Summer has hit us with a sweaty storm of constantly sticky
skin and a flurry of air con. I am now in season 3 of my time in Korea, I have
wandered despondently through the cold drab winter, experienced the complete
joy and rebirth of hope that Spring brought and now I’m idling away this rather
torturously hot yet still wonderfully fun summer. The changing of the seasons
has really been something I continually love experiencing and for the life of
me I cannot fathom how one country can be so horrifically cold at one point and
so smotheringly hot at another.
After 7 months of working without a holiday I am looking
forward to my first holiday from these terrorizing children and I’m going to
Vietnam on Saturday. I am so excited to see another Asian country, to eat
different food, to meet a different language and culture and I suppose to simply
escape from Korea and it’s Koreaness (as wonderful as that is at times).
The last month or however long it has taken me to write has
seen some changes and more exciting times. One event which I’ve been looking
forward to since I first heard about its existence was Mudfest. Yes, a giant
festival of people getting muddy and throwing mud and sliding in mud and
getting painted in colourful mud. Apparently, the festival started in 1998 as
it was trying to promote this mud treatment that is specific to the Boryeong
region Korea. Now the festival is so big that people arrive in droves-some
people traveling to Korea just for the festival. 
So a bunch of Pohangsters barreled into 2 buses, and drove
across the country to the other coast (an epically long journey of, like, 4 hours).
We found a mud flat to play in and conducted our own mud Olympics. It was very
jolly with mud wars, mud people piles, and mud massage chains. We continued to the
real festival where it was basically like a Korean foreigner town, English spoken
everywhere and people in bikinis (shock and horror- Koreans don’t really do
bikinis) and lots of fireworks and Korean k-pop shows and overpriced tombola
stores. After a night of shenanigans we woke up the next day and stood in a
LOOOOONG queue to get our bodies painted in colourful mud. The woman painting
the bodies was, bless her, incredibly meticulous in her work and so we watched
person over person get carefully painted but being the impatient person I am,
when she was finally painting me I stole a brush or 2 trying to paint myself but
she wasn’t having it and snatched my brush back from me. Sigh, always upsetting
the Koreans… We took some photos and rushed to a hose pipe to clean ourselves
before a bus took us back to our lovely East coastal home. 
I started a new
sport- Ultimate Frisbee which is basically a netball/ soccer like game but with
throwing a Frisbee into goals as opposed to a ball. I joined the league
thinking I was in for a good time, making new friends and being part of an officially
team sport and I was right in a sense- Ultimate Frisbee is a ridiculous amount
of fun though I didn’t know about how intense it would become. It seemed that
as soon as the volleyball tournament was over everyone left the 2 volleyball
nets swaying lonely-like in the wind to practice their Frisbee forehands and
backhands (I didn’t even know there was a Frisbee forehand!). The league I am
in is predominantly a wagooken (foreigner) league and apparently ultimate Frisbee
is becoming such a popular sport worldwide that there are foreigners all over
Korea who have played the sport intensely with tactics and stuff and they use
words like “cut” instead of “run” and know a host load of rules.
These rules were explained to us with a lot of force last
weekend at our Pohang Ultimate Frisbee tournament. We created a team, myself
and my favourite friends, which I thought was fairly solid, (we could run and throw
and catch things) but it turned out were are no match for the tactical teams
who didn’t seem to tire on the mad pitches of sand. It was a day of utter defeat;
we lost three games, where 2 of them had us done at 14 to 1 and 16 to 1. And
now I face a league that runs for 3 months, with intense players and lots of
fancy terminology.
But it was not a weekend
of total defeat. We entered another competition- “Pohang’s got Talent”. My
buddy and partner in crime Courtney spent some time doing balancing acts in
circus back in Florida and she had taught me a few of her tricks along our many
frolics. We thought we could make some sort of show out of that and we meant to
practice, and then we meant to practice and then we were going to practice but
we just never got around to it so we withdrew from the competition. But the
night before the show, sipping on drinks by the sea on a warm summer’s night, I
heard our friend and organizer of the event was sad we weren’t going to perform.
Not wanting to sadden a friend we decided to have a go.
Luckily I now work 3 hours on Fridays (I love my life) and
we spent all my time off that day practicing (Courtney had somehow wrangled
herself into a holiday). We met up with our French friend who Courtney had
enlisted one night into her volleyball team in the volleyball days and him being
a gymnast, we chucked him into our more difficult tricks, making him take his
shirt off (so we could get extra points) and do some flick flacks on the side
for more pezaz. Well after a day of practicing and a lot of
body paint we didn’t win the talent show but we won runner up which was enough
for me, as all I really wanted was to make our buddy happy and avoid dropping
Courtney on her head. 
