2010-10-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

This is the worst movie review you will ever read of Eat Pray Love. Let me clarify: It is definitely not the worst movie you will ever see (unless your viewing selection is dedicated entirely to Masterpiece Theatre and PBS marathons, in which case you are probably too smart to be reading my blog anyways. Seriously. If you're one of those people, stop reading my blog and invest the next 10 minutes in doing something more worthy of your talents, such as learning how to play the cello or mastering a fifth language. Thank you. Now, back to the normal people, the plebeians, or "pleebs" as I like to call us.); however, this actual review of the movie will likely be the worst you'll ever read, since I'm not even going to pretend to stay focused on the actual plot or the acting, and if the convoluted syntax of this sentence hasn't already convinced you how rambling this review aspires to be, then nothing will.

Eat Pray Love features a divorced American woman in search of herself as she travels the beautiful and exotic locales of Italy, India, and Indonesia to indulge in both the sensual pleasures of the body and the spiritual release of the mind. I went to see the movie with two of my girlfriends since I figured we could all identify with the main character, though as it turned out none of us had been divorced, or even the first step -- married, or practiced spiritual meditations, unless occasionally falling asleep in church counts. Nor had any of us been to India or Indonesia, though I had been to Italy twice and Ashley had once been to Iraq, and that also starts with an "I."

(As you can see by the two photos above, Julia Roberts and I do, however, bear a striking resemblance in regards to our physical appearances.)

Ok, so down to the nitty gritty. The movie's plot can be summarized through the following abridged and somewhat altered dialogue. You should imagine the following being said in a high-pitched, squealy voice (not that Julia Roberts actually uses such a voice; it's just more fun to imagine it that way). “Ohhh, I've found a handsome man who's madly in love with me! Whatever shall I do? I think I'll dump him.” And repeat. In fact, this is the entire action sequence of the movie, just Elizabeth Gilbert -- via Julia Roberts -- dumping men and then professing guilt for breaking their hearts. Her soulful whines about how to get rid of her latest handsome man acquisition kinda made me want to slap her, even though, as my friend Katie pointed out, the men were very likely not as handsome in real life.

Movie Theatre Snack ~ Winning Combo
"Hey, you've got your squid in my peanut butter!"
"Your peanut butter is on my squid!"

The real interesting twist in the movie, from my viewpoint, was when it ended. My friends Katie and Ashley, as well as myself, were ushered out a side door of the viewing room and into a bare steel stairwell, which had a very different atmosphere from the clean, well-lit movie postered elevator we had ascended to reach the appropriate viewing room. Since we were now at the top floor of the movie house, we naturally began to descend the stairs. Down, down, down we went until we reached the basement doors, which were locked and bolted shut by a steel bar. Up, up, up we backtracked, trying to find a way out of the movie house. We glanced out of an overlook onto the vending area where we'd bought our popcorn and squid snacks just a few hours earlier. The place was void of people and lights, eerie in its shadowy desertion. By this point, we had picked up about three or four disoriented Koreans who had also become lost in the movie theatre and then all of us began wandering up and down the stairs. Finally, one guy decided to go into an unlit viewing room. Like little lemmings, we all followed. The room was cast in velvety black, except for a few pinpricks of emergency lights from the floor, and it would have been dead silent were it not for my voiced suggestions that this was now the perfect setting for a horror movie. After going through the empty viewing room and out another hallway, we finally reached an outside door. This one, too, was locked, but in a more simple manner, and one of the Korean theatre-goers just reached up to the top of the door and released the spring lock. We all passed through and back onto the street, successful at last in leaving the Hotel California of movie theatres.

Lost Girl of the Week

2010-10-18T19:46:00.001-07:00

Several years ago, while I was still in the states daydreaming about my future, I followed a small number of narrative travel blogs, including the Lost Girls World. At the time I started reading it, the blog focused solely on the adventures of three New York women and their world travels. It feels strange, but good, to now be profiled on their website. It's like looking out from the opposite side of the mirror.

http://www.lostgirlsworld.com/2010/10/lost-girl-of-the-week-melanie-ehler/

(You know the drill. Copy and paste the URL since I can't hyperlink.)

Almost Famous

2010-09-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

Old English majors never die; they just ramble on.

Fellow blogger and Female Nomad and Friends contributor, Maria Altobelli, conducted an interview of me in her blog, Mexico in Small Bytes.

My story in Female Nomads was about 4 pages. My original interview was about 6 pages, but it's been trimmed neatly down to size.

You can go to this interview by clicking the title ("Almost Famous") of this post.

Never Gonna Give You Up

2010-09-19T22:19:00.001-07:00

Within the past six weeks, I’ve been stranded a week in Japan with no money (or rather, I had money, just no way to access it, which was even more frustrating); lost electricity in my apartment for almost a week following a lightning storm; was cornered by a would-be attacker; lost phone service for over a month because of ARC reasons; started a new job; lost a tooth; moved apartments twice; survived a typhoon (Ok, so I slept through the typhoon but it passed right through my area, smashing plate glass windows and uprooting large trees. I could have been crushed by one of those trees were I not such a sloth); and was kicked out of a restaurant for the sole offense of . . . drum roll . . . being white (the woman kicking me out actually called up someone on the phone to translate it for me). Do you know what all that means? It means I have the best diary ever!

I have to think back to my diary just a year or so ago. It was full of mundane observations, such as the time I saw the homeless man using his cardboard “Feed me” sign to shield his cell phone from public view as he texted on it.

Also, my previous diary contained more than one entry that related my daily commute from Ann Arbor to Ypsilanti as I rode my $10 mountain bike – “The Nevermind”— through all sorts of foul Michigan weather. Dripping down the hallway after one particularly bad rainstorm I simply told anyone who inquired about my sopping state that I’d jumped off the Titanic and swum there.

My diary from one year ago also chronicled interesting executive-type experiences, such as the time an overseas VIP was scheduled to visit our offices. Apparently, the VIP was a stickler for “tidiness” in the workplace, rumors claiming he’d fired people for sins such as keeping a disorderly supply closet. I was told to hide all my paperwork, folders, books, pens, pencils, stapler, calculator, calendar, and office phone (phone!?) deep within the confines of my desk drawers. I truly hoped the phone would not ring while hidden in the drawer, as that would have been embarrassing. As the arrival time for the sovereign VIP grew imminent, my boss and I discovered (to our horror!) that the company coat closet was full, so we crawled under our respective desks to hide our coats under our wastepaper baskets. So inspiring was the office-wide terror about the VIP's impending visit that had the wastepaper basket been large enough, I would have crawled under it myself.

Ok, so those diary events have a certain amount of retrospective amusement about them, but most of the entries inbetween them formed what can be loosely described as a foodie log focusing on the various types of chocolate I consumed on any given day and my reactions to it. (“Cinnamon chocolate. Mmm.” “Curry chocolate. Bleck!”) And more often than not, there weren’t even any written words, just greedy little fingerprints in cocoa smudging the pages, providing proof that I was still alive and also making it very easy to track me should I engage in any future criminal activity, such as, say, holding up a Godiva factory or hijacking a Little Debbie Truck.

A year and some weeks later, I now sit proudly at a brand-new cubicle! One where the phone is allowed on the desk, though my new workplace has kindly requested I not plug it in less it disturb people by ringing. Now is the time I was originally slated to leave for my RTW trip. I’ve worked in Korea and successfully finished my original one-year contract with “ivy league” Yonsei University, receiving the generous year-end bonus all Korean companies provide to their foreign employees. Now is the time when I should be loading up my rucksack and moving forward into the world.

After a series of unfortunate events, such as listed in the first paragraph, the average person would probably call quits on Korea and move forward as planned. Know what I call those people? Smart. They are smart, smart people who know when to give up. These people also probably understand that living more than one year in the world’s most precarious nuclear hotspot is, in fact, not smart. But that’s where I come in. These people have smart as their primary strength. Me, I have stubborn. Sure, the world may be filled with people who are smarter, stronger, and own more powerful weapons of mass destruction than me, but I have Olympic-level ability in stubbornness. And sure, the aforementioned series of unfortunate events may have driven me to the sort of desperate edge wherein a person in a position such as myself might shout, while on a public sidewalk, “You think you can beat me down, world? You think you can make me cry? Go on, try it!” (Such a public outburst worked to create a nice bit of space between me and everyone else nearby, which made for a refreshing change since Seoul is possibly the world’s most populated city and, generally speaking, there are at least three strangers in close bodily contact with me at all times – an intimacy which can double in number during subway rush hour!) Err, theoretically, I mean. All this is theoretical, except for the question asking the world if it thinks it can make me cry. That is a rhetorical question, by which I mean I would prefer the world not to answer.

Sure, I'm having a rough time right now, but this, too, will pass. And what’s more, in spite of everything, I still like Korea and I like my new job as a full-time editor. So, it’s one more year in Korea for me. One more year of doing the editing I enjoy all day and doing the dancing I love all night. One more year with the friends to whom I grow closer every time I see them. One more year eating fresh, delicious, cheap restaurant food. One more year replacing all the necessities of life with their cute counterparts. (Are the slots on your slotted spoon in the shape of a winky face? Is your toothbrush holder in the shape of a little piggy? Is your winter hat adorned with kitten ears?)

This has been a disasterous couple of months for me, true, but I'm not going to let it defeat me. I will rise up, every time.

(Exulting in Korea's adventures or readying myself to leap off the edge? Either way, wish me luck in exploring the infinite abyss.)

Swing Out in Seoul

2010-09-09T22:47:00.000-07:00

Swing Out in Seoul
by Melanie Ehler

As an expat in Seoul, part of what drew me to this city was its exciting social aspect, its dizzying array of clubs and bars, the ability to dance all night and hang out with large groups of people. You too? Well, I'm willing to wager: my Seoul nightlife is nothing like yours.

“BK, how many days has it been?” I ask the Korean guy standing across from me. He grins widely at me, like always. BK has about a thousand teeth and he shows all of them in his smile.

“I dunno,” he replies. “I lost count a couple weeks ago.”

By my own estimation, based on the number he presented to me last month, BK must have been dancing over 100 days at this point. More than 100 days of dancing in a row. While my remark about the number of BK's teeth is hyperbole, my calculation of his dancing days is closer to exact. (I recently e-mailed BK about this. With the ultimate goal of dancing 200 days straight, he eventually had to stop at day 155, after a cold – and most likely exhaustion – claimed him.)

Personally, I am not quite as intense as BK, but I still go out dancing about five or six nights a week, alternating bars depending on my mood, location, and the crowd I can predict will be there. Only these are not the typical hoist-a-bottle-of-Cass-over-your-head-while-you're-gyrating type bars. These are swing bars. The patrons here do the lindy hop, the jitterbug, the Charleston, the east coast, the west coast, the balboa, the blues, old-fashioned dances with old-fashioned names that emerged primarily from the 1930s and 40s. But swing dancing contains a vitality that has not lessened over the years. Unlike ballroom, with its upright formality and sometimes strict regulations, lindy hop is a partnered street dance, brought to the general public’s attention by the fabulously talented ghetto kids of New York as they performed their moves in the Savoy ballroom. Creativity remains a highly prized element of the dance: lindy hop can extend beyond just the basic steps, as innovative dancers are constantly adding new styling and creating new moves to add to the basic forms.

