Morning on the Ganges

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.

"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

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

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

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

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

"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.