Cambodia - Japan - Korea Trip Journal

This is my last day night in Korea. The trip's over. The year's over. What a time. This weekend, I'll be in Canada for the first time in over a year. My sketchbook is now full but for a single blank page. Here's what filled it.




And that's it, that's all, that's all there is.

Hong Kong - Vietnam - Laos Trip Journal

I'm in Laos now, and will be for the next 2 days or so, at which point I fly to Cambodia, the last stop before Japan. I've run short on time, and (as I sort of expected) I'm cutting out a re-visit to Thailand to give me more time everywhere else. Six countries (and one Special Adminitrative Reigon) is probably enough for a little over a month of travel.

Here are my journal pages from the last week or two. My sketchbook is actually getting pretty full.





It's really hard to upload pictures from computers in third-world contries.

China Trip Journal

I'm in Hong Kong now. My week in China was amazing. Big walls and small dice and new people and all that.
I've done the setchbook thing, and the pages follow. I couldn't post from China because those Commie bastards block blogger.





This is only the first country of... many. Still got Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Japan left.

Over and Over

I am an engine and I'm rolling on...

It's hot and wet tonight. It's been raining all day. It's been uncomfortably hot all day. Thunder and lightning and monsoon season. It feels heavy - like something's happening. So goes the most pathetically transparent pathetic fallacy. How appropriate that I'd prepare my escape from Korea on a dark and stormy night.

But there was more than a storm brewing on my last weekend in Korea. I got together with the people I know best in Korea, and had a great night of Koreana and finality. Meeting in Sillim, we ate Galbi at a my favourite Galbi place. And after much drink and dead pig, we headed off to Led Zepplin for one last visit with the bartender whom me and Ben have dubbed 'Gary'.

Saturday is show night at Led, and we communicated by pen and paper while a generally shitty classic rock cover band slide-guitared their way through our faltering eardrums. Dishes of cheese an peanuts were (as always) par for the course (for some reason). Teeny dried fishes, too. Curiousity finally helped me confirm the obvious: they taste fucking terrible.

Never content to armwrestle in just one place, we headed towards another nostalgically typical destination - Hongdae.

That was goodly too; the warm comfort of doing things I know with people I know is what I wanted of the night. We even ran into some people I haven't seen for approximately forever. As nights are apt to do in Hongdae (or Korea in general) the whole ordeal turned into a drink-until-morning subway-home affair.

So my Korean conclusion was not unlike the last episode of a TV show. Safe, familliar environs, and everyone coming out to take a little goodbye bow.

And so went my last few days of work, or course. The kids were sad to see me go, particularly the Kindergarteners. They cried and asked why I had to go, and when I'd come back, and other such saddening questions. Gripping legs to stop me from walking out of the classroom. Lots wrote letters. Older kids asked for my email address.

Part of us loves that. We want people to cry and wail and feel practically useless without us. We want to know that we're that important, that the world turns a little rustier without us.

But in the end, I know they're fine, and I think they understand. I mean, no one keeps one teacher their whole life. That shit's called parenthood, and it's not really what I planned when I came here.

Simple, fitting good times on my last week. Just a week of enjoying the hominess of a place that's been home for so long. A year is good timing. A year is just right for me right now.

People ask me why I'm not doing another year, and honestly it's nothing to do with disliking Korea. In fact, I can think of few more satisfying places to piss-away another twelve months. But the reason I came here in the first place was for a change. If I come back again, it's not a change anymore. It's not different. It's more comfortable, it slowly gets better and feels more like home.

And perhaps that's the crux of it right there. Right now I'm not looking for a new home. If anything, I'm looking not to have one. Perhaps that's why I'm going wandering around Asia for a month. Maybe it's why I'm traveling so quickly, only a few days in each country. Never time to get comfortable anywhere. Hell, hardly time to realize I've arrived before it's time to go again. A whirlwind of wander and wonder, which is more than fine by me.