Me, I've been swing dancing for over a decade, ever since Jump, Jive, n’ Wail played on a Gap commercial in 1998, an advertisement that was pivotal, if not in selling khakis, then in reintroducing swing dancing to the American scene. I have traveled throughout North America just for the chance to dance swing in different cities, states, and provinces: San Francisco for playful groove; St. Louis for sultry blues; Cleveland for smooth bal, Asheville for flying lindy; Toronto for Sunday morning gospel sessions; Ann Arbor and Detroit for Motown; Honolulu for, well, dancing on the beach; and so on.

But.

No other single city I have encountered offers the sheer number of venues (15), the overwhelming turnout of dancers, or even the consistently high level of dancing as does Seoul. Even though the swing scene in Seoul did not receive widespread popularity until about 3 years, most Korean dancers are so intent on improvement and so dedicated to practicing that their skill levels advance with astonishing rapidity. Before moving to Seoul, I’d heard rumors that is was “lindy hop heaven.” These rumors acted as a big incentive in my decision to move to Korea, and the truth behind them is what keeps me here a second year.

That is not to say the swing dance scene is altogether perfect. Quite frankly, I had difficulty fitting in at first. Many of the clubs were – and possibly still are – unused to foreigners. For many months, I was the only foreigner to frequent the Boogie Woogie Club in Sillim. Then suddenly, an Irish girl named Eimir began swing dancing and showed up at the same club. A Korean girl – whose nickname is something like Bam Bam Cheeks – saw the two of us standing together one night and observed, “You know, we didn’t use to get any foreigners at all in Boogie Woogie. Now we’re just packing them in here.”

Eimir and I looked at each other in bemused silence. After Bam Bam Cheeks had left, I told Eimir, “Well, in all fairness, the foreigners have doubled in number since your arrival.”

The obvious upside to this situation is that through dancing, I have been able to meet, and eventually become friends with, a number of Korean dancers. I’ve shared sensitive and complex dances, full of personal expression, with men with whom I cannot otherwise communicate. I danced with one guy several times a week for 6 months or so in complete silence, under the assumption we couldn’t speak the same language, when suddenly he burst into casual conversation in a tone that implied we’ve been friends for ages. It turns out his English speaking skills are just fine; shyness was the problem. I’ve gone to a retreat in the mountains with one group of my new dance friends and a retreat on an island with another group. I’ve danced around campfires, played games without understanding any of the rules, been invited out to eat, and out to drink. When it comes down to it, swing dancing in Korea is an amazing social opportunity.

What I’m trying to say is that if you want to learn a new hobby or even if your motivation is simply to escape the mini-America of Itaewon, swing dancing in Korea is perfect. Check out these websites for more specific information about the days and locations. If you’re based anywhere in Seoul, there’s bound to be a swing bar somewhere nearby. Just remember to go early! Except for the case of special events, dances typically run between 8:00 pm and midnight.

http://lindyexplorer.wordpress.com/category/korea-swing-scene/seoul/
http://sites.google.com/site/swingdanceinkorea/

And here’s a final tip: If standing out as the sole waygook is too intimidating, I suggest you start your dancing experience by checking out the Big Apple Club on any Monday night. Of the 100 or so dancers in attendance, there should be between 3 to 7 expats. Trust me, this is the largest contingency of foreigners you will probably ever find in Korea’s swing scene. And eventually, of course, if you visit enough swing bars, you’re bound to run into me.

Bio

Melanie pretends to be part of the literati, but, in truth, just reads refrigerator magnets and quotes them at appropriate intervals. To read her personal, Seoul-based blog with updates that can best be described as “lackadaisical,” check out http://odysseusdrifts.blogspot.com

Originally published in:
http://thethreewisemonkeys.com/2010/09/06/swing-out-in-seoul/

The Trouble with Wishes

2010-08-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

"True love and adventure," I think while watching a falling star arc in a platinum streak across the sky. "True love and adventure," I think as I blow the angelic white puff of dandelion seed. "True love and adventure," I mumble while closing my eyes and blowing out birthday candles. These have been my wishes for at least the past the dozen years, which is really the only natural outcome of a childish belief that The Princess Bride was based on a true story.

I am dropping one of my wishes.

Huddled against a pile of futon cushions under the stairs, I glance up warily as a new girl entered the room.

"Hello!" she chirps at me. "Are you an escort lady, too?"

My trip to Japan is not what I had expected.

It is, in fact –

The route that has led me to camp out nearly a week on the floor of a Japanese escort is too convoluted to easily relate. Suffice it to say that circumstances with my visa (credit/debit card) left me virtually without money and circumstances with my visa (working papers for Korea) left me stuck in Japan until my new workplace actually got the paperwork right. In the meantime, my workplace refused to give me a hotel voucher beyond one night, stating that it “would be unfair to the other employees.” HR’s concern was nonexistent. And her incompetence only compounded the problem. I learned that the one night's hotel voucher was actually good for the night before I arrived in Japan; also, HR had sent me out of Korea without the confirmation number that was necessary for my return, which made my stay in Japan indefinite; the plane ticket she gave me did not have a return flight on the same day as she had told me; the maps she e-mailed me were to the wrong embassy; and after I finally did receive a confirmation number from her, it was impossible to change my flight and go back to Korea without purchasing a new plane ticket. At this point, I’d like to once again point out the whole “no money” issue. The only way I got through this was by: 1. The kindness of a Japanese escort I’ll call Mameha and 2. My ability to make the impossible possible. (This only sounds like bragging because I’m bragging.) Oh, and not to forget, 3. The wish.

(No, I said wish.)

My time in Osaka is not entirely bad. Mameha’s apartment is just a 10 minute walk from Osaka castle, so I often walk the castle grounds during my stay there. Also, one night, Mameha and I dress in yukatas and roam the streets of the Osaka district nicknamed “Amerika Town.” This area has a mini Statue of Liberty, a surplus of jean stores, and Japanese youth who dress like Americans. I stare at them in their jeans and tight, heavy metal t-shirts. They stare at me in my yukata. Each of us is a little lost in the fantasy of otherness.

So, like I said, it is not entirely bad. But it is also not entirely good. I can not do much touring because I always need to be near an Internet café, so that I can check my e-mail several times a day, in hopes that my confirmation number will arrive. I am always just a little bit hungry, though I do manage to eat sushi for my one meal nearly every day I was there. Living like a queen for one meal a day is better than multiple bowls of ramen, in my opinion.

(Yes, I am nearly entirely broke, but this is the sort of wardrobe I packed.)

But most taxing of all, I feel under constant pressure. It is one thing to put yourself under a strict budget for a certain number of days. The locus of my stress is that the number of days is X, an unknown quantity. What if after all my budgeting I end up running out of money completely? What if Mameha gets tired of having me underfoot?

(At least two of these people also find it difficult to understand the customs when traveling abroad.)

The unknown is a weight I carry with me every day, until one day I realize that I need to go on holiday from myself. I put on my prettiest dress, the one that's the bright yellow of sunshine and daffodils, and board the train for Kyoto.

When I first arrive in Kyoto, I simply wander the streets in one of the old quarters.

I go to an ancient wooden pagoda that had enchanted me on my previous visit to Kyoto in the spring, and the nearby colourful, quirky monkey shrine. The main altar of the monkey shrine features three chipped and cheeky monkey statues in the classic “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” poses.

And from the shrine just before the temple, as well as in the backdrop of the temple itself, there dangle row upon row of what look like triads of balls. These colourful cloth balls actually represent even more monkeys. People write their bad habits on the monkeys – habits they wish to rid themselves of – and then hang the monkeys on the shrine. Then whenever they indulge in their bad habits, monkeys will come and plague them, thus an incentive to stop the bad habits. Nifty, huh?

My only real objective for this trip is revisiting the Kiyomizudera Temple, the temple in the clouds. This is another place I had visited in the spring, but it was during a special night show for the cherry blossoms, and the impressive height was hidden by the darkness. When I saw photos of Kiyomizudera Temple in the daytime, I determined to return there.

And Kiyomizudera, originally built in 798 and listed as one of the 21 contenders for the world's "new" seven wonders, is certainly worth a second look, being perched above Kyoto proper, with several of the temple’s largest buildings held above the hilltop and surrounding trees by a crisscross of massive wooden beams. Impressively, not a single nail is used in this structure.

I discover a small side path from the main temples. Entering the area of the Jishu Shrine, I am immediately accosted by the bronze statues of a man with a raised mallet and a rabbit standing on its hind legs, much in Alice in Wonderland style.

(Um, I wish not to get hit in the head by a mallet?)

Nearby is a dragon fountain, with water to wash away your bad luck, or possibly just to wash away your dirt. The heat is blistering, so I splash water against my hands to cool them, and then drip the cold water so that it trickles down the back of my neck.

Then, most interestingly, I notice a set of two stones, 20 feet apart, with a placard before the first one that is translated to read something like “Pass between these two stones while closing your eyes and coming to no harm, and your heart’s desire will be granted.”

I look at the stones and then look at the people swarming around me. “This is stupid,” I tell myself. “People are going to think I’m crazy. And if walking blindly between two stones doesn’t suggest insanity, talking out loud to myself should do the trick,” I murmur.

I position myself in front of the first stone, the back of my heels pressed against it. I close my eyes and hold out my hands to either side. Back in the day, it may not have been so hard to walk from one stone to the other, but now there is an ever shifting mass of tourists and devotees passing through the area.

My self-consciousness eases considerably after closing my eyes. Like a child, I almost feel as though the other people now cannot see me. I take one tiny step forward, pretending that I am walking on a tightrope. After all, how hard can it be to walk a straight line?

But I find a number of distractions. With my sight shut off, my other sense immediately expand. The white noise of people speaking in other languages, a sound which I’d come to tune out during my past year in Asia, suddenly strikes my hearing with a confusion of sounds. I can also hear music in the distance, most likely emanating from one of the nearby temples, playing from an instrument I can not recognize. Incense is thick in the air, with scent as heavy as a cloud, nearly palpable as rain.

I walk forward slowly, almost solemnly. At one point, the skin from another woman’s arm flutters beneath my fingertips. An another point, I reach out my hand and lay it against the smooth surface of a counter. I have gone off course, somewhere to the left of the stones, and am apparently at the booth that sells prayer charms and paper fortunes. It is then I hear a voice.

“You’re doing good,” the voice encourages. “Step to the right now.”

I blindly follow the voice’s instructions. “Great!” the voice says, “Just take a few steps back to the left. That’s it. Keep walking.”

“Do I have much farther?” I ask. It feel as though I’d already spent 10 minutes covering the smallest possible portion of ground.

“Not too much further,” the voice replies. “Move towards my voice. Wait, stop a minute. Ok, you’re good now. Keep coming.”

I walk forward in faith, trusting this stranger I’d never seen to guide me.

“That’s perfect! Congratulations!” the voice enthuses.

