Let's set Korea on Fire! BURN KOREA BURN!

Africa Burn

Naked Cyclist!

And the seasons continue to transform into a quieter time. Leaves are changing colour and every moment has ceased to be a struggle against the sweat falling from my body. New seasons bring new change in myself and in the things around me. The major event that has been in, on and around my mind has been the Korea Burn Festival -Korea’s version of Burning Man. Now if you’ve never heard of Burning Man before let me explain. Burning Man started in America and is held every year in the Nevada desert. People come from all over the world to this arid, dusty space and bring it to life with art, music, mad costumes, yummy food and creative ideas. Burning Man is a world which prohibits the exchange of money. In fact nothing is exchanged, people come to the festival to give whatever talent, skill or sustenance they can provide and in their turn others do the same. The idea is that IF everyone in the world were to pull their weight and provide everyone around them with a gift or a service everyone could live happily and in harmony without need of anything. Obviously this idea is utopian at best and disregards factors such as greed and laziness but at least for several days this life can be experienced, a dead place is brought to life, and after it all, everyone leaves, without a trace of having ever been there.  

I went to Africa Burn (South Africa’s response to Burning Man) a few years ago, in the Karoo. I didn’t really understand the concept before I went but it seemed like a vibe so I went along. When I was there I was simply blown away by all the beauty, effort and of course, money, people had put into their different gifts. There was a post office where you could send postcards to anywhere in the world, there was a huge pirate ship on a truck one could dance on with music drifting around the desert, scooters dressed as pink pigs frolicking accros the plane, a mother and daughter giving out blueberry pancakes in the morning, a tent dedicated to the teaching of yoga and meditation, and a Wonderland that you entered through a tiny door and brought you to world of sweets piled atop one another.

When I discovered there was to be a Korea Burn I resolved to bring something there which would make up for my rather too large amount of taking at Africa Burn. I started a facebook group to brainstorm ideas for the fest but besides a smattering of souls it seemed as if no one had much interest in the endeavor. Never mind, I figured we could summon at least 10 people to make a little theme camp. Anyway, good ideas seem to grow, especially in a foreigner community where everyone is so excited about doing, making and experiencing as much as they can. After our short sojourn to various faraway places for vacation people returned and soon the number of interested people went from 5 to 30 and in the end we not only 10 people interested, but 40 people interested and paid up and a bus hired and a whole bunch of things to take with us. Our theme camp was named the “Ocean of Love” as we live by the Ocean and we all made horns and thus become “Sea Unicorns” (a fact that no one really got besides us) and we brought lots of paint and thread to body paint and bracelet make and a huge (and I mean huge) stew to feed the masses. Never before did I think organization could be a smooth and simple process and I think in most societies I have lived in this is true – you have to pull people with a string by their teeth to make them do things. Luckily here there were excited people that often, when they say yes, they actually mean yes and it sad that this is such a novelty.

I woke at 430 am on the day of the fest to hear the vicious sound s of pouring rain banging against my window. My heart sank. We had so many non-waterproof things to carry in this storm to the bus and there had been talk of the festival being rained out. Anyway after meeting people and soldiering to the bus and getting things onto the bus with only a few casualties we set off excitedly. We found the bus microphone and soon full scale karaoke was being belted out with dancing down the aisles. The bus driver seemed to be of good spirit and didn’t seem to mind numerous requests for toilet brakes and the obvious ear splitting yowling of a bunch of hyperactive foreigners. 

And then we were there. And even though we had possibly come from the furthest other side of the country than anyone else had, it seemed we were one of the first people there and the first to set up our theme camp. We layered the bottom of our tent with mats and blankets and decorated our tent with various sea animals and decorated ourselves with unicorn horns. People came in and we painted them, we braceletted them and later took pictures of them in our Korea Burn Photo Frame and even later we fed them. It was glorious to have such wonderful people around me, a group of friends of forty lovely people, all doing their bit, all bringing the absolute joy of giving to Korea Burn. 

Slacklining in the Forest!

 

The other theme camps set up eventually and they conceited of one where you recited poetry for bacon (though I never actually heard any poetry yet smelt a lot of bacon) one where you had to do a silly dance for pizza and beer and another where a silly forfeit would get you a yummy cocktail. A friend of mine I had met in Vietnam showed up and taught everyone a sexy dance (way too sexy for me to handle really) and some people dug a huge hole in the sand, filled it with bubble bath and made a sea jazuzzi, others were painting shells or decorating t-shirts or giving out glowsticks or fire spinning, or slack lining or playing vibey music to dance to. 

Labyrinth time!

I found some people playing Frisbee on the beach and joined them for a little bit and mooched around, laughing with my friends and taking photos of silly things. Finally it got cold and I transformed into a unicorn for the night, prancing around the fire where they were burning  “The Man”  and meeting other creatures like a cat, a hippo and Where’s Wally himself.   We had to return the next day after some forest walks and music sharing human mad whirlpools in the ocean. And then life moved on. 