The shit thing is that I'm losing the people I've met here. Or at least, I'm losing the means to enjoy their company very easily. But fuck, no one's a tree planted in Korean soil. We all move. Out and on. Over and over. The ones that really matter will cross my path again. It's a cruel system, this finite one-year-contract shit, but hey, I had to leave some great people to meet these folks in the first place.

So it's done here. Hours left in this country. Then it's off on a 26-hour boat to China. And a million other places between now and August. I'll keep up to date here with sketchbook pages sent from the road.

Exciting, sad, wonderful, scary shit this travel thing. Just me and a backpack full of crap.

But hey, what does Korea think of this travel stuff? Or rather, how do Koreans envision us foreigners when we're visiting the rest of the world?


Like that, evidently.

I'm not quite sure what sort of Singapore-ian treats are making this guy basically spasm with culinary joy and orgasmic tastebud overload, but someone should really warn him that drug offenses are punishable by death in Singapore.

And that's it for my year in Korea. Over fifty Thursday nights spent talking to a laptop and letting the interwebs listen-in on the conversation.

Porky Pig used to have some sort of saying that's really far too obvious to specifically mention here. But too appropriate not to reference.


Goodbye, Korea.

Penultimate

Just that something so good just can't function no more

How often does a night start with eating live seafood, then end with playing impromptu Jenga drinking games? I guess the answer to that question depends pretty highly on whether or not you're in Korea. I've only got a week left in this country though, so soon the answer to that question will be a disappointing 'not often enough'.

I managed to check another fishy item off my 'I'll probably only get the chance to do this while I'm here' list this weekend. Ben and Bora took me out for dinner, and along with a plate of fine fresh sushifishies came a creepy crawly surprise plate. It turns out that the secret purpose of the meal was to eat live octopus.

I'll say that again so it sinks-in a little better: We ate live fucking octopus.

I did so without hesitation. It's actually really difficult to eat. Literally, the tentacles cling desprately to the plate, and it takes quite a tug to pull them off with the chopsticks. Plus they're all squirming madly. Some of the legs actually managed to crawl off the plate and tried to escape across the table.

See, it's actually chopped-up, and you just eat the tentacles, but they continue to move for a good half an hour. Taste-wise, it's pretty much like raw octopus (which I've eaten more times than I've wanted to), just a little more tender and, you know, moving.

Just in case all this graphic talk about eating live octopi isn't disgusting enough, I've got a looping animation of them squirming wildly on the plate. It's mesmerizing, but so quease-inducing that I'll only put the link here.

Click it if you've got a strong stomach. Or if you've got a weak one and you're just in the mood to puke.

So, what can you do after eating live food but get drunk? Well, I guess for most it'd probably be more important to get drunk prior to and during it. For us, darts (magnetic) and booze (non-magnetic, I hope) were the perfect chasers.

The bar actually had this nifty device, which was basically a big tube with a freezer at the top. It created snow and sprinkled it gently down the tube. It actually snowed inside, right onto the beer in the middle of the table.

Somehow, a beer-branded mini Jenga set came with some of our drinks, so that turned into a messily competitive drinking game. Not since Tetris has stacking blocks been so exciting and tense. That and more drinking games followed when the bar closed and we headed to Ben's place.

Of course, being that it was my second-last on the peninsula, I had to get some things done this weekend. I got some flight booking and slow-boat-to-China booking done. Some paperwork so the Republic Peoples don't go all Mao on me at the border.

After the boring important shit was all done, I walked around and looked at flea markets, fountains and other useless junk downtown. Picked up some camera stuff at one stand, while the stands to either side were selling replica machine guns and various pieces of pigs.

But right next to the randomness and shamelessly misspelled counterfeit goods (GaoLanger is supposed to be Go Rangers, which still isn't the right name, of course) there's this nice fountain that I never seem to get sick of photographing. The lucky timing of getting random Korean strangers to unwittingly recreate the cover for Abbey Road is well worth being redundant, though.

I found something in Dongdaemun other than people looking for bargains and shelter from the sweltering sun, though. I noticed a long string of 'medical' shops. Now, these aren't really drug stores, as such; they sell, ahem, medical supplies. The kinds of things that pass as having medical purpose in this country range from hilarious to confusing and probably somewhere near dangerous and every other ineffective level in between.


