Igo ani jana.

It's like The Shawshank Redemption. All the English teachers here are chiseling their days into the walls, pacing like caged pumas up and down the streets, chain smoking, tunneling through the floor with rock hammers by moonlight. I, myself, have a d-day countdown running on my cell phone: 271 days until I fly away. I am not homesick and life is not even that unbearable here, but it would be silly for me to deny it: Korea is a stepping stone.

I did not come to Korea because I am a kimchi connoisseur, because I enjoy being stared and pointed at, because I have a penchant for hostile languages or because I thought second-hand radiation might do me some good. I am here unabashedly for the money. But I want the money so I can travel, so that I can become poor again, so that I can work, so that I can travel, so that I can become poor once again, so that I can keep growing and dying and growing, so that I can keep moving without ever having to stay still, all that idealistic bullshit. That bullshit is my plan and it will not become reality. Something will get in the way: I will get pregnant, my kidneys will spontaneously burst, my nose will fall off, my ears will melt down the sides of my head, I will get the guinea worm. But the universe is a large place; I would at least like to get to know the planet I'm stuck on.


Starting with the Oprah restaurant two blocks from my apartment.


Daegu is divided into specialized districts with a trillion specialized shops selling the exact same junk for the exact same price. So on Sunday night, when the Bostonian and I wandered downtown for all-you-can-eat at a foreigner bar, we first had to pass through a pet shop district, a used tuba district, a Protestant Church district, a wig district, and a district of boarded-up windows, scattered plastic bags full of ball bearings, and discordant faraway piano tinkles - en route to the foreigner bar district, where foreigners go to sniff each other's asses, and drink.

The buffet was packed and buzzing with the hysteria of a hundred human beings united in a quest to eat themselves to death for fifteen bucks a head. After finishing our fourth course, the Bostonian and I decided to sample some of the insect cuisine, one bug apiece, with lemons for chasers just in case. It was a brownish bug, maybe some sort of larva, football-shaped, a chewy morsel with a dash of crustacean pizzazz. I had just about choked the thing down when a blue-shirted Korean man at the table next to me collapsed and went into a seizure.

I've always imagined my moment of truth to be a dramatic or at least somewhat distracting affair, drawing some concerned glances and maybe a paramedic or two. But this poor bastard just lay on the floor writhing around for five minutes while his friends sat with their beers stalled en route to their mouths. The guy must have stopped breathing, so the hero of the bunch felt obligated to kneel down and give a few halfhearted chest compressions. Meanwhile, a drunk expat across the room stood up and performed an impeccable reenactment of the "Da Bears" SNL skit, pounding on his chest, hacking and pantomiming the projectile dislodgement of a Philly cheese steak, a hot dog, or something.

The bug was still on my tongue so I swallowed it and reached for a lemon. A man in an orange jumpsuit parted the gathering crowd with a stretcher. A tense but mostly impatient silence weighed heavy on the buffet as people waited for it to become socially acceptable to go back for more cocktail wienies. At the bar, a Korean was bellowing without using his honorific forms because the weissbier was kaput.

Finally, the seizing man ceased seizing and rose to his feet. I fought that primal American spectator's instinct to give him a standing O, realizing morbidly that he could collapse again at any second and die. He staggered around a bit, let out a few probably incoherent words (doubly incoherent because I don't know Korean), looked around, scratched his head, and bowed ashamedly to the onlooking crowd, deciding by default that he was terribly drunk. His two friends grabbed him by the arms and grumbled as they dragged him out of the bar. Your worst enemy is your own nervous system (Orwell, 43).

The Bostonian had not finished his bug.

"Eat up." I pointed a chopstick.

"Fuck you," he said.

Haek bang-gu.

Korean road trips are fundamentally different from their longer (and therefore manlier) counterparts in the western hemisphere. Korea itself is about the size of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, so driving from one end of the country to the other seldom takes longer than fifteen minutes, 25 if you happen to get caught during rush hour or in the midst of one of the hwa-rang taekwondo streetfights that rage constantly in the unpoliced suburbs.

Because of Korea's longitudinal and latitudinal brevity, it has been woefully deprived of one of the few remaining American institutions that could arguably be called worthwhile: the American truck stop. Korean truck stops - because there are about three of them - are subject to obsessive-compulsive upkeep and sanitation. Where there should be Skoal-encrusted toilet seats and glory-holed stall walls, there are friendly solid-gold cyborg bidets that are fluent in over six million forms of communication. Where there should be amphetamine-popping truckers with Old Testament names, there are shrewd, camelbacked old men who will simultaneously organize your wallet, give you a neckrub, and grill up a live squid. In short, the Korean truck stop is modern, safe, and open to Asian-looking people from all walks of life, not just those of us who are young and gutsy enough to put our trucker virginity on the line for a bag of vending machine Funions.

