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!

Crashing into Cherry Blossom Trees...

The Heating is off and no longer necessary. I ride my scooter in leggings and no gloves. Every weekend there is a message to say “COME TO THE BEACH” and I have shocked at least a few Koreans with several barefoot showings. 

Never before have I truly known the meaning of spring like I do now. In fact, save for one little blossom tree at the bottom of the garden, when Spring came to South Africa there really wasn’t much of a change. Now, I am glad that I don’t have to deal with the ugly hopelessness that is the Korean winter at home but OH WOW the absolute joy and excitement that I have experienced while watching vile barren landscapes suddenly transform into an EXPLOSION of pink blossom trees and, after a few very short weeks of soft snowy petals scattering in the wind, the most heavenly GREEN has emerged from underneath, with brilliant coloured flowers lining the streets and thus, lining my heart.

Camping in a Korean Graveyard

Myself and 2 of my adventure buddies drove to Gyeongjiu where everyone goes to celebrate this mad blooming of the cherry blossoms. Thinking camping the night before the festival would be a vibe I asked my Supervisor about campsites but she seemed confused. “In Korea”, she said, “We just go to the lake. Then we put up… tent” What news! This elated me, not that I have a problem with just camping anywhere, but for it to be a legitimate cultural norm gave me that funny warm feeling that I feel quite often these days of “Oh I love Korea!” So we drove to Gyeongjiu the night before and went searching down some random farm roads to find a tiny path which we followed. This brought us into a little clearing with large grassy mounds which we know to be Korean graves. It was protected from the road, it was flat, I could see mountains and I don’t have an issue with sleeping near dead bodies (as long as I cannot smell them or see them) so the 3 of us huddled into our 2 man tent with 2 sleeping bags and spent an incredibly squashed and EXTREMELY chilly night. It wasn’t a picnic but I was camping in a Korean graveyard with 2 of my favourite people and it was Spring! 

So the cherry blossom festival wasn’t really a festival just a multitude of people and traffic going to one small town to see a mad load of cherry blossom trees. We tried to find some sort of festivities but I think the point was to rent a bicycle and cycle around the traffic while trying not to be killed by the bumper to bumper traffic. Luckily that is why the cool kids drive scooters; we rode through the traffic and under the blossoms and took in the mountains that had simply come alive with colour. After a long journey past lakes and mountains and hills and tiny towns surrounded by a ring of mountains, we arrived back in our city and rolled onto the beach where rugby, frisbee and handstanding activities continued into the evening.  

And so much sporting fun has exploded into action. I was climbing three times a week, and now I have added some squash, soccer and beach festivities to the mix. Exercise is something that the more you get the more you want and so on an energetic morning I woke up with the drive for a 2 hour cycle to this really pretty beach named Chilpo outside of Pohang (where I live). I was listening to my Ipod and happily humming along, glorying in the beautiful day and noticing how exquisitely green this forest below the road looked, when I glanced back at the ground to see the lovely smooth concrete had turned into a mesh of mounds and I was skidding along on the edge and finally tumbling into an almighty heap, for a second I was one with my bicycle and then I was lying there bloodying the pavement with a very twisted looking bicycle. The cars were zooming past (I wasn’t really on a cycling road methinks) and in telling myself repeatedly I was ok I jumped over the road barrier and down a hill so I could sit down and cry in peace without feeling the zoom of very fast cars go unsympathetically by. I viewed a bit of the damage. The bicycle handle bars looked like a backward cycling circus bike and my body looked like the makings of a good zombie movie. I was now next to the forest I had previously been appreciating and in my pain I started laughing. How glorious it is sometimes to be able to feel physical pain, to go for a huge tumble on a busy road and to be able to go and sit in the sun with blood pouring down and to realize that actually in fact, I will be alright, in fact, I AM alright and finally, I am ALIVE. In that time I felt my whole body just beating that strong beat of life. I cycled painfully back home, boasted about my new wounds on facebook (don’t we all love attention?) and headed off to work. The best place to be taken care of is definitely a kindergarten and concerned Korean motherly types put plasters on my face and antiseptic all over my mutualized arm.

My shoulder pain after the affair was no picnic and some painkillers later and forceful recommendations from various friends I thought it may be fun to see what the hospital has to say. With a sister who is a doctor and parents who tell me to go to bed or phone my sister when I’m sick I don’t get to go to doctors very often. And since I was younger I had always dreamed of being sick enough to go to the hospital. All that attention! How fabulous. I prayed and prayed for a tonsillitis that would take me to jelly and ice-cream and tonsil removal and when the doctor finally said “Next time you have tonsillitis you should get them removed” I never got tonsillitis again.