First, there's these infra-red lamps ("Human Doctor Q" - the Q is for quack). Now, these things are taken so seriously that I can't visit an ENT (an actual legitimate doctor) here without him making me bake my ears for 2 minutes each under a fucking hand-held McDonald's burger heat lamp.

Then there are the foot massage slippers, which are so accurately precise and effective that they've mapped out exactly what part of your foot stimulates what part of your body. If only Western doctors were aware that most bowel diseases can be cured with a footrub...

The Compressible Limb Therapy System looks kinda fun, if not potentially crippling to the poor soul who thinks crushing their legs with awkward balloons is medically sound. The woman on the box is smiling a kind of smile that whispers 'Hurry up and take the picture so I can take these painful fucking things off of my legs.'

To be fair, people go for the magnetic bullshit all over the world, so the "Magnetic Health Hoop" is actually the least hilarious bit of sham medicine here. The wild thing about these fridge magnet laden overpriced hoola hoops is that they're probably more popular than Tylenol here. Why is everyone convinced that magnetic fields from anything useful (cellphone, TV, microwave, alien death ray, etc.) are cesspools of cancer, while the ones from bullshit health products can evidently cure anything but mass stupidity?

To switch gears (considerably) I'll admit that thoughts and emotions and all those other human things are in no shortage on my last few days of Koreana. While I'm sure my finale next week will be full of introspective weepy-ness, I'm trying to get my good-natured digs in at Korean culture while the soil's still soft.

So, that in mind, I've got something to mock that is so steeped in Korean culture that it comes with a 10-second language lesson. See, Korean singing rooms (Kareoke) are known as Noraebang. However, there's something called a Noraeba (no 'ng'). This is also a singing room, but a sketchy one in which women are apparently paid to come 'escort' men to the rooms and 'encourage them' while they sing.

Now this is the symbol for 'bang' (pronounced like 'bong'). That little circle on the bottom is what makes the 'ng' part.

This character lacks, the circle, and therefore lacks the 'ng', so this just says 'ba'.

Looking at this sign, it's obvious that this was once, a Noraebang. However, it seems like the owners weren't satisfied, so they literally just tore the circle off their sign and turned it into a sketchy-ass Noraeba. It's no accident either, every sign outside the door had the same hasty hole from removing both the circle and their scruples. Newer spinning signs were designed without the 'ng' and feature pictures of girls that people are supposed to believe work there, I guess.

The funny thing here isn't that this is a sketchy singing room (judging by the signs, there's no shortage of those), it's that they changed it so lazily and transparently. And really, if you were inclined to visit such an establishment, would you really trust the quality of service provided by a red-light business that can't be bothered to buy a new sign?

And that's the end of my song this week. Next week is my last track. Then a bit of unofficial live records from the road. Maybe even a reunion album I finish my world tour.

Unfinished Business

(Hey, remember that time...)

Things are clueing up here. I'm down to about a dozen days now- my last weeks are filled with what feels like a closing ceremony. Packing and cleaning and booking and planning. Luckily, I'm a flagrant procrastinator, so I've hardly done any of it.

No, I'm far too busy tending to more important matters. Months ago, back in November, I tried to destroy Ben's phone with a bunch of fireworks. Since that didn't work (or rather, since the charred phone still did) I simply had to finish the job before leaving Korea.

Armed with the combined innards of several gutted roman candles, I set the scene and marinated everything copiously with lighter fluid. Ever cautious of safety, I used other fireworks as projectile fuse ignition doodads, to keep a 'safe' distance away.

The whole ordeal was a success. While the destruction was more of an extended fireball than the single, eyebrow-searing boom I feared, it sure burned the fuck out of the phone. I've highlighted the photo of the charred remains to show the screen (left) and the keypad (right).

Of course, I captured the whole thing on video (from multiple angles). Like most of my self-destructive exploits, it's been put to rock music and put online here.

