Let's all pile onto 1 bicycle and GO!- 8 days in Vietnam

I don’t normally travel for a week. I have always looked down on people who think it’s worthwhile to go to another country for a mere few days. I snobbishly presumed that if you can tell people you have been to another country, one should spend AT LEAST a month to be able to say you were really there, and probably more. These were the kind of thoughts I had when I was a student with 3 months holidays in the summer and a further 6 weeks in the winter and when I was a vagabond traveling from country to country, just earning enough money to get by.  And then I got a real job. Well kind of, my hours can be a little ridiculous to be called “a real job” but be that as it may, from Monday to Friday I have to be at least somewhere near Pohang and I have only 2 weeks in this long 14 months for gallivanting besides my weekends. 

My first holiday finally appeared and a friend and myself bought tickets to Vietnam at a bit of a whim. I wanted to go somewhere in SE Asia and the price seemed right. After looking at a few things on the internet as to “what to see” and “what to do” in Vietnam, I felt overwhelmed and stressed by all the information so rather, to alleviate stress, we went ahead with no plan and presumed we would figure out what do when we arrived. 

 

There is this wonderful site called Couchsurfing where travelers can get into contact with other people all over the world and ask them to stay at their house for free. The idea of couchsurfing is very much on a pay it forward basis. I give a couch to you to sleep on and hopefully down the line you will give a couch to someone else. This obviously is not always the case, some people are definitely more givers and others do a bunch more taking but in general my couch surfing experiences have turned out quite wonderfully. In saying this I have done a bunch more hosting than surfing, finding that getting in touch with someone and organizing a place to stay before I go to a place would entail that I know where I’m going to be on what day which is not really how my life works. But for once I was assured I was going to be in city for at least on night so I organized a place to stay for Tiffany and I, hoping to glean some information about the country.

Well things turned out easier than we expected, we were fetched from the airport by a driver who took us and our new couch surfing friend to the heart of Ho Chi Minh’s nightlife at 1 in the morning. Wewere escorted into a mad scene after a day of travel and began to dance the night out. A few hours later we went on to an apartment that looked like a holiday resort and a big double bed to share and a try in a real racing car seat attached to a video game. We woke the next day to greet the city with our appetites and had my first yummy breakfast in a restaurant for a looooong time. When you wake up in Korea before 10am on a weekend you won’t find even coffee shops open and only if you are near a Dunkin Donuts will you get anything resembling breakfast (you can get a rather gross bacon and egg bagel from dunkin donuts but it’s not exactly the things of dreams.) Here there were eggs done in all sort of styles and baguettes (bread! I LOVE bread!) and omelettes and such supreme yumminess and the best thing was, at this fancy resort/ apartment restaurant- it was so cheap. As Tiffany and I continued our journey through the country in our precious days we found that almost no matter what restaurant we went to and what we ordered, it was delicious and between us would come to the grand total of 3 dollars (tiny exaggeration but pretty much true).

We then went on to drink coconut milk out of huge coconuts on the side of the street and went to a large colourful market full of all those colourful Asian things that you see everyone coming home from holiday with. Then onwards to the “must see” War Museum. It was basically a big building full of different pictures of different people doing different atrocities to each other. I really didn’t know much about the war and I didn’t find out much about the war in the museum,  just that it was terrible and a lot of people were affected by it. In fact, because of the Agent Orange chemical that a lot of people came into contact with many people are still suffering today as it still affects generations later where babies are built with arms and wit other strange deformities. One of the craziest photos I saw was of Siamese twins being born with one body and a head at each end. So that was rather harrowing and not too informative because it was mostly about the atrocities that befell Vietnam in the war and was really one sided and I’m sure there must have been 2 sides to the story. 

