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.

Serendipitous Weekend (August 10-12)

Part One: Friday August 10th.

Five of us decide we want to ditch the celadon tour plans and go one of the thousands of island of Korea, Jeju-do. We have the requisite complications in trying to find out bus and ferry schedules with our non-existent Korean... I took to drawing stick figures and lots of miming to explain to my host family where it was we wanted to go. I'd still speak to them in English, but broken English:"Bus time? Need help. Ferry. Ship. Ship schedule? Not certain. Maybe we go to Jeju-do? Ferry time [question mark, arrow to port name, etc.)"

Fan-fucking-tastic. Miming. It's not just for the French or circus freaks. Seriously, it works. If I come home and speak to you with a total lack of prepositions and articles, but extensive line drawings and hand gestures, please don't mind, it will go away soon enough. Anyway, back to the story.Two of our Korean co-teachers offer to give us rides to Mokpo, where we can catch the ferries, and one even sets us up with one of her elementary student's family-- who invites us to stay for free in their spare bedroom (on the floor, 5 to a room, but with a bathroom and no expectation as to when we come or go. not bad, really).

We are dropped off in this friendly stranger's house and we leave again almost immediately to pick up a few things at the local e-mart (e-mart-euh, as the natives say) and head out for dinner and drinks. At the e-mart (think walmart, meets costco, meets a weird mom & pop store (the girls working in various departments have matching uniforms, including leg warmers) we wanted to purchase a couple of ice cream bars; it was hot and they are tasty chocolate coconut milk things, but we were chastised by an older Korean woman working the frozen food section. She gave us a bag. We put our ice creams in the bag and began to walk away. We were chastised a second time. She took our bag away and put out ice creams back in the freezer. She pointed to the Korean sign. We had no idea what to do.

"We want three," we say, holding our fingers up and gesturing. She says" anio," and crosses her wrists to indicate no. We walk away not understanding why we are not being permitted to buy ice cream. We encounter a clan of Korean school girls in uniform. "Hello," they say, in unison. "Where are you from?" [giggles ensue.] We tell them and then enlist their help. Please help us buy ice cream. They lead us back to the cranky Korean lady. Eventually we learn that we can buy eleven ice cream bars, or we can't buy any. Silly. We buy cans of bubbly wine (ewww, but a novelty) and then leave to get pizza.

After pizza, we decide we really want ice cream. We buy eleven. We eat as many as we can and then Wim begins to distribute the remaining ice cream to random parentless children. He wasn't seeking them out; Korean children seem to wander around at all hours pretty much unattended. Even late. It wasn't creepy by Korean standards, but we laughed at him as though he were a creepy old man. What I haven't mentioned thus far is the rabbit hutch. Yes, a rabbit hutch. Just sitting outside the e-mart, randomly. Seven bunnies in their cages, apparently for customer entertainment. They looked hungry. They licked our fingers through the cages.

"I wish we could feed them. There's some old lettuce in the cage; they look fed, but they seem hungry." One of us said this, or something like it. I think either me or Fallon. We sat down on the bench and watched the rabbits and ate ice cream and laughed at Wim and the children. Then a man walked by with a huge bag of lettuce and he proceeds to drop it on the ground and walk away. We exchange glances. Bag of lettuce falls from sky. Sweet. Fallon and I rip into it and feed the bunnies. They love this about us and no one seems to have a problem with it, so we feed them some more. But the evening is young. We decide to go out for drinks. "

Next up: the sexy T girl bar, the fish and peanut bar, the random white people on the street and our walk home.

the love shack, baby

I'd really like to blog about the amazing weekend I had this past weekend on a small, remote, and incredibly beautiful island named Big-eum-do, but I'm going to have to save my stories of bunnies and ice cream and the bag of lettuce that fell from the sky; the ferries getting cancelled on account of the approaching typhoon and the private boat we had to charter to get off the island and that sort of thing. Instead, I am feeling compelled to blog about the love shack we are currently staying in...

There are vending machines on nearly every floor in which a person can procure the following: condoms, love lube, dildos, and fake vaginas (no joke! only 20,000 won-- get yours while supplies last!). Pretty sweet, yes? Also, there are two free channels of Korean porn (some of which is decidedly unsexy) that some televisions have been programmed to spontaneously turn on (no pun intended) in the middle of the night. Since there are no driers in most of Korea and laundry all is hung to air dry, it is very comforting to see the hotel bath towels (each the size of a standard bath mat or smaller) are hung on the hallway handrails to dry (consider again what's sold in the vending machines for a second). But best of all, was walking up to the seventh floor to deal with the laundry situation only to overhear a woman having sex... which would have been fine (most of us, since we aren't getting any ourselves, would be pleased that at least somebody is getting some) except that it sounded like she was having the shit beaten out of her and her screaming was punctuated with sobs. The hotel host was in the hallway too... You try miming "hey, is that normal Korean sex? is that a hooker putting on a show? seriously, should we be intervening and killing some abusive man? just curious."

So, as you might have surmised, we are in a no-tell motel type of deal. I'm not sure they rent the rooms by the hour, but I do know that I feel as if we are stuck in 1982 and I'm a little tired of it. What we overheard was certainly no husband and wife honeymooning; most likely it was a prostitute we heard screaming and I hope it was simply an act. But, given that women aren't treated as much more than chattel here anyway, you can imagine that a prostitute is probably treated like a dog here, and considering how I've seen those treated (not to mention that they are food items as well) it is easy to see why I am a bit disturbed. Also, for those of you who remember the West Hall incident not so long ago, I'm fucking tired of this sort of thing.

Anyway, my next blog post will be about the amazing, serendipitous, wonderful weekend I had. Until then, sleep well and know that I am avoiding three starches at each meal, flip flops that smell like, as Wim put it, a homeless person's sleeping bag (though he was referring to his, not mine, but all of us who went to Big-eum-do have shoes that qualify for this, um, ranking), and drying off with any hotel towels... wish me luck.