After the phone met its maker (mister LG?) we were thirsty for more booze and potential destruction, so we met Mike and Adrian in Gangnam. That went like other Saturday nights often have here in Korea.

Start with eating charred pig and gulping beer and soju at a Korean restaurant. Then off to wander streets, drinking and probably annoying the shit out of Koreans. Actually, I think this night set itself apart in that we kind of went out of our way to do the latter. The specifics aren't real clear right now, but pictures of Adrian wielding traffic cones and megaphones can't be a good sign.

The cutesy heart pillow is a complete mystery.

Not content to keep our irritation at street level, we pulled ourselves into a Noraebang and screamed into microphones for a bit. I've actually got video from this, but I'd never release it to the Internet public, as doing so might incite riots. Or just make us look really retarded. Probably both.

I think the expressions on everyone's faces should suffice to communicate the sort of singing skills that were brought to the table that night. If that doesn't do the trick, the bottles of cheap booze on the table should augment the picture a bit.

After the Noraebombing, we wandered a bit and cabbed off to Mike's apartment, where we shot the shit (as well as Mike's pellet gun) until blinding sunlight reminded us to catch the train home.

This is the kind of note on which I want to leave. This kind of meandering Korean-ness. With only two weekends left here, I couldn't ask for better than more of the same, really.

I finally got my Holga film developed. Unfortunately, a little loss in translation mean that I got them developed into negatives. I scanned and reversed the negatives, and while the images are messier and blurrier than they'll be when I get them developed, they give me a good idea of the blurry images the infamously, wonderfully flawed camera will give me. They look fucking haunted. I'll look back at this and think I visited Korea sometime in the 1920s.

A lot of the pictures are spoiled (spring-powered film cameras don't have a delete button) but the ones that came out are worth it. I actually really like they way they look on film strips like this, too. Makes the ghostly glow all the more creepy. Makes this cool-digital Korea a little more warm-analog. I swear I can almost hear gears ticking inside my cellphone.

But I'll miss cool, digital Korea. It's given me just what I wanted from it. If I was in the mood to make bold, pretentious, uninteresting statements, I'd say it gave me one of the defining years of my adult life. I think saying that it gave me a hell of a year will suffice, though.

I'll miss a lot of things. I'll miss the food, for example, and everything that surrounds it.

Cooking your own galbi with friends. A collection of sixty-some-odd magnetic take-out ads that have been left on the other side of my door. Mascots who are not only willing, but honoured - excited, even - to have you eat them. A tank overfilled with about a hundred giant scary-ass battle crabs. A country that's so goddamn silly that it thinks potato is a good pizza topping. Not to mention corn and pickles.

Ice cream on salad. Cutting food with scissors. Whatever works, it's an interesting approach to culinary delights.

So many of the things that seem so funny about the food here is the Western food that's been warped by the fun house mirror of Korean culture. But as I mentioned, that's not the only part of Western culture that gets a bit blurry through the Korean lens.

Once again, I'm ignoring the myriad spectrum of thoughts and opinions Koreans actually have about foreigners, and I'm trying to define our image in Korean popular culture. And there are few things more popular in Korean than advertising.



In contrast to the singing, gambling cowboy image of a few weeks ago, some of the only ads in Korea that use white people portray them as creepy, plasticy repressed caricatures straight out of the '50s. There are more ads than these, and they all have even-creepier television versions.

Living in a place where you look so different from everyone is interesting. You're loved, hated, ignored, stared-at, fled from and fled to all at once. I think that's the crux of Korean attitude towards foreigners there. There is no one attitude, surely, other than the definite, universal realization that we "ain't from 'round these parts".

So regardless of whether we're liked or loved, we're inescapably alien.

War Cry

(If that's all they see, I wouldn't blame 'em...)

The other day, as my subway car ran parallel to the highway bridges that cross the Han River, I saw a procession of army trucks speeding alongside, the only traffic moving at more than a traffic-jam crawl.

