Kedros Revisited

These past few weekends have been busy but rewarding for me. As Korea comes to an end I have finally put follow though into my effort to see a couple of people in this country. I have 22 days or so left here and there was really no valid reason for not seeing these people. I wish that I had seen them earlier and that I had seen them more frequently, but I am happy that a year in Korea did not pass without me visiting Sun Young and Dawoon.

Top: Dawoon and I outside the hostel in Kedros.
Below: Dawoon and I outside Motel Tomgi in Seoul.

These two were very much a part of my birth into serious travel as they were present at my first trip abroad. They were already seasoned travelers when I met them outside of the bus in Ioannia, Greece but I was about as naïve and clueless as they come. I often say that I don’t know what the hell is going on in Korea, but I really didn’t know what was going on in Greece.

I’ve retold this Greece story enough times to warrant its absence here, but it had a huge impact on how I thought of things around me, of myself, and the grand scheme of the world. Most importantly I left Greece with an openness to new experiences, new people, and new places that wasn’t entirely present before I left home that first time.

Sometimes I compare this experience to Greece. I was in Greece all of 3 weeks and I will have been away from home for over a year by the time I get back from Cheongju. I realize though that the length of time doesn’t make much difference on the impact an experience can have on you.

Left: Sun Young and I on the road in Kedros.
Right: Sun Young and I at a temple in Busan.

Greece was basically a long vacation from hell. We were freezing the entire time, aching from day 2 until the end, and navigating the awkward situation of a bunch of people from around the world sleeping together on a couple of very wide beds and sharing a dirty bathroom.

When we said goodbye it was as sad as it can be with people you had known only a short while, but in intimate circumstances. Well, not that intimate. Some people did make out once, though. I last saw these two in the Athens airport. We stayed up all night with Jardiel from Mexico as the rest of the group likely did the same in Thessaloniki. We drank cheap wine from Styrofoam cups and toasted to the whole wild experience and told the worst stories from our lives that we could come up with or force ourselves to remember.

I was happy for the company I had. The four of us said goodbyes and hugged and passed on to lost luggage, medical school, magazines, and memory.

That I have seen all 3 of my airport companions since then is incredible to me. We planned reunions but even I, the novice, knew that the nature of these sort of friendships is that they usually end at the airport- at least as far as actually seeing each other in person.

I saw Jardiel a year later in Mexico. My work camp failed to pick me up and I spent the scariest night of my life sitting in a dark corner chain smoking with a homeless man and a feral cat that ate cockroaches as a truck full of heavily armed men drove by. Cabbies I had been cautioned against came closer and closer asking me to get in and me with $2000 of camera equipment wrapped around my leg.

After a week I finally found Jardiel and we spent a night eating and talking about the cold, about the dogs, about the work, about the mountains and the people we met Greece.

So, after a lot of planning I went to Busan to see Sun Young and then to Seoul to see Dawoon. This isn’t to be over dramatic but I barely recognized them. We were all grown up, or something like that. We were wearing proper clothing and we weren’t covered in clay or pine needles, or dressed against winter in the mountains. Everyone had legit jobs.

Still, underneath it all we were basically the same. So we all relived a little of Greece in Korea and laughed at Shibal and the pizza, and talked about the nomad Josef, and the cheese and the hikes. It is reassuring to know that as this thing is ending for me that these friendships don’t really end.

Maybe someday I will see the rest of these mad Kedros people.



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Drool



Until recently, there was a class of three boys at my school. They called themselves Simpson, Kai, and Bell. They were known collectively amongst the teachers as the Three Monsters. When they were together they were impossible to manage without screaming at them or calling in for reinforcements. Nobody gave them homework because they wouldn't do it. Options were limited because they threatened to quit the school if separated.

So, it each day it was a lesson in what a king might feel if his subjects decided suddenly to become anarchists and criminally insane at the same time. They are no older than 13.

Crazy as they were, I did not hate this class. It was slow going, for sure; it took me 10 times longer to teach them anything because I would spend half the time begging them to stop talking / calling me tomato / having hair fights, but they were often funny.

They are all goofy and that is what wins me over. One of them is a bit more malicious and another is a bit more clever but they have this absurd way about them that makes me laugh, even when they are obviously insulting me.

Hair fights are pretty popular with them. I have mentioned this activity before, but it is when you pull out a strand of hair and stretch it out against another person’s hair- first broken hair is a loser. It is perhaps the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. When they bore of deciding who goes first with Rock, Paper, Scissors they will shout “hair fight!” and then start pulling out hair until they get a good piece.

Anyway, they were finally separated with our switch to 50 minute classes and nobody quit. Two of them are still together but they are thankfully much more subdued with the breaking of their unholy trinity.

