Living in a country where World Cup soccer is a going concern is, as far as I’m concerned, as important an experience as visiting the landmarks and learning the language. For Americans soccer is still a D-List sport, maybe a rung or two above Jai-alai. It’s gained some peripheral traction in the zeitgeist, but it’s professional standing is nearly non-existent. Of course, to the rest of the globe it’s the only thing keeping us from nuclear war, the only thing that confirms their pan-global, common sense of person-hood. Knowing this and seeing it turned out to be two separate things, however.

Point A: Saturday night was the first big game of the cup for Korea. Mary & I were out in area that’s usually pretty packed on a Saturday night. It is not an exaggeration to say that once the game started we were the only people on the street. It would’ve been like walking in a ghost town if not for the fact that every restaurant, every bar, every cafe was packed top-to-bottom with spectators, participating in the creepy spectacle of one or two hundred people per room all staring, unblinking, in the same direction.

Even street vendors who were unable to leave their post had small televisions or watched the game from a cell phone. People who couldn’t find a table to save their lives stood outside of restaurants and bars and looked in, drinking beers purchased at a convince store. I cannot understate how absolutely thorough this was. I’ve never seen this many people engaged in the same act at the same time.

That said, neither Mary nor I are people with a keen interest in sports. The two of us headed to our favorite bar, a place with a strong pour and a frankly apocalyptic Long Island Iced Tea and found it completely empty. They had no TV and, hence, had no customers. It was just the two of us and 4 bartenders, crowded around a cell phone, watching soccer.

It turns out that we didn’t even need to watch the game. At every missed shot, every scored goal a cheer would come up from the street in all directions, in living surround sound. The broadcasts must have been off by a few seconds because we’d hear it from the north end of the street first, then traveling southwards and finally our cell-phone bound companions would cheer.

In an era of fractious political opinions and global tension, it was nice, at least for 90 minutes, to feel like everyone agreed on something.

The story about Muuido Island goes like this:

It’s a swim-able distance from mainland Korea. But they run a ferry because people like to bring cars and whatever across and because if you had to swim to it, no one would ever go. That morning we called ahead to find out when the last ferry ran. We got two answers, 7:45 and 8:00. Both were late enough that if we left with enough time, we should be able to make it.

Events transpire! Our bus begrudgingly drops us off about a 1/2 mile from the ferry and even then the driver only does so with a breathy grunt that seems to indicate that he drops off a lot of white people on this muddy shoulder of the road. It’s 7:40. Our friends are already on the ferry. They are stalling the captain. From the shoulder of the road we have no clear view of the ferry, but what we do have is about 50 pounds of camping stuff. It’s a long story! It’s also a heavy bag to be wearing on your back. At any rate we end up doing this thing that can only be described as “bootcamp-y”, this kind of stooped run where we’re trying to go as fast as we can with more weight than we can probably bench press strapped to our back.

We make it the quarter mile or so to the water’s edge and have this weird, awful movie-moment: In the dusky twilight a ferry disembarks about a half-mile away. It’s 7:50, there should still be a ferry running at 8. We resume the boot camp run, this time to the ferry terminal. It’s not easy. There’s about a quarter mile of two-lane road and then another quarter mile of single lane road that runs out and across the water. It’s narrow and we’re dodging traffic as we go. When we get to the terminal the old guy working the booth just kind of laughs at us and says there will be no ferry despite what the clear signage on his booth says. We argue with him in better Korean than I thought we had. This goes on, back and forth, for 40 minutes or so. Our friends on the other side make an attempt to hire a small fishing boat, but it’s a no-go. The ferry sits anchored in the shallow waterway between the islands. I am a lousy swimmer and yet I’m confident I could, packless, make it.

We walk the 3/4 of a mile back to where the bus dropped us off. We need a place to sleep, the next ferry doesn’t leave until 7 AM. In the distance is a single neon sign on top of a 10 story building: PARK HOTEL. We walk another half a mile or so. The hotel is obscenely expensive, being near the beach and all. There’s an expensive but tasty Korean restaurant across the street. Murray orders for me, dduck bulgogi, a kind of marinated beef soup in a stone pot. The rice comes in those big, metal bowls that are meant to be filled with water at the end of the meal, forming the popular dessert of rice tea. I cannot fathom how anyone finds this an acceptable dessert, but I like it enough.