We headed back to our couchsurfing friend’s house and started making plans for the next day. There was the Mekong Delta which is a pretty touristy thing to do but we figured we would go along. A friend of our host showed us a picture of the brown river and said “and you want to go THERE?” I don’t know what she expected us to do in Vietnam for 1 week but apparently she thought it sounded like a terrible idea to spend a day tripping around a delta. Not too deterred by her patronizing of a place she’d never been to, we booked a tour which included a bus ride for 2 hours in the morning and back in the evening,  boat trips and honey tasting, coconut candy eating, a massive lunch and bike riding all for the exorbitant price of 10 dollars. I’ve never been one for tours but time was short and we hopped on the bus and had the most wonderful of days. The brown water was not made from dirt after all and Vietnamese people rowed us through beautiful tributaries linking to delta side villages, coconut upon coconut piled upon each other and I cycled to through these tiny lanes and found a woman under a shelter with a huge knife slicing coconut after coconut and pouring it into huge vats to make coconut candy. What I loved about this tour really was the variety of people on it. Living in the city that I do the only foreigners and thus English speakers, are students in their 20s and English teachers also in their 20s. When I see a western child or an older western person I gape like the Koreans are constantly gaping at us, they are such a strange sight! On the tour was an old Polish scientist, a Spanish family, another American also teaching in Korea, a Korean couple, a Swiss couple, a Dutch girl and a few Vietnamese and some other languages I didn’t know kept popping up. 

We made our way that night on a rickety and incredibly slow train to the beach town of Nha Trang. Well, I say rickety yet it’s not Africa, people are quiet and respectful, everyone has a designated seat to themselves and besides the aircon which was ridiculously cold and woke me up several times to rearrange my blanket it was quite a pleasant journey. We arrived at 6 in the morning and made our way directly to the beach. In the morning light we saw the beach was filled with Vietnamese- playing volleyball, swimming, laughing like it was the afternoon yet it was only 6’o clock. We saw islands stretch before us in the bay and the water was sweet to swim in. Simply gorgeous. After finding some internet and backpackers to stay in we decided to talk to a travel agent about how to get to Halong Bay which was the one thing that had stuck in my mind from all my fruitless searching. After discussing how we would probably need to fly to Hanoi if we wanted to get to Halong Bay (Vietnam being the incredible long thin country it is) she asked me what I wanted to do with my day. I replied that I wanted something exciting to do and she said “well there’s a boat where you can spend the day snorkeling and exploring islands, sing karaoke and get free lunch and a bus ride for 7 dollars” I replied in the affirmative and asked her when it was. She replied “Now” and thus I grabbed Tiffany out of the shower and we grabbed a towel and a camera and got on the bus to spend another day on a boat. This one was a little different and definitely geared towards the party spirit of young travels and the day was raucous to say the least. We met some VERY loud Canadian friends who were also teaching in Korea and spent the day dancing and singing on a boat. Stopping at various islands to see some thing or other and went snorkeling in a beautiful coral reef with such colourful fishes! Then at some point they brought out their very own drag queen who sang us a bunch of bouncy Vietnamese songs and a Vietnamese band. And the most EXQUISITE lunch that no one could finish. 

We arrived back in the evening after a fun filled day to go shopping for fun Vietnamese things like a new bikini (yay) and cheese sticks (battered cheese- the best thing in the world) and spent the evening continuing the party in more little restaurants and clubs.  

So the next day, after beach lounging and eating some ridiculously fancy food for not much money by a tropical pool (it felt so un-Mary but also so great to just lie around and eat food all day) I decided it was time to take my scooter skills to the road. I hired a bike for the ridiculous price of 2.5 dollars and went exploring the pretty town of Nha Trang. I sailed to the outskirts and made my way up a dirt track over a mountain and descended into another world. I finally felt like I’d hit a moment of real Vietnam. Over the mountain was no more tourist shops just a dirty street filled with all sorts of people doing their thing, eating, talking, selling things, old women walking hand in hand in their Vietnamese hats, children playing games and smiling. I wanted to carry on driving ‘til I found a good field to sleep in and keep on driving but we had a plane to catch so I headed back to the hostel and soon I was sitting in a tiny airport waiting to go to Hanoi.