A second later and my foot came into light contact with the second stone. My wish, whatever I choose to make it, will be granted.

Friday the 13th: The Real Story

2010-08-14T17:58:00.000-07:00

Two days after my birthday is nearly my deathday. I do not recognize it as such that morning, of course, unrolling myself from the floor, stretching awake, and then bounding off to work. I do not realize it as I go to a blues dance at Swing Zoo that night, at the time my only concern being the brief, dark walk from the dance club to Sindaebang station, and I do not realize it as I walk though my neighborhood, by chance running into a friendly group of Happy Bar dancers who then invite me to go out drinking with them. My day is normal, joyful even. Then I return to my home.

As always, my neighbors have left the main door of the building not only unlocked, but swung wide open into the street. I climb my stairs without a second thought about it. This is Korea. It is always safe here.

I can not immediately fall asleep after a night out, too wound up, mind and body still active from the long day. I turn on all the lights in my tiny apartment, grab a book, and prop myself up against the kitchen wall. About 20 minutes into reading, I hear the noise of footsteps on the rooftop. Well, I think to myself, it's not just my rooftop. Maybe the neighbors just came up to get a bit of night air. The footsteps do not leave; instead, they seem pacing in front of my apartment. Or maybe, I think to myself uneasily, they just need to hang up some washing? The clothesline is just in front of my place. Laundry at 3:00 a.m.?

Then I see it, just slightly, the handle of my locked door quivers as someone tests its give. I take my fist and pound against my side of the door. Footsteps fall back loudly in surprise.

I stay next to my door, and tensely continue to read, waiting for I don't know what. About 20 minutes later, I hear the thin metallic ping of my door as the handle is moved once more. The light outside my door flickers on and off, triggered by movement.

Perhaps it was not meant to be my deathday. Perhaps that is an exaggeration. All I know is that the lights in my apartment are bright, and there are no curtains. The only things visible through the window of my apartment are my refrigerator and a pile of dirty clothes. I don't even have any furniture, besides the fridge. The only thing of value in the apartment is . . . me.

As difficult as it feels to immerse myself completely in darkness, I turn out all of my lights. Since I had spent so much time in the windowless kitchen, it is possible the intruder has not actually seen me. I do not want him to know I am a woman. I do not want him to know I am a foreigner. I do not want him to know I am alone. With all the lights out, he should be blind to me. I creep to the window in my living room, peer from the edge. I can't see anybody, just the motion light sensor as it again flickers on and then off.

I crawl over to the last "room" of my apartment, which in essence is an open closet. It is where I've stacked my piles of clothes and books, still unsorted after my recent move. The closet room has only a thin curtain -- a starry, magenta scarf, partioning it and the rest of the room. During the previous night's thunderstorm, I had dragged the foam mattress topper and pile of blankets that serve as my bed into the closet, in order to better avoid the lightning. I crawl to it now, my body slunk into the ground in an effort to escape the intruder's attention. As I blindly crawl, I put my hands out to either side of me, feeling the ground. My phone! Where's my phone? I can't find my phone.

Then I realize. I have not paid my phone bill this month. I cannot dial out. What's more, I don't even know my own address.

I reach the closet, grab my largest umbrella and lay it beside me. It is my only possible weapon.

About the same time, at what I guess to be two or three buildings away, a woman starts screaming. These do not sound like ordinary screams, but more like a keening wail that rises and falls in grief. The woman screams and screams. She does not stop screaming.

I hunker down into my pile of blankets. Willing my body to be smaller, unreachable, I curl into a tight little ball. I say a prayer. Amazingly, within minutes, I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Unbeknownst to me, the outside screen of my window silently slides open.

It is Friday the 13th.

This is not fiction.

This is not a dream.

This is my life.

Boryeong: It's the Journey, Not the . . . You Know

2010-07-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

Since Joseph had plans for soon selling his motorcycle and leaving the country, he was quite keen on taking his bike for a road trip to the Boryeong Mud Festival. I also wanted to go to Boryeong. I was not, however, so keen on the prospect of motorcycling there. I shovelled pho and crisp bean sprouts in my mouth over a late breakfast and worried aloud about falling off the bike and meeting an untimely demise.

Do you realize that my mother will kill me if I die on a motorcycle? I asked him. No, I amended, my mother will kill you if I die on the motorcycle.

Joseph didn't appear overly concerned about either of our imminent deaths and even seemed quite confident I would not fall off the bike, stating that it simply was not possible unless I physically pushed myself off it. I, however, more fully realizing the range to which my clumbsiness can extend, had visions of myself lying mangled on the side of the road and looking up at Joseph, using my last gasps of breath to form those four little words that everyone loves to say but hates to hear: I. Told. You. So.

Part of the journey to Boryeong, which lay on the southeast coast of Korea, was through crowded cities, where Joseph would weave the bike through gridlocks of cars before stoplights, like a game of vehicular tetrus. In between the cities were, inevitably, highways and freeways through the country. Flying down the long, empty stretches of freeway terrified me, and at those times, I clung to my poor friend.

I don't understand it, Joseph said. When we're going through the city streets and massive waves of cars are unpredictably changing lanes at the same time, you don't bat an eye, but when we go 90 km an hour down a clear country road, you cling to me.

My hold on the bike, or rather, its driver, depended entirely on my level of fear at any particular moment. If I was relaxed, my hands would rest loosely by his sides; if I was scared, they would be wrapped tightly around his waist. My riding style was less that of a Hell's Angel and more that of a barnacle.

We passed by lovely, but largely unchanging, scenery. Korea is filled with clusters of mountains, in rich, earthy shades of emerald and jade. The countryside is also full of rice paddies, where the plants are arranged into perfectly-formed rows inside neat squares. I watched the silky, bright green rice plants ripple in the wind as we flew past them.

At one point, our road ran parallel to a train track that had a train steaming down it. We went faster and faster, first gaining, and then beating the train's pace. Do not race the train, I told Joseph. But I did not tell him that until after we'd come to a stoplight, after we'd "won" the game as far as we could play it. Secretly, I liked racing the train. I was terrified, yes, but also exhilarated.

We took the motorcycle from Seoul to Boryeong with the vague idea that the trip would take us 2 or 3 hours. It took us 6 hours, but finally, we arrived. After locating the festival grounds, we parked the bike, passed under the cartoonish arches, and discovered -- that the mud was closed.

How is this possible? I wondered outloud. How can anyone possibly close mud? It's just . . . mud. It's inconceivable!

I do not think that word means what you think it means,* Joseph responded as we looked about at the dismal, now empty mud pits and the few dirty stragglers who had apparently made it to the festival in time but had not yet left.

What do we do? we asked each other, and quickly determined swimming was the penultimate option. The ocean was only a few feet from the festival grounds, and aside from a wash of mismatched flip-flops and empty soju bottles left by careless mudfest revelers, it looked like it would make for a nice swim.

Nobody else is swimming, Joseph observed. That's so lame.

We waded about 5 feet off the shore and then heard loud whistles and the orange-suited Boryeong policeman, who were patrolling the sands, sternly waved us back to shore.

The ocean was closed as well. It's a wonder they don't try to turn off the sun, I thought to myself.

Wandering around the festival area, we found a partially-deflated rubber pit that still had about 3 inches of mud in the bottom.

Well, said Joseph reflectively, I've always wanted to lie in a big pool of mud.

So we laid back in it, looking up at the bright blue sky streaked with wispy white clouds. It was surprisingly peaceful. And predictably gross.

I began laughing. When Joseph asked why, I tried to explain. This whole trip. Us. We could be an indie movie right now, having spent 6 hours on a motorcycle to miss the festival and end up laying in a deflated pit of mud.

You don't understand, Joseph replied. This is my life.

We left the pit with the grey clay mud painted across our legs and backs, indiscriminately streaked across our faces, and clumped into locks of our hair in true rastafarian style. We walked to the edge of the ocean and looked into its forbidden blue expanse, the curling white-tipped waves rushing toward us.

You know, said Joseph, I reckon it will take them at least 30 seconds to pull us out from the water. Are you ready to run? On the count of three: One, two, three . . .

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*Lies: Our actual dialogue did not quote The Princess Bride, but a transcript of the entire 10 minute conversation pondering why/where/how all the mud had disappeared is just tedious. All other dialogue is more or less accurate.

Eumseong Pumba Festival

2010-07-14T06:17:00.000-07:00

In mid-June, I decided that going to the Pumba ("Pretend Beggar") Festival in Eumseong would be just the ticket. What made me decide on this, out of all the festivals Korea has to offer? Absolutely no reason! I did, however, convince a small group of friends to come along, and they're what made the trip fun.

We started out the morning by meeting at the bus station 15-20 minutes later than we'd all previously agreed. Every one of us was late, so much so that I began to laugh out loud on the subway while getting a series of apologetic texts from my friends. We are all lindy hoppers, though, and had spent Friday night dancing at various different venues around Seoul. It was really unreasonable to expect any of us to be punctual the next morning.

Maybe this lack of sleep is how we agreed, after finally making it to the festival, that silkworm larvae would make the perfect breakfast. We yawned; we stretched; we ate larvae.

It did wake some of us.

Perfect for both foreigners and children, the play did not use any spoken language; it instead relied upon colourful costumes, music, and players who engaged in a lot of physical activity.

Well, the lion baby did yell "Omma!" when she kicked her legs and threw a tantrum, but we could all easily figure out this meant "Mama!"

The local public restrooms never had any toilet paper. We did, however, see this guy perform. Just where did he get his costume? Looks sus to me . . .

While at the festival, we saw a little open-air bus, which was actually more like a glorified golf cart. It stopped where we were standing, so we bounded onboard. It drove us around in a circle and deposited us back at the festival's entrance, all the while playing 70s era music.

("And it arrived out of nowhere, just like a gift from the disco gods." ~ Eimir)

There were three living statues near the festival's entrance. They wore robes in bright gold or green and had their faces painted to match. These performers posed while standing on wooden stools. Their long robes covered the stools and pooled onto the walkway beneath them, thus giving the statues the illusion of height.

While I was taking a photo of the statues, some random festival photographers decided it would be a swell idea to photograph me with the statue. Joseph offered to hold my bag, but the photographers saw this as a two-for-one foreigner deal, so he got placed in the photo, too. Blue eyes = B-list celebritydom in Asia.

(photo credit: Eimir)

To end our day, we took the bus back to Seoul and saw the very first World Cup game with Korea (Korea vs. Greece) on a giant TV outside the Coex Mall. Millions of Koreans were watching the game on giant TV screens embedded in skyscrapers throughout the city, though the crowds were slightly less than anticipated due to a steady drizzle.

Here are hundreds of excited World Cup Korea fans watching a screen filled with hundreds of other excited World Cup Korea fans. It's meta-spectatorship!

Joseph, Katie, and I assimilate to the local culture.

And for the perfect day's ending, Korea won the game.

Flashback to Japan

2010-07-14T01:53:00.001-07:00

Want to learn about my winter vacation in Japan? I've written a brand-new entry about it, but post-blogged it in the February 16 slot. This new (though post-dated) entry contains information you can glean for your own vacation to Hokkaido, such as:

1. When to lie about your nationality.
2. How to stay a week for free with strangers you've met through the Internet.
3. How to ask directions from a pimp.