This is a story about Simpson. I have been here for nearly a year and I have only seen him wear two different pairs of sweat pants. Usually he wears blue, but sometimes gray. When we were learning “what is he wearing?” his partner would always say he was wearing the same thing he always wear. He also seems to own approximately 4 shirts that he wears on a weekly basis.

Of the three he is the goofiest and seems to be less evil than the others. He often answers in a variety of voices. Once he tied his hands together with some string and had to be cut free. He is awesome.

A couple of days ago he came into class saying that he had been sick. No, he didn’t say that. I asked him why he was tired and he pretended to projectile barf on the floor. Throughout the class he kept falling asleep. I would see his eyes roll up, his head would go down, and then he would jerk back awake.

It was funny. Once, when he was out for a few seconds I did a monster impression and scared the hell out of him. He then looked at me like I had just punched his mom.

He then put his head down and drifted off again. I tried to stop him and keep him in the conversation we were having but he just turned his head to the other side.

He was out cold. I kept asking him questions and he just lay there slumped on his desk. He was not faking.

So, I decided to let him sleep. It was just a review class anyway and this kid looked like he was dead.

I played a game with the other student. It wasn’t even an English game. At one point I took down the clock and we tried to convince Simpson that he had slept for hours but it didn’t work. Finally, right at the end of class he sat up and tried to look natural as though he hadn’t been sleeping. The strand of drool was running down his mouth, onto his shirt which fell past the pool on his desk and on its way to the drool on his pants. He tried to wipe it but soon saw the sheer volume of it on the desk and his pants. He looked around and saw the two of us staring at him laughing.

I then made him wipe it all up. It took two tissues.

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Hello, Goodbye

I spent some time in Greece a few years ago. I wasn’t there for very long, just a few weeks, but the experience was one of the most profound that I have ever experienced. At the time, the only traveling I had done outside of the country was to Montreal to get drunk.

Tim and Andrew during the trip to Daecheon.

Those three weeks were overwhelming. Here I was, this minimally cultured, shy guy who had just spent a year working in a cubical and going to the same bar every Saturday night. Before I knew it I was freezing as the rain flirted with the idea of turning to snow and then did so in the mountains in the north. Albania was a stone’s throw away.

I remember sleeping on one of a few giant, communal bunk beds in the village’s hostel. I remember hooking my arms into links of chain in the back of a flatbed next to a back-hoe so I didn’t fall out as the driver took sharp corners at mad speeds atop cliffs that dropped off at the side of the road. I remember digging holes into the clay all day only to find that rain had washed our saplings out and about the ground over night. I remember eating feta cheese and kalamata olives to the same frequency that I eat rice and kimchi now.

Amanda and Robyn pre World Cup.
Not shown: Tim having appendicitis.

I remember a lot of things about this brief time in my life, but one memory sticks out as the most representative of that time and all good travel experiences.

It was the eight of us who had stayed the duration of the work camp sat in a restaurant. It was dark and cold, save a fire in the fireplace. It was empty save a Bulgarian cook, her assistant son, and her groundskeeper husband. Carafes of wine lay strewn about the table. Outside was lit by lanterns for a ways but we were just a blip on a very large mountain amidst other large mountains. Most of the world didn’t and doesn’t know that Kedros exists.

We sat for a long time, Mexicans, Greeks, a Frenchman, a couple of Korean girls and myself, talking about all manner of sentimental and obscene things. The entire duration of the trip, the restaurant played the one damn CD they owned, and so it does now.

Tim and Amanda on the way to Daecheon Beach.

Late into our last night a strange thing happens. The alcohol mixes with sadness that it is over ,and the happiness that it happened. The Frenchman and Greek girl stand up and dance to the 19438th playing of “Hero,” by Enrique Inglesias. We all laugh but soon we are all swept up and we are dancing about an empty restaurant to a song I would usually skoff at. The cook’s son asks the Greek girl to dance and soon the night is over. Soon after we are all home or at least not there. We are each other’s fuzzy memories now.

The friends you make abroad are like no others. Maybe it has nothing to do with being abroad.  Maybe it is really about the experience that bods you together with your friends.  Either way, the friends I have made in Korea are like no others that I have had, and recently I had to say goodbye to most of them.

It was rough, even if I am basically incapable of showing emotion.

We started off at MJ’s, the 8 of us sitting amongst the smoke and beneath the heat of a horribly powerful heating duct. We drank and played darts. We listened to music and asked each other if we would ever do Korea again and other such things you ask someone who is about to end a significant experience in their life.

Katie, Tim, and I hiking the fortress.

Gin and tonics, Black Russians, wine, water and vodkas, and beers added up for a long time. A few fought for control of the music play list (and failed) as others played pool or just sat around a table in the middle of the Thursday night bar scene. Titanic played on the giant televisions for god knows why.

There was a dread amongst us. That much was obvious. There was also an honesty that I really appreciated; that of people who have traveled or experienced enough to know the realities of travel.