Singing on the Bus!

This project of fetching, taking and organizing was done. And then I presumed I would have more time. Now time is a funny thing, you always think you will have this magical “more time” when something is over but something else just magically replaces it or more laziness sets in. I really do feel like I am a more productive person the busier I am as I have no hours to waste on nothing. My climbing and adventure friend Courtney was leaving so it was all farewells to her and then Ultimate Frisbee practices (our league was to start the following weekend) and I joined a class to (finally) learn Korean. This is the longest time in my life that I have gone without studying, It has been almost 2 years since I have had something concrete to study and I have fallen on this opportunity like no other. I will not deny that I am a sucker for reward and the opportunity of winning a glass of juice at the end of a class for beating my fellow classmates (cannot let go of that competitive nature) is very exciting BUT I am also simply loving the joy of learning new things after such a lapse. I honestly feel that putting an 18 year old in University is a waste when one can grow up a bit and realize to relish studying like I do now and truly LOVE to learn and not simply to pass. In a way, even though I have certificates that denote some sort of qualification I feel like so much time and classes were wasted by my youthful mind not motivated to seize every new piece of information and try to record it forever.  

So I am swept up in the glorious words or nouns and verbs and the mathematics of putting together and figuring out ways to remember incredibly difficult words that have no connection to English in the slightest. And it is invigorating to say the least. 

And I could go on. Some friends and I took a trip to Ulleongdo which is a beautiful island off the Korean Coast. One gets there by Ferry and then the rest of our time was simply spent traipsing around this exquisite island. We took a walk along these rock cliffs where we saw Koreans trying to, I suppose, “catch” a giant Jellyfish. This jellyfish was colossal and about the size of a very very large fat person’s torso. We saw the Koreans throw a rope in and with this rope the hooked it on the other side of the jellyfish pulled the rope up. We thought they may have been trying to get it out of the water but instead the rope just sliced the jellyfish in pieces every time they tried to bring it and in the end there was just a mutilated jellyfish in the harbor and I am still sadly not so sure what the whole process was about. 

We walked around the Island and met a lost foreigner named Ken who joined our crew and got on a bus with to the other side of the island. SO we figured the bus would be short as we were going to a crater in the middle of the island yet we then realized it is mountainous and not really able to cut through the island and had to go the other way around. An hour later on this bumpy bus ride we arrived about another 2 hour walk to the crater but the buses had stopped working and it was getting dark. Well I was all down for making the dark road over the mountain and into the crater as I’d never slept in a crater and we were trying to get the group amped for that which they kind of were but no one was starting to walk. Then our friend Joseph saved the game as a group of English speaking Korean girls got off a bakkie. They organized some guy from somewhere to come and pick us up and take us the rather long and precarious drive over the mountain.

We then started running around this place and had a slim supper of whatever bread we could scrimmage from our backpacks and began exploring the crater in the dark. The only other girl, my buddy Courtney, joined me on an adventure in this strange straw house  (we tried to puff it down but to no avail) and a bit later we saw all the boys running down the road at high speed. I don’t know how but one of our boys pressed a button on someone’s tractor and the tractor started running  and even with a torch no one could figure out how to turn it off. We tried everything, from button to button to turning the key that was in the tractor but nothing happened. No one came out of any home and finally we shrugged our shoulders and found our tents and went to sleep. The next day we could still hear the tractor running and we continued on our wsy. We went to a waterfall and jumped over the fence and ignored all the warning signs and bathed in the cool beautiful water. Only later did we realize why everyone was so angry with us- we were swimming in the towns drinking water. 

Well I hope no foreign sweat killed them and besides all these misdemeanors we found our way to a temple where a monk came to us and asked us all sorts of questions. He then let us ring the gong at the temple and after taking soe great pictures he told us to wait and came back and handed each of us 10,000w which is the equivalent of about R70 and about 10 dollars. He told us with lots of gestures that we must have lunch with it and we tried to refuse and unsure at what point refusing would be seen as rude we simply thanked the monk and went to do what he had instructed- ate food with it. It was a strange and wonderful moment and I think all of us can think of that moment with such a beautiful feeling of happy bewilderment.  

Life sounds like a dream but honestly there has been some real-world stuff of late. My adventure buddy Courtney left me, or left Pohang and subsequently  left a big gap in my life, Frisbee has leveled a bit in politics, emotion and disappointment, a child’s phone was stolen off my desk and I was told I would have to pay for it (smart phones aren’t cheap) and winter is coming. But again all these things help ones learning as without the security of my normal best friends I have had to get out of my comfort zone a bit, I am learning yet again to try and relax my horribly competitive and loud-spoken nature and the child’s phone was returned by the thief and I am reminded that in no country, regardless of how “safe” it is, one must always keep their eyes peeled at all times- especially as a teacher. So again, there is so much to be grateful for in this strange country. And even if winter comes and chills my bones I now know enough to keep the good meaningful times rolling.   

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!