All these -- and more! -- are covered in my informative, narrative-style guide. Scroll back to February 16 now for your learning pleasure.

Lighting the Lotus Lanterns

2010-06-01T06:44:00.000-07:00

I did not want to see the Lotus Lantern parade. Or, to be more precise, I very much wanted to see the Lotus Lantern parade; I just didn't want to see it by myself. Nonetheless, the weekend before Buddha's birthday, the day when all of Korea stirs the land in celebration, I found myself very much alone.

I spent the morning fidgeting in my dorm room. Then I spent the afternoon fidgeting through the aisles of overpriced goods at the Hyundai Dept. Store. After I had finished spending a large portion of my day doing nothing particularly useful, I forced myself onto a packed subway train, finally tumbling off at the Insadong stop with hundreds of other Koreans, all of whom seemed to arrive in large groups of family members and friends.

Exiting the subway, I quickly and instinctively walked to Jogyesa Temple. I was uncertain exactly where Buddha's birthday celebration was to be held, but Seoul's main Buddhist temple, housing three resplendently large, gilded Buddhas, seemed a likely starting point for my quest. The temple was busy -- packed with people -- just like the subway and surrounding streets. As I was to later find out, there were thousands of people both as spectators and participants in the parade. I took out my camera and took exactly two shots of the temple, which had a rainbow of paper lanterns hooked to wires above it, when I thought I heard my name.

But that couldn't be. I didn't know anyone who was coming here. I ignored what I assumed to be the voice of my overactive imaginatio and took a third photo, when I heard my name shouted more loudly. And there they were: Jeff, BB, and Goan,* three swing dancers I knew slightly from the local dances. After speaking a few minutes, they kindly invited me to drink makoli with them. So, we found a quiet corner of park just outside the temple (no drinking on temple grounds) and had a picnic of Korean pancake, gimbap, fried mandu, and makoli.

During the picnic, we were joined by two other dancers, Robin and his fiance Yeoni.* Soon after the picnic, we heard a clanging of drums and bleating of horns from the street outside the temple. We rushed to the street and saw the start of the parade. Row upon row of lantern bearers passed. They were dressed differently according to their group's affiliation, and also carrying lanterns in different shapes and colours. Women were dressed in hanboks luminescently pearl-sheened, green, white, rose-petal pink, fushia . . . every colour imaginable . . . and the lanterns they lifted on poles above them were fish-shaped, bell-shaped, square-shaped, sock-shaped, etc. There were even a group of brown-garbed monks with shaven heads, carrying lanterns in both their hands -- lanterns that were russet-coloured and shaped like alms bowls.

As the parade progressed, the lanterns became increasingly large and elaborate. They moved from small ones held by individuals to giant lanterns on floats that were carried by four to six men, and even floats that had engines attached to them. A variety of giant Buddhas and giant lotuses were to be expected, but there were also a large number of tigers, white elephants, scenes from traditional Korean lore, and -- my favourite -- fire-breathing paper dragons!

It is my personal belief that more public events should include random bursts of contained fire. Even the stage performances we watched after the parade had several columns of fire shoot up from the edge of the elevated platform. At the parade's conclusion, after several hours of watching what seemed a never-ending multitude of almost-magical lanterns, millions of pink petals were released from the sky. They floated down among us and we leapt up to catch them in our hands.

*Some of the names have been changed to protect those** who can't spell.
**Myself.

Small Girl, Great Wall

2010-05-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a small town in Ohio. Not even a town, technically, as the population density, or lack thereof, classifies it as a village. Even other Ohioans are rarely aware of Greenwich Village, and when asked to further clarify its location, and my origin, I often jokingly claim that I was raised in the middle of a cornfield. Greenwich (pronounced "green witch" -- we're a phonetic people) had the advantage of being one of the safest places on earth for a child to be raised, and I'd often play barefoot in the soft, uncut grass of my backyard or even in my neighbors' backyards. In the purpley-grey dusk of evening, my best friend and I would coast through town on our bikes, sometimes playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek throughout the village. It didn't really matter where I roamed; as Greenwich was too small for any sense of anonymity, everyone knew either me or my parents.

Nonetheless, there were disadvantages to living in such a small town. I felt certain limitations without fully being able to understand or express them. My dreams of becoming an author or an artist, and my accompanying individualistic attitude, marked me as a shy eccentric. When Disney's Beauty and the Beast was released, I could relate closely to Belle, who dreamily lamented, "There must be more than this provincial life," while her neighbors, not unkindly, sung, "It's a pity and a sin / that she doesn't quite fit in."

Books were my escape. There was the library, which though now moved to its own separate building, was once located in a single, corridor-like room on the second floor of the firehouse. I would visit the library/firehouse and pile books pecariously on the handlebars of my pink 10-speed bike to transport them back to my house. My favorite books included an enormous tome of Tennyson's collected works. It had a dark, satiny, mustard-coloured cover, gilt edging, and original engravings from the 1880s, when the book was published. I also liked to tote back what few travel books our library proffered, which were fortunately kept a bit more up-to-date than the poetry section. After making it home, I would spread these out, with my geography book from school, along the honey-coloured wooden floorboards of my bedroom and read bits of everything. Too greedy for information of a bigger world, I'd sometimes try to absorb them all at once -- soothing, rhythmic sections of The Lady of Shallot, snippets from travel guides, photos from my geography book . . . especially photos from my geography book, poring over scenes of the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, wishing that I could see such places in person but never considering it an actual possibility.

When I was in China, I visited the Great Wall, not once, but twice, hiking along different sections both at Mutianyu, a restored Ming dynasty area only an hour outside of Beijing, and at Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall snakes into the Bohai Sea. While I was there, I felt something expand inside me: a sense of achievement, of somehow entering the geography books myself. That's a lot of what this blog is about for me -- a celebration of the fact that one day, I only dreamed of seeing the world, and now it's really happening.

Night Train to Xi'an

2010-04-30T02:17:00.000-07:00

During the train ride to Xi'an, I knew exactly three and a half words of Chinese: nee-how (hello), shah-shah (thank you), ping-my-o (terra cotta warriors), and jiao (the last syllable for "dumplings").

The train ride in itself was an adventure. With a small red square of a ticket clutched in my hand, I boarded what I could only hope to be the correct train in Beijing's overwhelmingly large train station. In fact, the number of people milling about the station on an average weekday was likely three times the size of the entire population the small Ohio town in which I had been raised.

I had been advised to take a first class sleeper, which was touted as being more comfortable and generally filled by high-class Chinese business men and other foreign tourists like myself. Whether or not the amenities of first class were as luxurious as promised and the people as genteel I could not say, for in my possession was the ticket for only a hard berth, second class sleeper -- which was half the price, as well as being the only option available for purchase on the same day as I left.

I located my bunk and sat nervously (and uncomfortably) at the edge of the bed, putting the kilo of bright red wax berries I'd bought earlier that day on the bed beside me. I didn't have any specific anticipation for what a second class sleeper should entail, but they were as follows: The "rooms" without doors, just a tight pile of 6 berths (three on either side of the area) with a table and trash bin in between. There were also a number of tiny table ledges with fold-down chairs by the train windows. A number of Chinese men were already sitting at the tiny tables, smoking, chatting, and reading local newspapers. It may have been my imagination, or perhaps some combination of hypersensitivity and egoism that colors my observation, but it seemed that everyone stopped their activities, for at least the first few minutes after I made my entrance into the train car, and stared at me.

A young Chinese couple sat on the bunk across from me. We stared at each other inquisitively for a few minutes, and then I asked if they could speak English. "Yes," the young man tentatively replied, "a little." Later, I would learn his name was named Lintao, which means "wind moving through the forest."

"Hello," the girl said, in a prim though not unfriendly manner -- rather, as though repeating a dialogue learned in school -- "How are you?"

"I'm scared," I confessed. "I've never ridden by myself on an overnight train."

Whatever barriers are naturally kept between strangers then seemed to melt.

"It's ok," she said, smiling.

The young man and woman were then joined by another traveling companion, a second young man. We all shyly spoke to each other, opening up more as the train rumbled down its track. They were all from the same company, working as engineers and IT personnel in Beijing and being sent to Mongolia on an assignment. They would be on the train for 33 hours, as compared to my journey of 12 hours. We didn't do anything so exceptional on that trip, but it was nonetheless a little wonderful: We played cards (Lintao helping me with my hand, so that I could learn the game's rules by observation, which I partially, but never fully understood), they spoke to me of American sports (which the Chinese men understood far more fully than myself), I asked which cities in China were the best to visit and they took the Asian map I had with me and circled all their favorite cities, writing in the names of a few places that weren't on the map.

At one point in the night, I noticed my red waxberries had puddled out the corners of their plastic bag and leaked onto the bedsheets, a large cerise halo staining the formerly pristine linen. When the train matron discovered what happened, she yelled in a general sort of way, but I could see that she was secretly amused by the incidence, as were all my fellow passengers. After that, I shared out the waxberries with my new friends and we ate them until our fingers and mouths were stained vermillion.

When I finally bundled down to sleep a not-at-all-inconspicuous crowd of Chinese men gathered at the table nearest the foot of my bed, watching me. I am uncertain what they could have possibly gained by the spectacle of me tossing about on the bunk until my bed clothes twisted round my body like a winding sheet. Their observations could have led to nothing more profound than: Western lady finds it difficult to sleep on a hard bunk. Or the more astute may have concluded: Western lady finds it difficult to sleep on a hard bunk while five strange men are watching her.

Which brings me to the next morning. . . As I left the train station early in the golden softness of an April dawn in Eastern China, I knew exactly three words in Chinese. (I had forgotten the last half of the word for dumplings sometime in the middle of the night.) I had also, most unfortunately, lost the tiny scrap of paper -- really, a hostel advertisement -- that served as a map for Xi'an. So, I had no city map, no guidebook, no friends at that point, and only a vague idea that the terra cotta warriors were NOT AT ALL near the station. All of this would be easily enough to overcome if I would simply relent and use a taxi like other Western tourists. But, in the words belted out by Tina Turner, "[I] never, ever do things nice and easy."

I bounded up to a woman who was working at the train station. "Ping-my-oh?" I asked. She waved me to the left. I didn't really see any place to the left with the appropriate bus, so I then bounced up to the another woman who seemed local to the area. "Ping-my-oh?" The lady took me by the hand and led me to wait at an underpass where dozens of other Chinese people were also waiting, patchwork suitcases and bags of food in hand. The problem was that this area was also not a bus stop. After waiting for about 15 minutes, I approached a young, college-age man. "Ping-my-oh?," I inquired hopefully. The young man looked horrified. "No, no, no!" and he took his bag and scampered away. Hmm. Maybe I'd used the wrong intonation. I tried another woman, this time virtually cooing "ping-my-oh" to make it sound harmless as a baby. She did not know, either, but eventually located a Russian woman who gave me perfect directions to the correct bus stop.