There were no “oh, please! I say we all meet up this time next year!” There was no “eh, I am not sad man! Nothing is going to change.” 

Christmas, pre Jim Beam.

One of the unique aspects about this Korean experience is that it is all temporary. True, Amanda is staying for another year and Robyn for another 6 months, but regardless we enter into these friendships knowing that the experience they are founded in has an end-date.

And this Korean experience is intense. The most any of us have known each other is a year, and some of us haven’t even known each other that long. But how long you have known each other here becomes irrelevant because we are all having this experience.

All of us left family, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, everything -our whole lives- thousands of miles away. You meet these people her,e so far away from home and the lives we knew, and you become fast and close friends because you are all each other has.

Everyone talks to their family and friends but the fact is they are not a part of our day to day lives here, not really anyway.

So, instead of going to the same college joint in across town every weekend, or going to the same restaurant every week you go to the same foreigner bar where you know almost everyone even if you don’t talk to them. And instead of the same restaurant you go to a place where you can’t even read the damn menu and hope for the best.

This general cluelessness about our lives is a bonding experience.

I don’t know. All I know is that I met these people 10 or so months ago and they all had such a profound effect on me that I dreaded their departure for a while before it happened. Their leaving was the end of an era for me and the beginning of the end of my experience in Korea.

We left MJ’s and headed to one last Noraebang. Most of us probably should have just gone home, some of us had to work, but that didn’t seem important.

The last hookah.

I do not like Noraebang. I didn’t like Noraebang in the beginning and I don’t like it now. I do not imagine this will change. Generally speaking if the night is headed to norae I bail and I bail quick. Part of me wanted to just bail that night and remember my friends in a way that didn’t involve me standing in one place “singing” in a giant, awkward mess. I didn’t though. We all sang something that night. All of us: Tim, Amanda, Amanda, Katie, Andrew, Gavin, and I. We drank more beer. Amanda R. wasn’t wearing shoes. A week before she had returned to Korea from the states and was still out when I left at 4am.

Dedicated mother fuckers.

Our hour was running out and that sadness that was blocked by laughter and alcohol was creeping back up.

More time added. Nice guy at the front desk.

We sang or slumped into the sofas for what seemed like a long while, fatigue making the end of the night and the inevitable goodbyes necessary. It was ending, soon. It was a bad feeling. I remembered when I had no friends. I remembered when I missed my home and sat on my floor eating pizza by myself. I though about meeting Craig and how he died. I thought about when I saw Amanda and John walking out of my apartment building last spring and meeting the people who would be some of the best friends I’ve ever had. I thought about Frog Rain, Daecheon Beach, Daejeon Rock, and hiking. I thought about the time I ate a lot of cheese and almost crapped my pants on a bus hours after someone shotgun barfed on Amanda. Screen Golf. Barbeque. Jokes. Indian food. Obscenities. Taxi cabs. Lotteria. Lots of alcohol. Hookah. Risk. Tim getting appendicitis. The World Cup. North Korea. Christmas. I thought of all these things and I appreciated this group of people singing like the drunken stars of what my life is now.

Looking back at my friends and the year or whatever amount of time and our experiences, how the night ended was perfect.

The last norae.

Until the day that I die, I will NEVER be able to listen to “Hello, Goodbye” by the Beatles without thinking of these people. Wherever I am, I will drift off for a moment and think of the ending of that night and the end of OUR experience in Korea together: seven drunken fools with their arms around each other dancing and singing in a circular love fest.

The man at the front desk looking at the security camera probably wondered whether that extra time had been wise and whether he had enough sanitizer.

So, outside we said our goodbyes. There were no naïve “I will see you soon”s except for those of us staying. The really, really difficult thing about this whole experience is knowing that the goodbye could likely be the real deal. I hope it isn’t. We hugged. Some of us cried. Some of us fought to hold it back. We got into our taxis and went into the night all better off for knowing each other.

At least “Hello, Goodbye” isn’t as embarrassing to have on my play list as “Hero.”



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Kamikaze Magazine

So, I have spent the past few months making a website.   At times this has been a passive effort but several nights have been spent pulling out my hair trying to get it to look right.  Now, it is finished.
I am proud of it.  It isn't the most original design but it looks nice.
It is an internet magazine.  Some friends and I came up with the idea quite a while ago.  Originally, it was going to be in print and we were going to jam it into other publication's magazine boxes.  Because we would likely go broke and get in trouble we came up with the name Kamikaze Magazine.
It stuck. 
So, I spent a little money getting hosting and a huge amount of time trying to change little things courtesy of my lack of web design knowledge.
There isn't much of a topic.  It was mostly created so that we had a forum to write stuff and put it all together and see what came of it. 
So, check it out!
http://www.thekamikazemag.com/

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