Hanoi greated us with a wave of wet sticky humid air. Oh it was hot. Going further north in some countries does not mean it gets colder by any means and we realized this as we walked out of the airport. There was no happy face to greet us this time and we got royally ripped off by some taxi guy (when we paid a sixth of the price on the way back) but one way or another we got to the hustle bustle city of Hanoi and to a backpackers that in terrible English told us there was no room. The next place also had no room and we wandered sadly down the street till we asked a travel guy where another backpackers was. “Ah!” he said. “But WE are a hotel, stay here” “How much” I asked. 15 dollars for 2 which was cheaper than the hostel for a private room and bathroom and workable aircon. We exhaustedly fell into bed and woke the next morning to find some breakfast and the street we were meeting ANOTHER tour bus that was taking us for an overnight trip on Halong Bay. We found a little café on the street and after much confusion whether they would actually bring us food or had food to give us they showed up with 3 eggs each and a yummy baguette and Vietnamese iced coffee with condensed milk inside. Oh yummy happiness! We then found the tour place and the bus arrived on time and we made our way another 3 hours or so to Halong Bay. 

A rather cramped and pretty bumpy bus ride later, (although, yet again, this is not Africa and unless I have someone else’s child on my lap and there are 2 lanes fairly clean of potholes to be driven on I cannot find reason to complain) we arrived at this most coveted Halong Bay. I couldn’t help but really want to see this place, the pictures online are exquisite and it has recently become one of the new seven wonders in the world. It is a huge bay packed with island upon island which are more like huge rocks rising out of the water. The water looked clean in photos and I wanted to kayak through the caves.

So we boarded a little boat that brought us to a big boat with lots and lots of plants on it. We had our own fancy cabin and a deck to lounge on and a lovely dining room. Apparently we had paid less than the other people on the boat and we got bumped up for some reason on some sort of fancy tour. However, unlike our other ridiculous tour guides, with lots of silly jokes and dodgy innuendos this tour guide was a very serious. The timetable was strict, and unlike everywhere else we had been the drinks (which we had to pay for) were expensive.  Nonetheless we found ourselves kayaking around some rocky islands later and eating delicious food for lunch and then for dinner. We also stopped at a “beach” that we were meant to swim in but the water was pretty dirty and unappetizing so I joined some Vietnamese in a volleyball game. The next day we went to walk around a giant cave where our rather dour tour guide pointed out lots of supposed animal shapes in the rocks. I enjoyed seeing the animal shapes in the rocks but he didn’t tell us any more about the cave so I poached some other people’s tours (a skill I have learned from my father)and learnt a bunch of things I promptly forgot but  enjoyed at the moment.

The Halong Bay experience, which I had been most interested in seeing and which is why we ended up flying up and down the country within one short week, honestly turned into maybe the most disappointing thing about the trip. I mean, it was absolutely exquisite but the tourist industry has just killed the water and even though pictures show clear blue water the reality is that tour boats and rubbish have littered the water to the point where I just didn’t want to touch it and I’m sure it has killed a lot of the life there. However, after all these sad feelings that I had seeing such an insanely beautiful place getting destroyed simply because it is so beautiful I read in the Vietnamese newspaper that efforts are being made to clean up along Halong Bay and monitor the fishing and preserving the wildlife and they hope to get the program fully working by 2013 so all is not lost. (I hope). 

We arrived  back in hot hot hot Hanoi and found a very lively, clean and air conditioned back packers to spend our last night in. We spent the evening on the street on tiny stools where a Vietnamese man was selling his keg of beer for R3 for 50 American cents a cup. The next day was hot. Just so hot. I spent my morning roaming the tourist stores and then headed back to the hostel because all I really wanted to do in the heat was lie under a fan and read a book. Which is exactly what I started doing till I overheard a conversation about a waterpark and invited myself along. Well, this was no Korea. The waterpark was big, with lots of slides and no lines. And no rules it seemed. I saw 2 life jackets on children, only had the whistle blown at me a few times but for the most part I just saw life guards playing with their phones, not really watching people. So happy after the stringent and boring Korean water park experience to go to a park that was super cheap and lots of fun. I made my way back to the backpackers, got tiffany, headed to a taxi tat shot us a ridiculous deal of 5 dollars to get back to the airport for both of us, ate my last yummy as yummy street noodle Vietnamese soup and headed to the airport. 

What I really liked in Vietnam was the energy of the place. Maybe it’s a bit much really, streets absolutely bursting with motorbike after motorbike but I like that people wake up in the morning and do things. I was never begged from once, people only sell to you. Everyone is working hard to make ends meet and I didn’t see many people who seemed to be above the normal price bracket. I liked all the incredible food coming from everywhere, street food so cheap and so delicious. After living in a country where to me most things are inedible, being able to eat almost everything that was offered was such a relief.  (Besides the restaurant which served every animal under the sun on their menu- dog, snake, rabbit- anything, you can get it). 