So I took myself to this most coveted place and had the most wonderful of times. The doctor examined me, the x-ray lady x-rayed me and stretched out my painful shoulder then the doctor told me I was fine and I should get some physiotherapy and the physiotherapist then proceeded to massage me, and then I lay down with deep heat cooling my shoulder and a heat pad heating it up, he returned and said “now, shock therapy, you know?” I freaked out a little bit as he put lots of weird things on my body and turned the shock on. Such a weird sensation but I lay there and got a text from my boss saying I didn’t have to come in in the morning if I was at the hospital and after being giving a  lot of colourful drugs and a ridiculously low bill I sauntered off home. Happy that I only had to work 3 hours on this sunny Friday.

The Bridge of No Return

Very very tall North Korean Flag Pole

So there are certain things one is supposed to do when you go to a country. Like seeing the Vatican if you are in Rome. And I suppose that’s the DMZ in Korea. Not that it’s the same thing but it’s the same sort of “You have to”. So as luck would have it, a dear friend of mine found a friend in the military and this military man said we could come to his military tour of the DMZ for free. I like free stuff so we concurred and soon we were standing at an American military base at 5.30 in the morning, herded into a bus with a very barky military man doing role call and on our way across the country to see this thing that I pretty much “had” to see. Well the bus was long and 5 hours later we stopped in Seoul at the American military base. After getting 2 sets of ID checked we were allowed in as military guests and we entered mini America within Korea. Gone were multitudes of Koreans and the ever present smell of fish or some other strange food and incomprehensible signs. There were American children on bicycles with their American parents enjoying a lazy Sunday, parks and buildings and shops and American fast food and, FAT PEOPLE. We ate a bunch of American/Mexican food, had some awkward conversations with military men, gaped at the fat people and got rejected from the military store because we didn’t have ration cards and our hopes of cheap cheese and wine were mutilated to the ground.

Stone Soldier

We returned to the bus with another barking military role call and another hour and a half found us in the Demilitared Zone. Another military man began his introduction to the tour, beginning his speech at such a pace I could not hear a word for a few sentences and after he slowed down a touch he used so many acronyms that I continued to be rather lost. We took photos of some sights where various scuffles with North Koreans had happened, and listened to a few insults about North Koreans, got told repeatedly to not make any unfavourable gestures towards the watching Koreans and to only take photos in certain directions. We were taken to a room where both the North Koreans and the South Koreans can use and we saw and photographed the stone soldiers, people who had to stand so still in a ready-to-fight position that I had to keep looking at the veins on their hands to really believe they were actually real people.  We took photos of the “Bridge of No Return” where North and South Korea’s prisoners of war were told that if they crossed it they could never return into the country they were coming from.  We took photos of the landscape and a very very tall flagpole in the distance as well as the anti-reception tower that cuts North Korea off from the rest of the world.

At the end of the journey we had a rather strange and expedition down a very, very long tunnel that I suppose takes you into North Korea. It was wet and we got cool hard hats but we seemed to be walking for ages waiting for the light at the end of it but instead a dead end saying “do not go further!” which was impossible in it being a dead end. I raced a military guy back up the tunnel and won which pleased me :) It was a long and steep and as it was the only exercise I had had all day besides eating it was welcome yet seemed a smidgeon pointless. It was an educational day, being with military men all with identical haircuts, going to a military base within Korea and thinking about how bizarre it is that this place of conflict is now opened as a tourist place.  I found it somewhat incomprehensible why we are invited to make this war a spectacle. It’s an extremely sad place and seemed portrayed in a “look at those North Koreans, what idiots” sort of way. I understand the tour is given by American soldiers who live there and deal with a constant war zone but I felt so strange about the whole thing, and really, me being there, taking pictures of such an ugly thing, of the stone soldiers who had to stand completely still in a rigid position during the entire tour and of a place that is STILL a war zone. It seemed wrong but I hope that in the future I will be able to see these countries become one country or at least become two amicable countries and then perhaps, I will be truly glad that I went on this day. 

Beach Fun

With incredibly mixed feelings I got back on the bus towards Seoul. I had arranged to see some friends in Seoul that evening, go to the second hand English bookstore, maybe buy some underwear that would actually fit me and ultimately, buy some cheese. However, this was when the American military brought out their favouite word “liability”. I asked the main military guy if I could leave them in Seoul but they said that because they took me to the DMZ, they have to take me back to Pohang. It was with a bit more than a frustrated sigh that I sat on that bus for a further 6 hours. Watching really loud obnoxious action movies and just dreaming of being out of the bus and in freedom. I was angry that they took up a whole Saturday of my time, how precious are these weekends I have! But then I realized, it wasn’t necessarily that the day was really, really bad, it was more that lately my days have been really really good, and I was just stamping my foot like a spoilt child “Why can’t I have fun ALL the time???”

Snowboarding in the forest... you don't go far, but man is it pretty

And fun all the time is how life normally is. Teaching itself of course is up and down and upside down and there is so much more to say, of classes and children and all the things Koreans say and other adventures but that will have to be another day and another time for now it is time to go back (after a week of shoulder recovery) to all the fun things that this fabulous spring has been offering to me.