Finally, I boarded a bus with a group of middle-aged Chinese people, most apparently on their way to work. In contrast to their bland facial expressions and serious work attire, loudspeakers filled the bus with excessively loud American club music. A dozen stops, a few dollars, and about 40 minutes later, and I arrived at the gate to one of the world's greatest historic and artistic discoveries, the beautifully detailed terra cotta warriors, the elusive ping-my-oh.

Goodbye Korea, Hello Kitty

2010-02-16T20:07:00.000-08:00

About one year ago to the date, I turned the photograph on my page-a-day global calendar to a snowy scene in Japan. The photo was of a night-time scene, and greenish amber lights were cast upon the front of a large, white four-story building -- that was constructed entirely of snow. The caption at the bottom of the photo read simply "Winter Festival, Sapporo, Japan." It caught my imagination and I decided that one day, I would go there.

Saturday became my "one day." After many negotiations at work (whining, pleading, wheedling), I convinced my manager to grant me vacation time for the trip. I managed to get the last remaining ticket, so far as I know, from Seoul to Sapporo during the festival.

I was relaxing in the airplane, drinking a beer at 10:00 in the morning -- disclaimer for the folks at home: not because I enjoy the taste of beer but simply because the stewardess had presented it as an option and I enjoyed the oddity of it. "I'm Canadian," I carefully explained to the stewardess as I reached for my beer. Of course, I'm really American, but I don't like to cast aspersions on my home country by my poor behavior. Everybody loves Canadians, so I figure their reputation can take the hit. Anyways, this is not the point of this captioning (though it's beginning to sound like I'm drinking another beer while writing this). The point of this caption is that while I was drinking my beer, I noticed the entire row of left-side passengers on the plane, the same side on which I was sitting, suddenly lean into their windows. I turned to my window and saw this gorgeous view of Mt. Fuji. Truly, it was so unexpected and breathtaking that I teared up a little when I saw it.

Since finding housing during the Winter Festival proved problematic, I tried couchsurfing for the first time. My host, Nana, was a wonderful Japanese girl, about 28 years old, who lived with her father and grandparents in a large house on the outskirts of Sapporo. She had to work a lot of the time I visited her, but she was very generous in spending her free time with me. We went shopping, ate out several times, visited the Ainu museum (which featured the culture of the indigenous people of Hokkaido) and walked though the snow sculptures. Even though it was the first time I had ever met Nana, it felt like she was a real friend.

Exquisite porcelain dolls, often in royal formation, were on display in the stores for the upcoming Japanese holiday of Girl's Day. These doll sets cost between several hundred to a few thousand dollars. I knew Nana's family was special when she related a personal story about the dolls. Her family had their dolls on display when Nana was still a little girl, and being too young too realize their value, and just old enough to realize the fun of colouring, she had picked up a permanent marker and drawn all over their faces. Instead of the corporal punishment or severe scolding that one might have expected to result, her mother and father simply laughed and said that now the family dolls had facial tatoos.

I spent one morning in an onsen, which is a natural Japanese hotspring. This onsen was in the middle of nowhere, but Nana recommended it as being cheap and in a beautiful setting and she even offered to drive me there. Once I arrived, the drill was somewhat familiar to me, since I have visited the culturally equivalent jimjilbangs in Korea on several occassions. First, and most importantly, I determined which section was for women. Once in the correct section, I slipped out of my clothes and took a preliminary shower. Probably because the onsen was tiny and in such an isolated location, it seemed to only be used by local people. This is great and all -- I really like genuine cultural experiences -- but when you're naked, you don't like being the one who stands out. At least, I don't. I looked around me suspiciously. Then breathed a sigh of relief. I was NOT the fattest one.

First, I stepped into the onsen baths inside the building. Then I noticed the outside baths and went into them. Oh, it was lovely. Lovelier than all imagination. The onsen was so close to the nearby mountain and river that if you'd thrown a snowball with good aim, you could have hit either of them. Then while my body was warm and toasty beneath the hot spring water, the snow starting falling down, blowing across my face, the bridge of my nose, my cheeks, freezing into frosty little stars in my hair. "Why," I thought to myself, "does Heaven smell like sulphur?"

(photo just outside the onsen, since taking a photo inside the onsen would have been weird)

When I expressed the desire to eat sushi, Nana took me to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. It was the first time I had ever had sushi in Japan, and it wasn't until this exact point in my life that I realized I love the stuff! In the past, at my friends' urging, I've tried choking down dry mounds of sushi made in the Midwest United States. On several occasions, my American friends would even get food poisoning from it. It was both horrible and overpriced, but I would sometimes pretend to like it because it was considered a trendy food item. Sushi in Japan is an entirely different experience. The freshness of the seafood, even at the cheapest restaurants, is indisputable, and the quality of the rice itself differs, with the moistest, fluffiest grains being used in the better restaurants.

Another noteworthy meal I took in Sapporo was in one of the shops along Old Ramen Alley. By this point in my stay, I had left Nana's house and was couchsurfing at another place, with a pile of futons on the floor of an English school classroom. I didn't get to see my actual host for more than 15 minutes since she lived in a separate house with her husband and in-laws, but the location in which I was staying was central to the festival and everything else in town. This left me on my own for figuring out how to spend my time and where to go. In my host's bathroom was a 20-year-old guidebook on Hokkaido. In particular, it extolled the culinary virtues of Ramen Yokocho in the Susukino district.

So, I bounded off the subway at around 10:30 pm in Susukino, and in typical fashion of my traveling style, I didn't know where the famous Ramen Yokocho was located, nor did I realize -- here is where you may begin hitting the palm of your hand against your forehead to produce sympathy pains for my stupidity -- that the Susukino district is filled with "nightclubs" and is, in fact, the only dangerous area in the entirety of Hokkaido Island.

Blissful in my innocence, I merrily bounded along the hooded backstreets (while wearing my little kitten hat) until coming to the conclusion that: A. I was really, really hungry and B. I would never find Old Ramen Alley simply by wandering aimlessly. Both these realizations led me to seek help from a nearby stranger who just happened to be standing on the street corner in the driving snow, doing nothing apparently except enjoying the near-freezing temperature. He was a tall, slender, young Japanese man, so tall and beautiful that he looked like the muse for an anime hero. He seemed rather annoyed when I asked him where Ramen Yokocho was located, but I simply smiled and waited for him to help me. He called over another man who was also apparently just standing on the street corner in the driving snow and doing nothing but enjoying the near-freezing temperature, and together they held a brief discussion in Japanese. Maybe it was just my fine-honed sense of intuition kicking in, or maybe it was because his friend was dressed like a gothic vampire, but I began to think, "Something's not right here." At any rate, the first guy from whom I'd asked help, after consulting with his friend, simply said "Come," and grabbed my wrist, leading me down a twist of streets and alleyways. At last, we ended up at an alley with a dozen or so ramen shops on either side. "Oh, thank you!" I exclaimed and bowed to the man. His face lit up briefly with the only smile I'd seen him make, and then he disappeared back into the black of night.

Later, after having finished my ramen and walking back to the subway, I looked more closely at the street corners. They all seemed to have one or two well-dressed men loitering on them. As I began to pay more attention to details, I noticed that most of them were holding papers that they would show to other men as they passed. These papers were photos of scantily dressed, or even undressed, women along with their corresponding prices. That's right. I had asked for directions from a pimp. Odd as it may sound, I felt sorry for him when this realization struck me. I wonder what had driven him to such a place and had the feeling, derived largely from the underlying unhappiness that seemed a part of his being, that he was not the top in command but merely another pawn being played by someone more powerful.

The main drag through Sususkino was well-lit and safe enough. It was also decorated with hundreds of ice sculptures, many of which had mythical origins. In the night, with the city light shining upon them, they shone like crystal.

Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me. Try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That's what takes a real hero.
~ Brian Andreas

The best snow sculpture, Nana and I decided, was the large one of the zoo animals. There was something about the variety of animals (gorilla, cheetah, bears, eagles, etc.), as well as the life-like features that had been carved into them, that made the sculpture seem special to us.

Just as a scale to the size of these photos -- the sculptures don't look as impressive on film as they do in real life -- here is a photo where a man is cleaning the sculpture after the previous night's blizzard covered some of the features. That tiny blur on the cheetah's back is the man.

One of my days in Hokkaido, I noticed a postcard with the image of a snow and ice playground. I made it my mission that day to find the playground. It ended up being on the outskirts of Sapporo; I took the subway and then a bus to get there, but it was worth it. There was a giant stadium, inside of which short K-pop performances played continuously. Outside the stadium, there were three giant slide sets (meaning each slide set had about 6 different paths to make for minimal waiting in line). The smallest one involved sitting on a little plastic square and sliding down packed snow. This resulted in much bruising. The next one was made entirely of ice. It looked stunning, but the slope was too gentle to thrill anyone but kids. Finally, there was the master slide, which as Goldilocks herself might say, was just right.

From the top of this slide was a great overview of the city, and to descend, you had to sled down via intertube. The photo doesn't make the descent appear very steep, but that's something of an illusion. One of the adults next to me was frightened enough by the height that she refused to go down it after waiting in line, which was a pity because it was soooo much fun.

Now for some gratuitous "I was there" photos.

Here I am standing in front of a snowy replica of the Korean Baekjae Palace. I am wearing the coat of a used kimono I bought in town, and snow is blowing down at an angle. For all those reasons, this is one of my favourite photos of the trip.

And here I am with the spirit from Princess Mononoke. This photo was taken at dawn, which adds an eerie rose-grey backlight to the scene. Also, the dark tree branches sprouting at odd angles behind the spirit give it a sort of alien quality, don't you think?

There is no story behind the Totoro statue, but I find the child-loving monster to be adorable in all his incarnations.

To Buyeo We Go

2010-02-11T00:55:00.000-08:00

Vanessa and I board the bus from Daejon to Buyeo, pastries in hand.

Dunsan Prehistoric Settlement Site(800 BC)in Daejon
Early man invents fire. Early woman keeps an extinguisher handy.

Goransa Temple

Goran Mineral Water
Every cup you drink will make you 5 years younger.

Do I look more youthful?

Sedong Park

Vanessa and I have had a long day. Time for the bus ride "home."

Hwacheon Sancheoneo Ice Festival

2010-01-26T03:39:00.000-08:00

The Hwacheon (trout) Ice Festival comes once a year in Korea, a time when the otherwise sleepy little town of Sancheoneo bursts into life, all its fences, posts, buildings, and scenery ablaze with brightly coloured paper trout which, rather spectacularly -- if oddly -- all light up as night encroaches.

Yonsei University, where I work as an editor and proofreader extraordinaire, holds a summer and winter English camp for children. As the American and Canadian teachers often buzz in and out of the offices where I work, I happened to hear some of them mention going to an ice festival that upcoming weekend. "Me, too," I said. (I had actually never heard of said festival up to this point, but living abroad tends to make you leap on opportunity.)