 

It was such a grand week, ups and downs and rounds and fun. What I really learned from my travels in Vietnam was above all, don’t listen to people. So many people told us to do certain things and not to do other things and some people said we should plan and there were just so many opinions to listen to. Halong Bay- the pinnacle tourist attraction of Vietnam was the thing that saddened me the most- probably because it is the pinnacle tourist attraction and thus it is getting ruined. The Mekong Delta was the thing that pleased me the most though that was the place where opinion really varied. At least in the end, things never have to really do with what you see but how you see it. Who you are with and with what expectations you greet a place with. I wished I had had longer to explore Vietnam but honestly, when I did get home and looked at the pretty Korean countryside in the not so stifling heat and there was not a tourist in sight, I was glad to be back in this funny country  and couldn’t help appreciating that this is the place that for now, I call home.

Throwing mud, climbing mountains, spinning frisbees, circus tricking and saying goodbye

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.

Happy Birthday Mandela- South Africans, Americans, English, n Koreans in Pohang celebrating his birthday!

Just a little note on How Much Fun life is.... (-thankyou Korea)

Sometimes I dream of having an ok day. A simple nice day. I want to wake up in the morning and make breakfast slowly, read a book, watch a movie. Play guitar and maybe my ukulele. Have another nap. Write some emails. Clean my room, maybe do some laundry. And then perhaps that evening I’ll see a friend and we will have a good quiet chat over tea and I’ll go home before 10 and go to sleep. Maybe I won’t write about this day and perhaps there won’t be any pictures worth taking yet I cant help but feel a quiet yearning to have a day not worth writing home about. 

A few weeks ago there was a grand quadruple birthday party which coincided with South African national braai day and Pohang exploded into a huge party of volleyball, Frisbee and silliness. This is when we found out that soon there was to be a foreigner volleyball tournament which would be funded by the city hall and there would be a ceremony where they would unveil a special foreigner statue and honour the foreigners of Pohang. We made a team, my competitive friends and I, and the volleyball fever was on. 

I have never been a volleyball player, there have been the odd church camp ball throwing around but I soon realized when I saw my South African counterparts that volleyball is definitely not a South African sport. I was aware that my American teammates were a bunch more skilled than I was and thus, for 2 weeks I began living, breathing and eating volleyball. I had to learn how to serve, how to bump with my hands together, how to pass, all in 2 weeks. We started practicing at 8 in the morning, then during our 1 and half hour lunch break and then a few times after work. When another friend couldn’t make 8am we moved practice to 6.30 and started practicing then. Volleyball entered my dreams, seeing passes in my sleep, watching my serves go out in the tournament and letting my team down. The pressure was on, all anyone could talk about when we were out was who was going to beat who and everyone was ready to “bring it”! (Oh, so many Americans).

The day came. We decked our bodies in glorious paintwork ready for anything that came at us. I was a fit of nerves, failing at any kind of casual conversation. The mayor and his homies arrived. He spoke about how proud he was to have a city that could boast 77 different nationalities and they are VERY happy to hold activities to integrate the communities. They then unveiled a huge globe statue and took pictures and (presumably because we were scantily clad) myself and my buddy Tiffany ended up in the middle of a photo with a bunch of suited Korean men and we were given corsages and exchanged a million, very happy “Nice to meet you!”s. 

And then the games were on. The first game was against our friends and we made a good slaughter. Then a game against one of the main cocky rivals of the day LARD. They had been making all sorts of in your face comments for weeks about their victory and how they were going to “Lard this” and “Lard that”. BUT it was a windy day, the match was almost given over to the fate of the moving air and we took their cocky faces and smashed them into the ground. We won the next game against the US military.  We were elated, so close to the precious 3^rd position (all I really wanted). But OH! We fought so hard for the next game, we were well matched, it could have gone either way. But we lost a tiny yet gigantic 14 to 16. No matter, we had one more chance and again, and as luck would have it, against our cocky friends, LARD. Sadly, due to our previous win they were slightly more subdued and thus ridiculously more focused and. And. We lost. And  went into a sad 5^th place. The depression of losing took hold and I could only sit around in the sand sadly until I realized that 2 weeks before I barely played volleyball and on this day we came 5^th out of 22 teams. 22 pretty unprofessional teams. But still. After I shook off my sadness it was a ridiculously fun day, with free hot dogs and all sorts of festivities and it was so great to be honoured- our silly little fun foreigner community of Pohang. 