But no, the North hadn't attacked. It was, in fact, Korea's version of Remembrance Day, one of the few holidays on the Korean calendar that doesn't involve specially-packaged chocolate purchased from the convenience store. I knew what day it was, of course, since I had the day off work.

I sought to make the most of my last, and somehow along my travels, I managed to accidentally walk past the Korean War Memorial. Given the timeliness, I decided to take a look around.

There's a lot there. A lot of tanks and jeeps and planes and guns and bombs and other pre-robotic means of world domination. There's something a little unseemly about kids playing on a tank. It was a pretty interesting looks at Korea at war, though. Kind of like MASH, except I didn't change the channel as soon as I saw it come on.

The memorial's supposed to honour all of Korea's historical battles, but the Korean war of the 1950s really the main attraction. Interestingly, much like the Vietnamese call their infamous was the American war, as do many Koreans call their latest the American war. I mean, why name a war after yourself?

The thing that surprised me was how overwhelmingly American the Korean war memorial was. The first thing I saw approaching the place was a sign warning that it was US Army property, and I may or not be shot on site for visiting. It's like the Army set up this big monument on Korean soil, thanking themselves for saving the world.

The tourist-y 'I haven't seen enough things in this city' day off didn't end there. I headed to Namsangol, a rebuilt traditional Korean village in the middle of Seoul. I like to call the place Jumong-ville, because it looks like the setting of the inexplicably popular (read: awful) Korean drama of the same name.

The place was a nice spot where Koreans talked and slept and sat and watched Koi swim upstream. The unfortunate thing about Korean historical sites is that so many of them (this one included) are replicas. The problem is basically Japan burned down the whole goddamn country a few centuries ago or so. Ashes don't make good museums, it seems.

Stepping back the history of my week, on Saturday I check an item off my 'things to do before I die in Korea' list. Namely, I ate blowfish. Or swellfish, as it had been hilariously re-mis-translated by the restaurant. Maybe that's a marketing choice, though. I'd much rather be told that my meal was swell than hear that it blows.

The food didn't blow (although it was a bit bland). Nor did eating the deadly fugu fish kill me. In fact, we were dso very alive after eating that we went about the area doing what we do best in Korea - imbibe.

We wandered about the area, in and out of whichever place had the most alluring collection of gaudy lighting.

Lack of attention and a cloudy memory means that I never quite knew where we were. Not that I didn't know where I was, just that I never paid attention to what part of the city I was in. It was a very nice, wildly-lit area, though. Fountains and rivers and people and lights, all hours of the evening. A man sleeping on a pile of glow-sticks. Balcony bars above drunken streets, watching little drunken ant people navigate from bar to bar.

Wandering around like an ant is about what I do now. The last-minute urge to try to see as much of the place before I leave it. Snap pictures of what I can. Quiet scenes of trees and trails. My last glances of neon home.

Now it's time to make fun of Korea, quickly, before things get too serious here.

Now if there's anything Korea takes more seriously than its shitty melodramas, it's technology. In particular, this place is pretty much the cellphone capital of the world. With an estimated 90% of the country using them, they claim that cellphones actually outnumber people in this country. With numbers like that, I just hope that the phones don't turn against us and plan a genocidal uprising.

A student of about six showed me his new phone the other day. It's a crippled phone, in that it can only dial a few pre-programmed numbers (ideally home, for emergencies I guess). I while the intention is pure, I'm sure, it's a bit creepy to see kids who can't ride a bike owning their own cell.

I saw this art piece at a subway station. Only in Korea (or in my head) would people think to combine cellphones and Tetris and try to pass it off as legitimate art.


The last thing here is a Korean ATM. These thing are models of modern tech. With two screens, no buttons, RF detectors, cell-phone connections, fingerprint readers, cheque scanners, and probably a big robotic arm to beat you silly if you fuck with it.

On the other end of Korean technological innovations, there's a curious new product at the local convenience stores. Basically, it's iced coffee in kit form. You buy a pouch of coffee, then get a tiny bag of ice, a cup, cover and straw. You mix it all together yourself.


It's a caffeine fix for the Lego generation.