We stopped twice on the 53 kilometer drive to Gyeongju. En route, we passed a trailer truck hauling thirty rusted red cylinders stamped with the English words "ROBOT WIRE." The Bostonian and I posed a few anxious questions from the backseat, which prompted Sangmin to hit the gas and crank up the Korean hip-hop. The invasion has begun.

Gyeongju was typically Korean. Mountains, pagodas, nylon Buddha ponchos, and every ten feet a vending machine stocked to the brim with Pocari Sweat, a hyperaddictive opiate-based sports beverage. While in Gyeongju, as per whenever I leave the apartment, I absorbed a small cult of eight to ten year-old disciples who followed me around stroking my arm hair and saying "I love you."

We didn't stay long, but I did manage to take this pretty bad-ass picture of Hyunmin.

It is an unfortunate coincidence that I happened to catch him during one of the rare twelve-second intervals where he is not puffing on a cigarette, otherwise this would have been a near-perfect Marlboro Man shot.

Korea - as evidenced by the photograph below - is a fantasyland of nauseating antiquity, harrowing technological capability, and chuckle-worthy juxtapositions of the two.



I do not recommend it to anyone.

-Kisu

Feeful come and feeful go.

First thing this morning, one of my eight year-olds pegged me in the eye with a tennis ball. Furious and half-blind, I let out a beleaguered ogre groan and groped for the would-be assassin, eventually snagging him by the collar. I ripped his ball away and tossed it in the garbage. Rule number one: never martyr a fuzzy spheroid. For the next forty-five minutes, the kids went on a rampage, scribbled all over me in black marker, roundhouse kicked the walls, tore everything to shreds. In spite of my recent advances in pretension and musical literacy, I still do not deal well with bullying.

I had so mori soup for dinner. "So mori" means "cow head." As much as I wanted to be revolted by the stuff, it was indescribably bland. Well, I could describe it to you, but I would only end up using some worthless description like "indescribably brand." You know?

I just finished reading 1984 for what might have been the 1,984th time. It's the only book I can re-read with any sort of non-contrived enthusiasm. It's written like a shark. There isn't a sentence in the book that isn't pure muscle. I still jump when they get caught.

Tomorrow I'm going on a road trip to Gyeongju with the Korean brothers and the Bostonian neo-hippie. I'm excited because we won't be in Daegu, or on top of a mountain overlooking Daegu, or in a historic Shilla Dynasty suburb in the process of being swallowed alive by Daegu.

It's 4:45 in the morning and I'm holed up in the fourth floor stairwell of an emptied-out office building, slurping from a cup of authentic ramen noodles. It's time for bed.

So glad to be a slab.

It's my third month in Korea.

The BBC hordes have been nipping at my heels this year. I was in Krakow for The Pope, I was in Berlin for the World Cup, and now I'm in Korea for the apocalypse. Call me Forrest Gump. And yet I've scarcely written a word about any of it. I'm not sure why, exactly. When I'm not at work getting ddong chimmed by Korean 4th graders, I'm brooding on how I will recount my travels to my cybernetic great-grandchildren of the future, whether I will narrate each episode in past or present tense, which digressions I will make, the length of said digressions, whether to omit sordid details for posterity ... but my misadventures, like this afternoon's kimchi, need time (probably several years) to be digested.

I will say - in highly general and mostly vague terms - that my travels have been rendered surreal by the sheer ubiquity of western shit. I feel very much like ... what's his name? ... Tartuffe? Voltaire? ... ah! - Candide! ... what with all the zany coincidences, the recurring themes, the lopping-off-of-ass-cheeks and all. Certain corporate logos have a way of running to your aid when you are at your most defeated, when a Berliner has jacked your luggage and an unprecedented late-May blizzard descends upon you; when your posh British roommates have locked you out of the flat and spending the night on a Krakowian park bench becomes a real (although not splendidly enticing) possibility; when you've just missed your connecting flight home and pause briefly to consider whether you (as a man) could sell yourself for a profit. But when all seems utterly and unrefundably lost, cutting through the frenzied squall of binge-shopping Asians, you spy those doughy electric letters - "DUNKIN DONUTS" - and rising above the consonant cacophony of a Polish Catholic anti-gay march, those glistening, golden buns - "BURGER KING" - and at the train station at the end of the earth, where there is nothing but a slab of rusty concrete and the tombstone-colored sky, where the wolves stand to come before the train ever does, just over your shoulder is a Starbucks, selling grande frappucino latés for half the gross domestic product of wherever it is you've ended up.

I climbed my first non-metaphorical mountain not too long ago. Here is a picture.



Nothing is impossible, just prohibitively time-consuming.

-Keith

Even the tiger comes ...

I'm in South Korea on the eve of the nuclear holocaust. Maybe I ought to write in this thing once in a while.

Starting tomorrow. Promise.

-Kisu

. . .