Besides the fact that volleyball has been a sole centre of my mind processes, other things have happened. We had a long weekend and bused off to the South middle of the country to the WORLD Expo in Yeosu. One of my friends convinced us the world expo was the place to be and I became increasingly interested in the affair when I started reading about it. The theme of the expo was sustainable oceans and I think its focus was (or is) supposed to be that of taking care and rejuvenating our oceans. For a country as incredibly fish focused as Korea I was excited to see if there were any attitude adjustments that could come about in this country which will eat literally anything that comes out of the ocean (and in ridiculous quantities).

Well I was sorely disappointed. We explored many countries throughout that tiring over packed crowd and stood in long queues to see well, nothing really. Well we saw Peru and there was nothing in there besides an overpriced milk rice thing and a sign that said “Giant squid skeleton” and when we walked up the stairs we saw people sitting on couches and saw NO giant squid. A couple of expos later though I had seen some Thai dancers, and some Cambodian and Vietnamese musical shows and a few movies. Which was all very nice but I was still searching for the countries sustainable innovations for the ocean.Finally we went to the United Arab Emirates and they showed a video where a turtle gets choked to death from a plastic bay and pledged to eliminate plastic bags in the UAE by 2013. Which was exciting. Yet otherwise, there was nothing, just lovely pretty videos about how lovely and nice these countries are and why you should visit them and then a smattering of stats about how much fish they provide the world with. Not exactly what I had in mind.

It was a very festive yet rather depressing day. I knew the world didn’t care much about the environmental situation but I was unaware about the extent to which the world doesn’t care about the environment. The shocking fact of the matter is that no one does care. And thus our apathy is sending humanity very quickly in one very sad direction. 

 We moved on. We left the expo, squashed into a train that was filling up faster than we anticipated and headed to another town where hopefully a jinjibang (Korean bath house) would be more accessible than the packed town of Yeosu. All 7 of my adventure buddies trooped inside, the girls to the girl bathhouse and (presumably), the boys to theirs. There were monkey bars and myself and my 2 friends engaged some Korean women to a naked monkey bar contest. We won of course (We climb so we can win naked monkey bar contests!) and went on to the big communal sleeping area where we escaped the insane heating and found a balcony space with a cool breeze and covered it with a million mats. We met up with the boys and played games, drinking rice wine named Makali and slowly going towards the sleep place.

We found our way the next day to the marshes of Gwangnam. We sleepily walked up a mountainous hill to a nice view. Then we saw a sign that read “4km to the beach”. We had been activity-izing for days and we were ready for a solid beach nap. The expedition took us down the other side of the mountain down a long rocky road to the middle on nowhere. On our left were rocky fields and to the right was an expanse of mud. The expanse of dried mud enticed me and I decided I wanted to feel the texture under my feet so I ran into the expanse only to find myself sinking thigh deep immediately with a million mud animals scrawling around. I screamed and hurriedly used everything in me to climb out of that swamp. I ran out and attacked my friends, making us all into a tribe of mud monsters and we continued on our way. After much confusion and hopefulness in our hearts we walked and walked and finally came upon a hotel where again we asked for the beach. A coke truck was standing there and thirstily, we asked the price. He shook his head and said that oh so glorious Korean-English word “Service! Service!” Service means you are getting fee stuff and he pulled out 7 (very warm) cokes and passed them around to us thirsty muddy survivors. Exalting in the sugar, the caffeine and Korea’s kindness we walked on around another hill and found ourselves finally at the “beach”. It was another pile of mud where the water started 50 metres in. We needed to get home and I wasn’t going to be allowed on any transport covered in mud so I had to get into this sea of mud. We walked to the end of a pier and I jumped off the end in the murky muddy water, trying to get all my obvious dirt off. 