Before the food comes I decide to walk back closer to where the bus dropped us off figuring that there had to be a closer hotel. The whole area near the ferry is one huge construction site and for most of the walk I’m pulling my shoes out of ankle-deep mud and tripping over steel rebar. The only moment when I appear animated is when something emerges from a stack of tires next to a junkyard-y looking, dark corner of the area and I take off running before I can find out what kind of sharp-toothed thing makes it’s home in a stack of tires.

I find another hotel more in line with what we expected: A terrifying little upstairs of a strip-mall, one long hallway and 16 rooms and most of the lights flicker in a way that in the parlance of Horror films means: You are probably going to be chainsawed to death. But the room is cheap and it’s close to the ferry and so I walk back to the restaurant and eat and we walk back to the hotel and watch TV in English and fall asleep.

The rest of Muuido tomorrow, I am genuinely exhausted. Tuesdays are rough.

When we finally arrived it was a little past 4. Mingwha is supposed to be a big temple for foreigners to visit, but when we arrived the only other white person around was a Russian woman enduring a 7-day vow of silence. Not that we went to be around other white people, but it may have been comforting.

Shortly after arriving they showed us to a surprisingly modern room- Heated, with running water and a private toilet. They gave us the daily schedule- Prayers at 5:30, dinner at 6, tea at 7, tea ceremony at 8 evening meditation at 9, free time thereafter, but lights-out at 11, wake up at 4 AM. Buddhists are, duh, vegans, so dinner was interesting. To be completely honest I’m blanking on the details, but I remember some kind of pickled bell pepper that was totally unlike anything else I’ve ever eaten. It hewed more towards that shocking pucker of neon-colored candy than anything I’ve ever come to expect from a vegetable.

Prayers were. Well, I think everyone else was at ease, but here’s whats between the lines: I spent the entire stay in a state of neurotic disease. I didn’t want to offend. The monks were deeply understanding and didn’t seem to care one way or another how many prayers your offered or how deep your bows were, but I couldn’t help but keep track myself. The prayers were a 4-step process that felt more like the Macarena than a religious devotional- Bow and chant and clasp your hands and unclasp and down on your knees, bow your head, feet crossed, hands at the side of your head and then up and down and I think I’m out of sync and I can’t remeber if I’m supposed to bow this time or not and. I over-thought it. No one noticed, but it’s hard not to feel under the watchful eye of some celestial-CCTV when you’re faking your way through religious ceremony in a 500+ year old temple.

The tea ceremony was also an amusing bit of theater. When we walked into the small building housing the ceremony, I was the only man in the room. They quickly directed us to a seat in the back corner where I was happy to kind of hide away. There were about 16 participants in the ceremony, 8 on each side of the room and everyone else watching from the periphery. What happens next is kind of a blur in my mind, but I ended up being the 16th member of the tea ceremony. Surrounded by women dressed in Hanbok, all of whom could probably conduct the proceedings blindfolded. The ceremony itself was plagued with technical issues. The soothing meditation music was subject to that going-the-way-of-the-dinosaur problem, the CD skip. This gave the candlelit room less an air of soothing calm and something more like a public access How-to-Meditate TV show directed by David Lynch. The Twin Peaks of zen calm. There is a deep contradiction there.

Anyway, my major problem was that I was seated cross legged from the entire 90 minutes. I vaguely remembered a story about a famous-to-me guitar player who had passed out drunk on his legs and nearly lost them. By the end of the 90 minutes I could no longer feel my legs, just a broad pain-y pain and the enduring sense of vertigo that comes from a deep psychological belief that you longer have legs supporting your form. This led to a good deal of panick-y fidgeting, followed by immediate hissed corrections from the Korean tea-pro grandma on my right. It was less Buddha under the lotus tree (?) and more Charlie Chaplin. If Chaplin lost his legs in some old-timey accident. Hit by a Model T or something.
By the time bed time rolled around, I was more than ready for a bit of passing-out-and-away. Which I did, promptly, interrupted only by the glow of an iPod. Did we really bring- and then turn out- iPods to a Buddhist temple that’s older than our home country? YES. And I’d do it again.