So that weekend, after several hours in a bus that bumped and gurgled its way up icy mountain roads, we arrived in the small town of Sancheoneo, nestled protectively in a hollow between the base of several mountains. The Bukhangang River originates in this area, and, in the heart of winter, it freezes solid. The local people depended on the Bukhangang River for their livelihood in years past. Now, the festival's activities center around the river and it serves largely as a tourist attraction for urban Koreans who want to spend their free time in the country. Sancheoneo has become so famous for icefishing that it apparently runs out of trout, and purportedly, town officials hire workers to sneak to the river's edge at night and replenish the fish.

(Are these people taking out some fish or sneaking some in?)

By the time we arrived, around noon, there were certainly enough people camping out on the ice to make the rumors of stocking the river seem plausible, if not definite. The icy river had more holes cut through it than swiss cheese, but the ice was strong and thick and the air tangy with chill, so there was little danger of falling through.

Though there were nearly 100 people perched hopefully by little holes in the ice, some of the more experienced fishers told us it was too late to catch anything at this time of day. One raucous, exuberantly-friendly Korean man, Peter, invited us to share the fish he'd caught earlier that day. We were hesitant to take too much of his food -- he had his wife and children with him -- but the scent of the fresh-caught fish rolled off it in steamy little waves as it roasted over the grill and we took tiny white flakes of it with our chopsticks and delicately nibbled at those morsels.

After finishing eating and drinking with Peter (we, at least, managed to contribute the drinks), we entered the gaping, fanged mouth of a white tiger. The tiger was, of course, made of snow. Inside the tiger's belly was a long tunnel and several small rooms made entirely of ice and backlit in blue and green lights so that it had the outlandish atmosphere of a night club, albeit the world's chilliest night club.

Following this, our group separated somewhat, scattering on the ice as we found the section of the river that had been portioned off for ice sledding. Several members of our group played on a large, multi-person sled. As for myself, I rented one of the tiny ice sleds. It was just a small, square wooden board with a set of blades on the bottom, such as you might find on ice skates. Following the example of countless children and adults around me, I sat crosslegged on my new vehicle and used the two icepicks I'd been given to dash into the ice and then propel myself forward.

From my vantage point of the ice sled, I discovered many things to see at the festival, including the results of a creative sled-building contest, which had resulted in sleds made to look like tigers, tomatoes, and sea gulls.

I also noticed a trail where children could rent teddy bear rickshaws. It entertained me greatly to see the little mechanical bears jerk their rickshaws up and down the road, often abruptly halting, their tiny feet impotently moving in place, as they found no traction on the iced trail.

In the evening, our small group reunited, perhaps called out by Jonathan, who somehow convinced the man in charge of the loudspeakers (which reached almost the entire festival) to let him perform a brief karaoke dedicated to English teachers. And then, just when we thought the trip couldn't get any better, we discovered human bowling.

Finally, it was time to go home, with an odd constellation of paper fish lighting our way.

Cat in the Hat That Looks Like a Cat

2010-01-26T03:33:00.003-08:00

I push back my white kitten hood, which has slumped over my forehead, momentarily obscuring my short blonde bangs, tell-tale sign of a waygook, and emit a low hiss. Forever being crushed in the crowd of Seoulites, pushed and prodded by both people and their suitcase-sized bags, I have little means to protest my treatment, certainly not language, so in an ill-mannered intent to express discontent, I have adopted a cat’s hiss when the people around me are too rough.

My strange behavior began when I first arrived in Korea, months before acquiring the cat hat, following the suit of one of my beloved cats back home in America. She is a dainty little golden-red princess of a cat. Generally docile and amiable, her sweetness dissolves when something threatens her wellbeing – such as a vacuum cleaner or bubbles – and overcome by the threat, her mouth draws back into a feline grimace as she emits a prissy little hiss in protest. That has become me – also dainty, generally sweet tempered, but sometimes pushed too far by things that are beyond my comprehension, and probably that to the rest of Korea seem as harmless as soap bubbles or vacuum cleaners.

Crafted of white velour, and including the features of pointed ears and a red, heart-shaped nose, my kitten hat is something that only a child under the age of five would wear in the Western world; however, certain gender and age-appropriate rules that are inherent in Western society don’t seem to exist in Korea. While it’s true that small children here wear animal hats, this is a more common fashion item among the adults. On a fairly regular basis, I’ll watch a Korean man strolling down the street, with the cool swagger that only college guys in their 20s seem to possess, and also with a grinning polar bear perched atop his head, the fuzzy pink pom poms dangling loosely beneath his chin.

At times, the kitten hat provides me partial anonymity, especially if I comb back my bangs and tuck my blonde ponytail into the back of my coat. People need to actually look at my face to determine that I’m a foreigner, and since commuters don’t always watch the faces of those around them, I’m given a brief respite from the continual stares and my continual status as different. That’s the worst thing about being a foreigner – the thing that grates after months: I’m always treated as different. The majority of the time I’m treated with extra consideration, which is nice, but means a barrier of politeness has been erected between me and the other person. On other, somewhat rare occasions, I’m treated with rudeness. Never am I treated as just an ordinary person. As an artist and as someone who grew up in a small town where conformity was rigidly demanded, I’ve always quietly rebelled against being the same as everyone else. Now that I’m at a place where I so clearly stand out, I just want to blend in.

Perhaps in part because of this desire to belong, I, myself, have begun to adopt Korean viewpoints in some unexpected ways. Praise, a Korean American office mate, and I were recently riding to Sillim, a district in southern Seoul.

“Do you know,” said Praise, using a tone of voice that is generally reserved for conspiratorial gossip, “that Sillim is full of white people? I saw three white people just last night.”

“Really?” I responded with surprise and genuine concern at such a large number of whites overtaking a city of 10 million.

“Hey!” I said, as a second realization suddenly struck me, “I’m white. And you ran into me in Sillim yesterday.”

Surviving Jirisan

2009-10-06T06:13:00.000-07:00

Because the letter “j” in Jirisan is pronounced with a decided “chuh” sound, this tallest mountain cluster in mainland Korea sounds like the word “cheery san.” A more likely misnomer never existed.

The first time I heard about the Jirisan mountains was after one of my co-workers, an avid hiker, returned from a trip with a severely injured knee. She could barely walk and hobbled about the office, only now and then referring to her trip, with a certain bitterness, as being the hardest hike in Korea.

"Oh, cheery-san, horrible cheery-san," she would moan as she limped through the university grounds.

I was interested in hiking, certainly not the dreadful cheery-san, but an easy, pretty little mountain would do. I received a FB message from someone I'd met at a party. His name was Warren, and he was a dedicated hiking leader. The message was an invitation to me and a number of other people, to trek though Jirisan. The problem was that as I read this word, I mentally pronounced it "jeer-esun."

In blissful ignorance of the actual destination, I replied to Warren's message by asking a few questions. What was the difficulty level of the hike? I was fit, but had not done mountain hiking since visiting Hawaii five years ago. Would this be a problem for me? Oh no, Warren quickly responded. It was an easy hike; even small children would be skipping along the trail.

Warren was an optimist.

And so was I.

I boarded the bus for Jirisan at 11:30 pm on a Friday night, as part of a group of about 40 hikers. The ride to the mountains took several hours and then, still sleepless, we began our hike before dawn. Our hiking group was comprised of all different nationalities, though mostly everyone was communicating with each other in English. Before leaving the bus, Warren, our group leader, suggested that we should all form mini-groups of five so that no one would get lost or left behind. This resolution was disbanded shortly after we started the trail and everyone immediately determined their own individual pace. While reasonably fit, I had not trekked a mountain in almost five years. The earliest section of the hike was easy, with a wide, smooth, clearly-marked path. Inspite of being tired, the autumn chill and excitement tempered my mood, so that my body felt alert and I climbed the first few hours with ease.

Going up the mountain was only a slight challenge. We set out in the pre-dawn, and as I had no torch, I kept my pace slow, but silvery threads of moonlight shone down through the trees and cast sufficient light, so that I managed to reach one of the lower summits before dawn and waited, with a cluster of other hikers, to see the sunrise. We could not see much in the way of bold colour change – Jirisan is infamously famous for holding back on its sunrise displays, but the subtle softening of the sky as it digressed from a rich black to mother-of-pearl grey to pale, almost-transparent blue was still lovely to witness. The lifting of darkness revealed clouds halo-ing the mountain tops below us, so that the mountain peaks appeared to be islands floating in a creamy, misty lake.

The path had pretty vistas, but continued to lead further and further up the mountains. It lead through forests with trees that still had the remnants of brilliant scarlet and gold leaves. There was a thin, silvery stripe of water running through the mountains and, at places, stone fountains built for easy access to the mountain springs. As I went along, the path grew more narrow and steeper. It was also treacherous considering the large number of rocks and boulders strewn in the path. I began to worry that, like my co-worker, I would also twist my leg as I shakingly set it down on the large, sharp rocks that decorated the latter part of the trail.

Midway through the hike, I came upon a clearing that had a cabin for those who chose to spend the night, and wooden benches and tables for those who were hungry. Also around this area, there were mounds or cairns, where rocks had been carefully piled by hikers passing through.

I fell further behind the group and only maintained any sort of momentum at all out of shame as the wizened little adjuma who appeared on the trail in front of me leant down and grabbed boulders in the path with both her hands and then leapt over them, like a determined gnome in a fairy tale.

After about 6 hours of climbing the mountains, my legs were starting to shake. I'd already begun the twisting descent of the trail and was feeling a drain to my energy. I was tired, never having slept the night before, and though I "exercised" nearly every night by dancing, different muscles in my legs were now being called to use, muscles that I'd never even noticed as a part of my body until they protested for me to stop torturing them and rest.

But at this point, I was alone, behind the others on the trail. I was slow, so much slower than the other hikers, a large number of whom hiked several times a month. So I stubbornly pushed my body forward.

The real challenge of the trek was not, as I had originally anticipated, going up the mountain. No, the hardest point was coming down the mountain. The path was strewn with a series of rough-edged, grey boulders, both large and small, and these were a constant threat for either stumbling and twisting an ankle or sliding off. The fact that I was not wearing athletic footwear did not help. I am not so dim as to not appreciate the value of athletic footwear; it was just that the brand new sneakers I had brought to Korea turned out to be a half-size too small. To compensate for this, I bought a daisy-patterned pair of Vans which were a half-size too big. On the positive side, they had been on sale for only 20,000won ($18). On the negative side, the soles’ level of traction was equivalent to satin, which meant I could potentially slip and fall to my death. But since I’m more of a glass-half-full kind of girl, I decided to concentrate on the daisy pattern and not falling. My optimism, however, failed to quench the physical pain that ensued during the last hour of climbing down the mountain. Every step down resulted in a shock of pain in my knees. It felt as though invisible men were pounding them with mallets, without any intention of stopping before each knee had turned into a quivering mass of jelly. I did not complain, nor did the people around me complain, but I noticed that several hikers’ legs were shaking and did not stop shaking until we’d ended the hike.

Finally, around mid-day, I stumbled out of the forest, to the small town at the end of the mountain. This was where our bus had driven and was waiting to take us to the nearby city of Namwon, the city of love.

