serendipitous weekend part two

Later Friday night:

OK. In Korea there are many places called Hofs, which, perhaps, stands for House of Food, or something, but in any case require that you purchase food whether or not you want it or they will not bring you a pitcher of beer (if one can call what passes for beer here beer). So, we order a fruit plate and while we are waiting for fruit we are served a platter of peanuts (standard pub fare, cool) and papery tiny dried fish, with heads and eyes intact. Lovely. Exactly what I want to eat with fruit. Yum. But, at this point, very little about the food here surprises me anymore. We move on...

What we discover, however, is that we all need to use the toilet (toilet is a word most Koreans know, while restroom or bathroom confuses them) so we stop at the first one we find: The Sexy T Girl Bar. As we live in Portland, the city with the highest number of strip clubs per capita in the nation, we figured we could get in, use the bathroom, have a shot of soju or vodka, and leave in just a few minutes. We were wrong. The Sexy T Girl Bar is a high class establishment. High class in the sense that they only cater to monied folk-- you can't buy a shot, but only a $130 bottle of liquor. The girls are dressed in sexy, but not super trashy, outfits, and when you order a drink, they sit on the other side of the bar and talk with you. Of course, we figured out that what they are really doing is servicing a segment of the population that wants to forget they are chatting with an escort, despite the fact that we are pretty certain you can rent a private room upstairs and order anything you want, literally. So, we drink our shitty beer, use the toilet and continue with our evening.

We meet a random group of folks in the street a short while later: the abtholutely fabulouth Angus from New Zealand, Lacey and Carey, from Vancouver, Washington (what are the odds?), and Sue, a bilingual Korean whose father happens to work for the ferries. Thanks to her we learned that there were no tickets left to Jeju-do and together her group of friends came up with alternative travel ideas replete with the Korean and English translations of a host of questions/directions. Of course, we did all this while getting drunk on soju in a bar with red velvet seats, random plastic toys, and a young Korean man that spent most of the evening snapping cell phone self-portraits (self-photography is quite popular here). We left the bar at 1:30 with the address of our random homestay written in Korean, a pocketful of notes from Sue, and plans to get up at 5:00 a.m., leave the homestay and chance walk-on tickets to Jeju-do, and, failing that, get tickets to one of the other islands that Sue and Angus had suggested. We go in search of a cab.

We find a cab without much trouble. He drives us to the place he thinks we belong, but we tell him, "no, anio. This isn't it." He gestures for us to walk through some field. We are not in the are we'd been originally dropped off in. We drive around with him for a short, frustrating while, trying to figure it out, but it's no use. We get out and he tries to charge us twice the fee the meter said we owed. We find another cab, but before we can talk to him, the guy in our first cab goes over to talk with him. We leave them both in search of the pokpo or waterfall, in this case a man-made waterfall that is one of Mokpo's main landmarks. All of us have very clear idea which direction our homestay is, all of which are differing, and all of us, of course, are convinced we are correct. Fortunately, I found our way back, and nobody came to blows, and by the time everyone else began to recognize where we weer, we were all so satisfied that we were not lost that nobody cared about who was right or wrong about anything. We went to bed around 2:00 a.m. with plans to wake up at 5:00.

5:00 a.m. Saturday Morning:

Despite Abbye insisting that she could hardly work up a buzz the night before, and despite that she'd been the most militant about our going to Jeju-do at all costs, these are the words we hear upon waking to the alarm:

"I'm drunk. Let's sleep. I'm going to pee and you have as long as my stream to figure it out."

We decide to sleep a while longer and take our chances on the other ferries to other islands. We wake up to our random Korean homestay families having prepared breakfast for us, which was nice, except that two out of the five of us are vegetarian and couldn't eat most of what was served. Instead, Wim eats five bowls of seaweed fish soup, so that we don't appear ungrateful, and we catch a cab back to the e-mart of buy beach towels, and then proceed to the ferry terminal. We arrive at the ferry terminal in time to buy tickets to Big-eum-do, the island that Angus and Sue had recommended. Tickets were cheap and the ferry was only a 2 1/2 hour ride. It was a lovely afternoon. We met a Korean in a Mt. Hoos, Oregon shirt (who had no idea really were Oregon was, or why we were so interested in his shirt). We ate crappy snack food, and napped (on the floor, just like we did at the homestay) and played cards. We pull into port.

Our first glimpse of Big-eum-do, is the expanse of parking lot at the ferry terminal, an apparently abandoned or unfinished visitors center, a mud flat beach covered with what appeared to be rocks, but were actually crabs, a fish shack and no one in sight that seemed as though they would at all understand anything we asked for in English. Just about the time we were starting to wonder what we'd gotten ourselves into, we see a white guy. Abbye runs up to him, shouting, "Do you speak English?" He turns around as he says, "Yes. Yes, I do." He is wearing a Clinton-Gore t-shirt. It turns out Nick is from New York and living in Seoul with his bilingual Korean girlfriend, April. We ask her to help us call a taxi and get to a motel. She is approached by a woman from the fish shack who tells April that her husband is a cabbie and will be there in twenty minutes.

Over an hour later, two taxis pull up; one is the husband, irritated that the other is there stealing his business, the other is the most fabulous taxi driver on the planet. More later.