4 AM wake up and everything else in the THRILLING CONCLUSION to the Temple Stay story.

The next morning we got up early- It was still rainy and awful. I’d misheard Mary and packed for 60 degree weather. It probably hung around 50, but I spent most of it in various states of dampness, which for those of you inclined to nerdery is something like a -5 check on a roll for happiness. Our trip would unfold like this: We’d take a bus from Mokpo about an hour away and another bus from there about 40 minutes farther. The second bus would deposit us near, but not AT, the temple. We’d been advised to just catch a cab from there as the temple sits on top of a mountain that resides somewhat on the “fuuuu” side of the leisure hike scale.

The first two buses were totally fine- We read and spoke enough Korean to comfortably purchase tickets and divine meaning from the weird arrival systems. It was still the Winter Olympics at this point and in every station people were packed around TVs, leaving the rest of the station weirdly empty. The second bus dropped us off in what could charitably be called the middle of nowhere and in all things resembled the kind of not-on-the-map places that dot the middle of America. While cabs were generally ubiquitous everywhere else we’d ever been in Korea, we were having a hard enough time finding living things let alone a hireable taxi. The experience was modestly hilarious- Two teenage Korean girls were utterly shocked to see two white Americans sitting on the side of the road and had their poor minds blown by our awful-but-extant Korean. A police cruiser pulls over at one point and the officers are also completely amused by our situation. We managed to hash out the fact that we’re waiting for a cab. They seem pretty optimistic and so we go back to waiting. At one point I find a cab, but it’s empty and parked outside of a barber shop. I poke my nose in but the place is empty. When we walk by the next day the cab is still there and the shop is still empty. Eventually the only yellow taxi I’ve ever seen in 7 months drives by and we hail it- It’s an older guy with his son in the front seat. The kid is thrilled to see us and the ride doesn’t take long, it’s about 5 bucks and 10 minutes up the prettiest, most picturesque mountain I;ve ever been on. The road winds up between the trees and the mist gets thicker as we go. By the time we reach the top of the mountain and the gates of the temple, I can barely see 10 feet out.

We went to the Ice Gallery last week!

Take a Hike 4 from Scott Stephan on Vimeo.

First: I hate it when it rains here. Take a country full of the some of the least spatially aware people you’ve ever met, give them all an umbrella and it’s like a gameshow where the only prize is losing an eye.

Second: We’ve been putting off discussing vacation largely because it entails work, something we have no shortage of. Between personal projects and work-projects we run a busy little hive. Nonetheless! Here we go. At the end of everyday I took 5 or 10 minutes to write down a bunch of keywords that I later assumed would rouse the memories from my brain. Looking over these lists I am about 60% correct.

Most of these pictures come from Mary’s camera and some of them are weird sizes because I’m nabbing them from Facebook and not Flickr. I’ll have the rest of the pictures up this week sometime.

Today’s words:

College/Mos Eisley: Bangkok is 50% frat party and 50% Mos Eisley cantina, which is to say that you’re either getting drunk or getting swindled. There was a bar called “We Don’t Check ID” and literally dozens of fake ID vendors, some who advertised in neon. Fake student IDs, fake drivers licenses, fake TEFL certificates. Kids between 2 and 5 watch you tap out your pin number on the ATM and the scurry off to parts unknown. And if they’re not trying to rip money out of your pocket, the ATM fee was a flat $5 everywhere we went. Drinks come in buckets. Beer comes in long, tall keg-like non-kegs. We were only in Bangkok for about 12 hours and we never saw it in daylight. I’m willing to accept the idea that the rest of it is quite nice, although our experience at the border more or less reinforced what we learned here.