Besides Frisbee and becoming a circus performer, I acquired
a Korean driving license and kind of a car. I work 2 days a week in a town 40
minute drive away and my director used to drive me to and from Pohang to
Yeongdeok. Unfortunately he had a little bit of a run in with the traffic
police and lost his license for 2 years. 2 years is a long time and I still
needed to get to Yeongdeok so I offered to change my South African license into
a Korean one. The process was surprisingly painless (Korea is so wonderful sometimes)
and now I drive myself to work and park the car in my apartment when I’m not
driving it. Amazingly, even though I was nervously driving on the right side of
the road (the wrong side really) pretending to be totally comfortable, my
director seemed to think I was a good driver and after I asked some leading questions
about how much it is to rent a car in Korea he said I could borrow the car for
a weekend sometime. 
So a few weekends later we went to one of the most beautiful
places in Korea, Soeraksan. San means mountain in Korean so basically it’s
these really beautiful mountains near the North Korean border with temples all
around and bunch of walking paths. Hiking in Korea can be a little bit tedious
what with the millions of people on weekends (how I miss being a weekday
warrior) and all the paved paths and wooden walkways never make you really feel
like you can get truly lost in the mountains which I think is most of the joy of
hiking. All the Koreans come decked in “day-glo” - neon jackets, stretch pants
and fancy shoes- and on the hottest of days they will still have pants on. They
also buy expensive walking sticks even if they aren’t going very far. At a
national park like Soeraksan the bottom of the mountain is packed with people
and restaurants and curio shops but as you ascend all the people in the
expensive hiking gear start to fade away and the people who actually hike the mountain
seem a tad more normally dressed. 
What I do find incredible about all the hiking trips I’ve
taken is that even on majorly overcast, or rainy, or unpleasant days the Koreans
still arrive in the masses and even at the very top of the mountain you will see
old women and men soldiering to the top. This is something that I find very interesting
about Korea- the dichotomy between the old Korea, that had to deal with war and
famine and who ended up eating ridiculous food because of it like silkworm pupae
(something they still sell today and it really s as disgusting as it sounds).
So there are all these very old people, faces lined with years of hardship, and
backs bowed down so their faces are parallel to the ground yet they can carry a
huge bag of bricks down a street (Maybe it isn’t bricks exactly but it sure felt
like it when I was helping a lady off the bus). When you go to the country side
you see these old people still toiling away at their farms looking like they
are from a completely different world from the young Korean woman of today – heads
full of things like fashion and making more money, being “safe” and wearing
shoes on the beach.
They have a lot of projects for these old people and in the
early mornings and if you go to the city beach in the early morning (that gets
trashed every night by environmentally unconscious Koreans) you will see all
the old people collecting the litter and apparently they get money for the
amount of bags they collect. In fact I have heard that people are supposed to litter in Korea because you
are helping the old people’s livelihood. I’m not ready to subscribe to the
system but the difference they make to the beach daily is incredible yet it is sad
to watch old people toil daily, picking up the rubbish of their drunken, famine
free and thus wasteful, children.
Speaking of the new generations of Koreans we visited a
Korean waterpark with my school as a sort of “camp” on Sunday. Well I say camp
but it’s more like a day trip. The waterpark was bigger than any I’d been to
yet a lot more boring. For several reasons. You cannot go to the waterpark unless
you have a life vest. This is because a lot of Koreans cannot swim which
geographically makes no sense but anyway. Also, because safety is key, the queues
are insanely long because only 1 person can go on a slide at a time. So you
wait in a line forever, get to the top and sit in a raft until the people in
front of you are not only all the way down the slide but also have evacuated
the entire water area and you are now considered safe to go. The best activity
at the park was actually the lazy river where you grab a tube and just float
down the river which has a few little waves to make you feel a little bit like
you are in a gentle ocean (or if you are Korean- a raging rapid infested river).
However, you are not allowed to sit on your tube or just hold on to it, you
have to be inside it and if you don’t do that you will have a million whistles
blown at you by the millions of lifeguards standing above this lazy river ready
to blow and shout and wave their arms at everyone. We went around this lazy
river close to 10 times and I think I got shouted at every time for doing
something wrong. OH KOREA.
The only other semi
exciting thing was the wave pool. The size of the “gigantic” wave was kind of
an average high tidewave at home except with no weird currents that push and tumble you and at home the sea is not 100 %
packed with screaming Koreans. The millions
of Koreans augmented my excitement as the chances of not barreling straight
into a gaggle of Koreans was near impossible which added some danger to the situation.
I would think one goes to a waterpark to get your heart beating a little bit
but the rigid safety concerns and the lines (on a somewhat rainy day) were so BORING and I was eager to leave when the time finally came.
So I’m on my way to Vietnam for another adventure. And when
I return Korea will be a different monster as 1 of my best friends will be gone
and another will be near gone. That is the most painful part of this society;
we all have an expiration date where goodbyes and farewell evenings run rampant
about the town. But with every night being our last we live our lives as if
every moment is is one worth really LIVING.
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| Happy Birthday Mandela- South Africans, Americans, English, n Koreans in Pohang celebrating his birthday! |