Ending the hike a rough 12 km from where we’d begun, our group ended in a small town on the other side of the mountain. The group seemed smaller than before, but I couldn't be sure. I had been so tired on the bus ride over and had been sitting at the front of the bus. Perhaps it had not been full on the ride over. It certainly was not full now, as we wearily trooped onto it for the drive to Namwon. In Namwon, we’d been promised festivals, romantic legends, a musical performance, and a type of porridge special to that region of Seoul.

“Well,” said Warren, looking around at our group, “we may have left a few people back on the mountain.”

We waited a while for the dilatory hikers to show, but the rest of our day had been divided into a fairly strict schedule. There was music to hear, drums to beat, porridge to eat! As much sympathy I felt for those few people left on the mountain, my biggest motivation in joining this tip was not in scaling the mountain, but coming down the other side so that I could do the fun cultural activities as promised. Namwon was the proverbial carrot on the stick for me. I then felt happy, with only the smallest possible twinge of guilt, when Warren decided the group would continue on to Namwon and he would stay in contact with the other hikers via cell phone.

In Namwon, we gathered for a much-needed dinner. There were dozens of different food items laid out on the long tables, as we sat crossed legged on the floor in front of them. There was a reddish-orange porridge that was special to the area and a type of fish that was decidedly pungent and delicious, in addition to the dozens of items I could not name but that probably contained some form of seaweed, tofu, rice, or a combination of the three.

After dinner, we were given about 30 minutes to explore the town. Quite frankly, this was done at my demand. We had been told beforehand that we were going to spend several hours in Namwon, but after dinner, Warren attempted to hustle us on the bus, saying that we'd taken too much time in trekking. No, I insisted, half entreatingly, half demandingly. I'd dragged myself hours up and down the mountains in anticipation of arriving at this famous city. I would not leave until I'd at least walked around a bit. Warren kindly relented and I walked through the city with the contentedness of a cat before cream.

The legend about the lovers of Namwon is really quite famous throughout the country -- I've even listened to a Korea opera sung about it -- and I was excited to see its romantic origin, remotely similar to Romeo and Juliet, but with a happier ending.

As I stood looking down the street, I noticed a long black car slowly approaching. It had a floral wreath tied to the hood and drove at such a slow, somber pace that I lowered my head, believing it to be a funeral car. Imagine my surprise, then, when I looked at the trunk and saw a doll-like young bride dressed in a long, red Hanbok and sitting among piles of brightly coloured flowers. There were red and yellow and pink ribbons wound about her hands. Following the car was a young man, his wrists bound by the other end of these same ribbons, motivating him to trot along behind the car at a steady pace.

(different honeymoon car in Namwon)

After we’d spent a while in Namwon proper, having seen the sights and having eaten our pumpkin porridge, we boarded the bus once again and drove to the music and culture center, which was located on the outskirts of Namwon. Trimmed into the ground shrubbery behind this huge building was a series of silhouettes of a man with a guitar-like instrument. We were late in entering the building, so the attendants of the music center quickly rushed us into an upstairs room that had a large, empty wooden floor and a slightly elevated stage filled with instruments. In spite of our tardiness, we were given a complete, if abbreviated, performance for several traditional forms of Korean music. A woman – someone from the group translated for us – requested that we politely clap after all the performances. Another woman then shyly entered the stage and sat behind an instrument that had the appearance of a keyboard but the resonance of a harp. First, she played a traditional Korean melody. We all listened quietly and then politely clapped. And then, in case we were homesick for standard American tunes, she played the Beatle’s “Let It Be” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The latter is a favorite of mine and I clapped with more enthusiasm than was polite after she’d finished her performance.

Next, two other women, beautifully attired in pastel hanbok, came to the stage. One of the women kneeled in front of a large pansori (drum) at stage left and the other woman took center stage.

Perhaps feeling that the crowd was not participating enough, one of the Korean singers then led us in a sing along, which can generously be dubbed "an interesting performance" considering that most of us had trouble saying "bibimbap" in Korean, much less doing a listen and repeat of the turbulently high-pitched lines in traditional Korean opera. One of the few girls who possessed dual proficiency in English and Korean later explained the meaning of the song to us. Apparently, we’d been attempting to sing a song that was not just romantic but rather risqué: please come to my bedroom, please climb on my back, please be my monkey of love we’d sung with quavering seriousness. That’s traditional Korea for you. At least they used "please."

The ride back from Namwon to Seoul was uneventful, except for the fact that at this time Warrent revealed the stats to the hikers who remained. Out of the 40 people who started the hike, 18 had been left on the mountain. All the time I had believed I was one of the slowest hikers was not exactly true. I was merely one of the slowest out of the fast group. What's slightly more alarming is that out of the 18 left on the mountain, only 16 eventually made it back by themselves. Two of the hikers had to be airlifted off the mountain, due to exhaustion and the intense muscular pain of the hike.

(The lovers of Namwon: TLA or just another hiker being carried off the mountain?)

Vacation Buddha School

2009-10-06T02:44:00.001-07:00

"Don't eat the radish!" my neighbor whispered fiercely to me, a slight murmur that delicately broke the air as we ate breakfast in silence at the Bubheungsa Temple in Gangwon-do.

"I wasn't going to eat the radish," I hissed back, which earned a stern look of disapproval from the Korean-to-English translator. The monk in charge kindly pretended not to hear.

The monastic breakfast was a complicated procedure, and intense considering it was meant to replicate simplicity and man's commune with the farmers and fields that created it. First, we quietly arranged the set of bowls and utensils we'd been given. I unfolded the brown place cloth and laid it in front of the thin mat on which I sat, cross-legged. Next, I carefully arranged the four bowls. The rice bowl I placed at the front left, next to the soup bowl. The side foods bowl belonged directly behind the rice bowl, and across from it was the rinsing bowl.

Small portions of the food were then ladled by servers into our bowls. Next, the communal bowls of food were passed around a second time, where we could take a second serving if we were so inclined. However, we had to be very careful not to take more food than we could eat. In order to honor the farmers and spice harvesters, we were bidden not to leave a single grain of rice in our bowl, not even a speck of spice was to be wasted.

Even the actual process of eating was something of an art. To eat in a polite and proper manner, we were to hold a bowl with our left hand and tip it upwards so that our mouth was modestly covered the entire time. Our right hands held the wooden chopsticks to bring the food into our mouths. Because of this, our breakfast took a while to consume -- nearly two hours. For some people, such as myself, it was difficult enough to eat using chopsticks, much less while hiding my face and scooping out every speck of food.

It was not until every white grain of rain, every red flake of spice had been consumed that we could wash our bowls with the drinking water and scrub them clean with the bright yellow slice of pickled radish. Following that, we drank the water and then, finally, ate the radish. It was a very neat way of doing the dishes. To prove we'd sufficiently cleaned our plates, our bowls were rinsed a second time with water which was dumped into a large bucket. If the communal rinsing water was tainted by anything - even a single flake of spice - we were to take turns drinking the dirty rinsing water until the bucket was empty.

Eating was only one element of the weekend I spent at the Bubheungsa Temple. Another basic necessity of life also treated differently was attire. Upon arrival at the temple, we exchanged our worldly clothes for outfits traditionally worn by practitioners of Buddhism. The deep-pocketed vest and balloon-like pants were cut in a slouchy fit, so that the vanities and temptations of our bodies were hidden beneath their loose folds. Though unfashionable, they were made of soft linen and were some of the more comfortable items of clothing I'd ever worn. They were died a natural terra cotta colour, like soft dirt, and a Korean man (not part of the group) told me this signified the colour of earth dying. I'm not sure what that means, but it sounded somewhat poetic.

Other spiritual elements, such as meditation, were also part of the temple stay experience. On Saturday, the group of temple stay participants gathered together to take a meditative walk through the woods. The monk bid us to think only about the physical process of walking. So, I slowly placed one bare foot in front of another in the velvety-soft dirt path, focusing on nothing more than the wind and my breath, which did not seem so very different. As there was a rather large group of participants in the meditative walk, we attempted to keep a certain pace and distance between us. Dressed in our faded, matching clothes, we solemnly marched through the woods in pairs, like a raggedy wedding party.

A different sort of practice that was taught and then practiced throughout the temple stay was full-body prostration. While spending time in the temple buildings, dedicated Buddhists, as well as temple stay participants, bowed their entire bodies low until their foreheads touched the ground, and then leaned back somewhat upright on their heels. They repeated these deep prostrations sometimes upwards of 100 times in a row. Whenever I entered a temple, I bowed my head briefly to show respect for the Buddhists and their way of life; however, I refrained from making the full-body prostrations because they conflict with my Christian faith. Most participants viewed the temple stay as a "culture vacation," but gods are gods, and I wasn't about to mess with them.

Since I skipped the many prostration sessions, I ended up several hours alone each day. During early Sunday morning, I took a walk by myself through the woods and into the clearing between several mountains. I was not pondering deep, reverent thoughts, nor was I attempting find my inner peace. I just wanted to have fun and take photos. I was so happy in the sweet, piney air and the breeze that lightly ruffled my hair that I nearly skipped along the path. I took some pictures. I sorted through coloured rocks and sprays of wildflowers, discerning which to leave and which to keep. I looked up at one of the tallest mountains and saw the outline of a big cat -- A tiger! I thought -- in the rockface there. I spun about with the dizzy happiness that only inner content can bring. My irreverent, happy-go-lucky attitude is what makes what happened next so inexplicable: A raw, eerie energy swept through the mountain. It was such a strange experience that I can barely describe it, and certainly not compare it in any normal analogy. The best I can do is say it felt like I was seeing a ghost, only nothing was visible. Nothing in the landscape had changed, only this feeling, only an energy.

At first, I was frightened and almost ran out of the forest, back to the safe and well-populated temple buildings, but then I refused to turn coward. How could I explain this to anyone in a logical manner? How could I possibly describe why I'd run away -- because I was afraid of the air? So I stayed and decided I would finish what I'd set out to do: walk along the trail and take pretty pictures. I set my camera on auto mode and, several times, tried to photograph myself against the dramatic backdrop of towering green mountains. The photos did not turn out; they were all over-exposed, tainting the scene with a lemony-white cast like a halo around the mountains. And here's a detail that makes the over-exposed photos inexplicable: The day was overcast. Shifting through clouds and shadows, from where did all that light come? When I returned to the monastery, I gave a brief version of my experience to the translator. He was not at all surprised; that area was renown for its energy field. And the tiger I saw on the face of a mountain? For hundreds of years, monks have identified it as "Lion Mountain."

At night, the only light came from the stars overhead and the lanterns that hung throughout the temple grounds. There was a line of lanterns in all sorts of colours -- pink, orange, red, yellow, and blue -- marking the pathway from the lower temples to the highest one, and there were multiple strands of lanterns festooned in front of the oldest temple. Some of the lanterns had the image of Buddha peeping merrily out from a lotus and some had images of the temple imposed on them, while other lanterns bore the cartoonish representation of a lion. I felt (probably impiously) they gave the temple a festive air.