Beer: I have no idea what this means. We drank some, but not a lot. I caught a cold on the plane and getting drunk was priority #415.

Josh Dances:When we finally found a hostel with an open room we bumped into an amiable, tubby little hippie. His name was Josh. Josh kept telling us that money was evil and insisted on paying for everything. Later, he stripped naked and danced in the street.

Rich South African: At some point Josh befriends a South African who is dressed in a variety of gold and diamond jewelry. He lets us try it on like we’re at a costume party. I can’t remember the guy speaking a word of English, just that he appeared to be rich and probably, maybe dangerous, although THAT’S RACIST.

Food:We ate a little bit. Some kind of pancake made from a dough that looked like latex, tossed over a smoking grill, folded and dosed with condensed milk and bananas. Later, pad thai for a dollar from a guy on the street with a flair for cooking theater. One of my favorite things about cheap food in Thailand is the little basket of condiments that accompanies any meal: Usually a spicy vinegar or oil, sometimes peanuts and almost always sugar. Sugar in savory meals is a secret pleasure.

Air Thai : I guess I mean Thai Air? Flying anywhere outside the United States is always a delight, but Asian airlines tend to go the extra mile. They’ll pour you as much liquor, gratis, as you dare ask for and the food isn’t so bad, either. We accidentally matched our seats which is cute and unfortunate.

So, anyway, we got a little drunk and it got really late and we’d been up for like 22 hours and we went to sleep when everything got too loud and we woke up in the dark again to catch a train to the Cambodian border, but that’s Day 2.

Tomorrow’s words: AM Train/Border, ATM, Tuk-Tuk/Crossing, Max, 3 hours/Taxi, eating, fights/MoHome,River,Food

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

It took me a full month to get these pictures together, but this is about the time we went to Busan. Busan is a fairy popular resort spot in the south of South Korea. We hopped an evening express train and managed to get there in about 3 hours- Not bad considering the distance involved. It was Halloween weekend, but you wouldn’t know it from these pictures. Sunny and clear, about 60 degrees. On Halloween proper we ate crab a stone’s throw from the ocean. We went to the aquarium where I got really lousy pictures. We rode a ferry that had a view of Japan. Jaime and Justin ate live baby octopus- When we inquired about the possibility of doing so, the fish monger consented by lifting a baby octopus from from the tank and biting off one of it’s legs. This happened! It was crazy.

And that’s the short story about Busan.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Last week Chris of Chris in South Korea fame alerted us to a really fun little event- The Seoul Lantern festival. Lantern festivals aren’t hugely unusual, but they usually happen in the Spring or Summer. A fall lantern festival is an event, indeed. It was also the first really, really cold day of our time here. We bundled up earlier in the day and spent some time in Insadong, a popular tourist market, with the intent to make our way towards the lantern festival. We got sidetracked by a weird toy museum and a nice dinner, but around 8:30 we made it to the festival.

The festival was taking place in a location called Cheonggyecheon, which was ground zero for Seoul’s downtown revitalization efforts. It’s a beautiful stream that cuts right through Seoul. Since the 1400’s it’s been a sort of landmark, but earlier in the 20th century it fell into disuse and eventually became such an eyesore that it was covered with concrete and buried in roads and highways. The revitalization helped restore the creek to it’s former beauty. Urban planning nerds can click through to the Wiki-link for details on how a major world city tore down two of it’s most highly trafficked roads, built a creek and won out.

So, anyway, it’s 8:30 and chilly and we get down to the creek and it’s just beautiful. In the middle of the creek they’ve positioned these lanterns over the running water and they look so warm and cozy. The crowds were huge and it was a little difficult to stop and get a good shot, especially given the lighting conditions, but I nabbed a few dozen keepers and you can use the gallery above to give them a peek. It was, unfortunately, the last night of the festival, but I know we’re both excited for the next one. It seems a little silly, but “Stand on a bridge surrounded by colored lanterns” is definitely on the ‘White People go to Asia’ checklist So, check.