Washing dirt in dirt is not ideal and pretty disgusting but finally I was vaguely decent (yet incredibly smelly). Finally we were ready for the home stretch and a taxi and a bus and another bus, a subway and a bus later we found ourselves back in our beloved city. We ordered pizza and went to one of our apartments for “The Game” (Settlers of Catan- a bit of an obsession) and pizza and I finally made my way tiredly to sleep.

And then there was the Pohang marathon. We had been talking about it for some time but I failed to sign up as I didn’t really understand the website. I was kind of thinking about not doing it as I kind of hate running anyway but it seemed like everyone around my expected me to do it. And WHO can argue with public opinion? I decided to show up unregistered on the day. A Korean friend of mine found people who had signed up but were not running and he pinned my free number to my shorts. And then we were off! AND. Oh running! How terrible yet wonderful it is. It is such a mind game, deciding not to stop, telling yourself you may feel terrible but you can still run another 5 km. The morning was hot and after every km I exalted, not stopping and only grabbing water mid run from the water tables. When I felt the absolute killing exhaustion I set a landmark for myself that I would allow myself to stop but whenever I reached that landmark I wasn’t dying anymore. Finally there it was! That glorious 9Km sign and I knew I was going to run it all the way. A Korean woman next to me said to me in another one of those fabulous Korean-Englishisms “Fighting” and we picked up the pace and ran exultingly to the end line. I got a free medal, a bunch of energy drinks, coffee and a picture with the mayor. What a morning. 

  

How many more beautiful experiences I want to talk about. Like the time we went to this glorious climbing spot, high in the mountains. We were driving up up up this long windy windy windy windy road. Sweet forest smells filled the air and we drove past rice farmers thigh deep in rice fields. At the top we walked some more then down a precarious cliff path to the most amazing amount of climbs. Heavenly. 

And the Busan sand festival. Busan is supposed to be the Cape Town of Korea and it isn’t quite there exactly but it’s pretty rad nonetheless. We watched a little volleyball tournament and then got ready for our flashmob. A flashmob is a mob of people who suddenly do something pretty weird in synch in public. Often it’s a choreographed dance though I did a zombie flashmob once where we simply walked around Cape Town showing our blood covered fangs to anyone who came near. So we learnt this dance and were ready for our first showing. We hurriedly taught some new people the dance and then the music sounded and we jumped in and wowed Koreans with our insych-ness. Now just a side note- Koreans are pretty excited about foreigners when they see the in the street. Often you will be stopped for a photo or a hello or a “Nice to meet you!” (when you haven’t really “met “ them at all). Anyway Koreans get more excited when you do something strange, like handstand or sing a song or just walk around in a group of similarly looking weirdos. So imagine how ecstatically interested they were when they saw a bunch of foreigners dancing in synch in the middle of a festival. We did our dance and were immediately requested to repeat it in a few hours. SO more frolics later we arrived back to do it again. We completed the dance for the second time and then we heard the beginning of our music AGAIN and we shrugged and danced our dance one more time. We cleared out of the big gap in the crowd we had been dancing in and then, seeing that there was still a huge circle of Koreans waiting expectantly for something more to happen my friend Devin and I decided it was time to show off our handstand skills. It was a competition of 3 rounds and wow I have never had a competition to so many shouts and screams from watching bystanders.

 It’s so easy to feel special in this place, someday I will go home and have a handstand competition on a street and everyone will just shrug, or not even shrug, and simply walk on by. 

But I have written so many words.  And there have been so many indescribable times. I cannot explain rock climbing to a non-rock climber and how glorious it is to approach something that seems impossible but little by little you find seemingly tiny holds that hold your entire body and somehow you find a place for your foot and then for your hands again and you feel the strength in your body pulling you up a beautiful rock face. That feeling I get is something I cannot begin to put into words.

I will say something about Korea. I forgot in the last couple of years how incredibly happy and fulfilled sport makes me. I feel so alive competing against myself, learning how to better myself, working towards something. Going forward is such a precious part of life and getting better at something tangibly really makes you feel as if you are doing something with the life and body you have been given. Again I cannot say how grateful I am to be here in this easy life with friends who are so willing to DO things and learn things as well as teach things. Where there are so many opportunities to just do EVERYTHING!