The temple stay's main focus seemed to be the "wish fulfillment" program. I am dubious as to how much a serious application of Buddhism includes wish fulfillment and how much the idea was spun into an appealing romantic-religious ideal for Western visitors. For Disneyfied as it may seem, who does not want to believe that wishes can come true? Throughout my life, I've wished on loose eyelashes, falling stars, dandelion fluff, birthday candles, the times 11:11 and 1:11, and reluctant ladybugs waiting for release. As it turns out, all I really needed to do was write my dearest desire on a slip of paper, place it inside a small cloth pouch, and hang the pouch in a temple. Oh, and hit an old bell! A very important, or at least very fun, part of the wish fulfillment was to lift a wooden gong and swing it with considerable relish against an ancient, sacred bell while simultaneously making a wish.

Of course, I was tempted to wish that everyone thoroughly clean their breakfast bowls the next morning so that I would not have to drink the dirty water, but that seemed a rather short-term investment for a wish. In my heart-of-hearts, I've really only ever believed two things were worth wishing for: true love and adventure. The only problem is that I've already wasted enough wishes on falling stars for a true love that's never arrived. And adventure is something I'm creating for myself. So, since neither of those two stand-by wishes would do, I returned to an even older wish, one that I remember whispering to a reluctant ladybug when I was seven years old: I want to be a writer. I want to be a good writer and earn a sustainable living from it.

God only knows if my wish will come true.

Countdown for Breaking Cultural Mores

2009-10-06T02:43:00.001-07:00

The following is a compilation of various mistakes made within my first four weeks of daily life in Korea, and - just in case you're unaware - nearly everything in Korea is written in Hangul characters rather than the Roman alphabet.

8. Buying fabric softener instead of laundry detergent.

7. Buying hair conditioner instead of shampoo.

6. Buying lotion instead of shampoo.

5. Stealing toilet paper from my workplace for nearly two weeks because I couldn't find a store where it was sold and also couldn't find anything else to buy that might possibly be mistaken for it.

4. Clasping my hands in a prayer-like position and bowing to thank every single Korean I met over the course of three weeks. It wasn't until someone asked me if it was a tradition I'd picked up in Thailand that I discovered typical Koreans don't actually clasp their hands to express gratitude.

3. Spitting out a half-chewed octopus while dining in a crowded restaurant.

2. Laughing loudly in a public restroom stall after pushing every single bidet button on the high-tech toilet.

1. Attending a company dinner (as the only foreigner) where I helped myself to communal noodles while using the wrong end of the chopsticks.

Losing Nemo

2009-09-14T04:30:00.001-07:00

Last weekend, my friend Michelle and I decided to hit up Seoul's largest fish market, Noryangjin. After a 20 minute ride on the subway, we exited at the station suggested by our guidebook. The guidebook gave no further directions, nor was there need for any. The smells there could wipe you out. The air was saltier and fishier than that near any beach. Following the smells, we entered a long concrete building where vendors were setting up for business. Men and women wearing knee high rubber boats and plastic aprons in vivid pinks, greens, reds, and yellows were pouring plastic bags of fish into large aquariums. Other vendors had set up early and were smugly sitting behind their aquatic displays, waiting for business.

Everywhere, there were fish. I saw octopus, eels, stingrays, sea worms, sea squirts, crabs, assorted crustaceans, and probably hundreds of different fish, including small sharks. It was like a dark version of Sea World. You could admire all the unique sea creatures, and if you liked, you could eat them. Some of the fish were already dead, such as the octopus stung through the head on a wire, like grisly party garlands for The Little Mermaid. Most of the animals, however, were alive and writhing in their crowded tanks. The mutant crabs, larger than the circumference of my head, seemed the liveliest and the most intent on escape. I would not at all have been surprised if I'd seen a few of them scuttling along the subway platform, hoping to hitch a ride back to Incheon or to whichever oceanic community from which they'd come.

I peered closely into one particular tank. The man nearby pulled out a fish with his net to allow me closer inspection. "How much?" I asked curiously. "10,00 won," the man said. "8,000!" I countered, an automatic haggling reflex. With that, the man flung the fish to floor and, excitedly shouting something in Korean, bludgeoned it to death.

No returns, no exchanges.

For all the meat and seafood I consume, this was the first time I'd ever actually witnessed something die in order to become my meal. The fish I'm used to eating comes in neatly pressed little squares or sticks, cute geometries that in no way resemble an actual fish. I began to doubt my pro-omnivore position. Vegetarianism all of a sudden seemed, well, less vicious.

A nearby woman scooped up the fish and brought it into her restaurant. There were various restaurants set up along the side of the fish market. Some made arrangements of sashimi, which is raw fish similar to sushi, while others boiled up fish stew, and still others just grilled or baked the seafood to simple perfection.

Michelle and I followed the woman into her restaurant and seated ourselves on mats by a low table. After a ten minute wait and handing over several thousand extra won for food preparation, the fish was delivered to our table. I took one bite and decided to retain my omnivore status. It was undoubtedly the freshest, flakiest, most tender fish I've ever tasted. Most of it I ate without seasonings, though the restaurant lady was eager for me to douse the fish in soy and wasabi, so I ate some of it that way, too. Either way, it was delicious.

Do Not Ask for Whom the Bell Tolls, Quasimodo

2009-09-09T03:33:00.001-07:00

Sitting through a three hour stage performance of The Hunchback of Notre Dame being sung in Korean is equivalent to being five years old and watching Hamlet. I spent hours without understanding much of anything. And then everyone died.

If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?

2009-09-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

If she knew what she wants, he'd be giving it to her. If she knew what she needs, he would give her that, too. If she knew what she wants, he'd be giving it to her now. The lyrics from a 1980's Bangle song played unhelpfully through my head as I ended up in yet another awkward restaurant predicament.

I'd been walking alongside the Han River, having taken a short hike above the city that ended in a well-developed path along the river. The path was marked by a vivid green covering similar to astroturf. A replica of an old-fashioned wooden watermill and a pretty, man-made waterfall were alongside the river. I enjoyed walking there, but then again, I also enjoying watching romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan, so my tolerance (and appreciation) of too-cutesy is rather high. At any rate, I was getting hot and restless in my river stroll, so I decided to come up on one of the riverbanks and see what was in this area of Seoul.

I passed by a place that had an open door with a jumble of shoes in front of it. Curious, I poked my head inside the door frame and saw that it was a traditional Korean restaurant with low lying tables that had hot plates nestled in their centers. I was about to withdraw when a woman noticed me. “Come, come, come,” she gestured, saying something in Korean. “Um, that's o.k. I was just curious,” I mumbled, but she understood me no more than I understood her. “Come, come, come,” she gestured again, getting the attention of a number of other people in the restaurant, who all then stood and motioned for me to step inside. So I did.

The people assembled around me appeared to be the owners, along with assorted family members and the cook. One of the women laid a mat on the floor for me, gesturing that I should sit. Someone else handed me a menu. They then conferred in Korean, presumably asking each other what they should do with me. Finally, the husband stepped forward.

“Oogle,” he carefully enunciated, pointing at the menu. “Oogle?” I repeated, confused. It didn't sound like a typical Korean word. “Oogle, oogle,” he repeated, tapping his finger in staccato against the menu. As the menu was written entirely in Hangul, this did not clarify things. My thoughts tumbled different letter combinations and sounds, trying to make sense of things. “Do you mean 'noodle?' ” I finally asked. “Yes, noogle,” the husband happily repeated. “Yes, yes! Noodles. I like noodles,” I said, recognizing it as one of the safest possible options. “Noogle, noogle,” the various family members and the cook all told each other. The cook went into the kitchen. Then she came back. No noogles.

The husband chivalrously continued helping me with the menu. “Ifffs,” he said, pointing at another item. This one had me stumped. “Ifffffffs,” he repeated, drawing out the word more slowly for me to understand. I considered an option. “Fish?” I asked. “Yes, ifffs,” he replied. “Fish, like fish that swim in water?” I asked while puffing out my cheeks and pointing at my water glass to verify. The family took this as a negative indicator and after some conference, moved on to a third item on the menu.

“Beak,” the husband offered, pointing again at the menu. “Beef!” I shouted excitedly. We were finally getting better at this game. I was ready to bust out the Pictionary by this point. The family interpreted my excitement as a gesture of interest in beef, and so my meal was decided.

What I was served most likely did have some relation to beef, but what exactly it was difficult to determine. The main dish was a sort of soup with large chunks of bone, possibly hooves, that had small portions of gristle and fat attached to them. The soup also had onions, green leaves, sprouts, and glass noodles in it. In case this didn't fill me, I was also given six side dishes, including one that had the appearance and taste of paraffin wax, though it quivered like jello whenever I poked it with my chopstick. Although I'd been given a set of chopsticks and a spoon before the meal was served, it seemed to my hosts that I needed more help than that. One of the women arranged all my food for me and mimed the appropriate way for consuming some of it. Another woman ran to the kitchen and brought back a fork. I picked up my chopsticks to eat with them, anyways. This made the family and cook burst into a fit of giggles, which they politely but ineffectively tried to smother. A woman went back to the kitchen and returned with a second fork, which she set next to the original fork on my table. Perhaps they'd decided forks should come in a set, like chopsticks.

The food was to die for (in a literal sort of way, mind you) as there were altogether far too many items that I could only identify as “gelatinous,” but everyone there had been so kind and so eager to help that I ate away at it for as long as my stomach could handle it. When I left the restaurant, I was given a big handful of candies and smiles from everyone. Sometimes doing all the wrong things works out alright.

Changdeokgung Palace Photos

2009-09-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

The Royal Treatment

2009-09-07T04:56:00.000-07:00

[Actual Date: August 23, 2009]

"Do you remember that show," asked Michelle, "where those people started out on an island for a three hour tour and ended up trapped for the rest of their lives? Well, that's how I'm starting to feel."

Michelle and I were rounding on the 2nd hour of our 90 minute tour through Changdeokgung Palace. We were required to go on a tour instead of self-guidance, even though it was completely in Korean -- meaning that, for the next several hours, unless the tour guide thanked someone or asked for the location of the nearest bathroom, we couldn't understand anything she was saying.

To make matters worse, it was at least 80 degrees outside with a humidity rate that would melt iron. Neither Michelle nor myself had ever been so hot. We melted, we dripped, we pooled from place to place. In truth, we ambled along at such a slow pace behind the tour group that even the young pregnant woman out strolled us, and eventually, we were left behind by the rest of the pack.

It was nice for a while. We had the place to ourselves, and the greater number of my photos looks as though we had stumbled through a recently deserted palace rather than touring a UNESCO landmark in the middle of Seoul with a group of 40 other tourists a kilometer or so ahead of us.

We didn't mind having the place to ourselves, except that the palace grounds were the size of a small forest and we were a little disoriented. ("Disoriented" is a good word, since using "lost" in every single blog entry would be repetitive, and probably downright copyright infringement on the ABC television series.) Eventually, though, we found a second tour group and latched onto them. This group had a guide whose intent seemed to be taking us up and down six kilometers of woodsy hills beyond the palace buildings to ensure we'd get full value out of the $3 entrance fee we'd paid. Three hours after beginning our (first) tour, Michelle and I made it back to the front gate. No longer lost and wandering through the palace grounds, we were now free to become disoriented anywhere we wanted within the entire metropolis of Seoul.