Daejeon Rock Festival (aka a lesson in inaccurate advertising)

I spent a while on a crowded and comparatively stuffy (compared to what you might expect in mid-October) bus talking to Amanda R. about our expectations for the Daejeon Rock Festival.  It was about 5pm and the bunch of us were staring out windows or sleeping through the 45 minute trip; waiting for the outlet malls to fade away and the bus to pull into the thick of Daejeon.

A pretty cool ska band.  Thankyou camera phone.

The Facebook flyer advertised an incredible variety of international food and beers.  The music, for a lot of us, was secondary.

"Maybe there will be fried dough," I'd say.

"Or funnel cakes," Amanda said. 
"Or hot dogs and sausages."
"Tacos.  There will definitely be tacos."
"Cheesy stuff"
"Grilled Cheese."
"Burgers."

The list went on, or at least it did in my head.  If you happen to have been on the bus that conversation might have not happened at all like that but you get the gist.  Point is, I was excited about trashy, greasy, non-Korean food.  Like, I was really excited.  When I say that the music was secondary, at various points when I got to thinking about the food I really couldn't care less about what the music was like. 

Then there was the beer.

As the bunch of us (Amanda, Katie, Christina, Tim, and I) wandered around Daejeon looking for a bus terminal some of us got to thinking about beer. 

Blue Moon?  Maybe even Blue Moon with an orange slice.  Sam Adams Winter, I thought.  Maybe they'll have the winter lager!  Maybe there will be cider!  This, I must say, is the prospect for which I was most excited. 
I am a cider kind of guy.  My fondest memories of my old apartment always involved a bunch of hard cider, Thursday night TV, a horror movie, a brisque breeze, and Mike Hadley.  I would be lying if I didn't aknowledge that I was missing all of that at the current point in time.  Summer is over.  The pine outside my window is dying.  Not so subconsciously I was going to eat everything I could, as fast as I could; and then I was going to drink as much cider as I could (also as fast as I could).  I would sit in the crisp air, smell fall and get my fix and maybe stop thinking about what is going on back at home.  Anyway, Proctor Street is gone and Hadley doesn't live in New England anymore and neither do I.

We never found the subway.  Instead we sat in traffic and watched as fireworks cracked above the river.  Beyond the bridge were "300 international food and beer" vendors all set up in a shiny white tent city that reminded me of the Head of the Charles.

Allright!  Maybe I would be getting more than a little taste of New England Fall after all!

Amongst the fireworks was a flapping remote control bird with sparklers attached.  That it was remote control is only an assumption as around the fireworks and amidst the smoke and sulfur flew a line of powergliders, also with sparklers attached.  Above it all few a steady flow of paper lanterns, turned into balloons by the fire at it's base, that followed the wind's current like some haunted orange processional, amongst the buildings and black night. 
That sight alone, looking back on that night and how it turned out, was worth the trip.

Amanda and I beat the others.  We stood for a while at one of the main entrances.  Straight ahead were the booms and concussions of very near fire works.  The grass around us was trampled by the hundreds (probably over a thousand) people in attendance. 

Foreigners.  Everywhere you turned was a foreigner.  All of us drawn in by the prospect of eating something other than kimchi and drinking something of better quality than Cass. 

Then I saw it:  directly to our right as an open stand marked Mexico next to a small image of the Mexican flag.  Heaven was here.  I brought with me 90,000 won.  I was well aware of the potentially disasterous and definitely humiliating results of eating and drinking $90-ish worth of carnival tacos and apple cider but I was pretty much committed.

We met up with everyone and started with a 2,000 won Cass.  Not a bad price when you are used to the trmendously inflated prices of events back home.  Not bad at all.  We then split off to find our own little slices of food and alcohol heaven.

Fault One of the Daejeon Rock Festival: Advertising.

The promise of 300 international food and drink vendors was frankly a lie.  There weren't even 300 tents.  There probably weren't even 300 different meals there total.  Sure, there was an Indian food tent, and a couple kebab tents offering such traditional turkish kebabs as the chicken-drowned-in ketchup-and-russian-dressing-in-a-fajita kebab, and a Spanish food tent that sold stir-fried veggies and tomato sauce but that was really pretty much it.

As for the Mexican food tent; well, I'd rather not talk about it.  Suffice to say there were no tacos and the sold only a tiny little fried thing of dough that was allegedly full of beef.  There was no fried dough, and there were burgers or western hot dogs either for that matter.  The food was a total let down.

The beer was not much different.  The Daejeon Rock Festival Facebook page is currently filled with people complaining about the "international beer selection" amongst other and bigger problems.  Other than the very cheap Cass (if you had the patience to stand in the giant line that sometimes formed) there WERE international beers.  Sure, there was no cider to be had but there were other exotic drinks like Bud Ice.  Bud f*#&@^& Ice.  I shouldn't even tell anybody that Bud Ice is actually available in a lot of bars here but the fact that it cost what you would expect an "imported" beer at a music festival cost probably made a lot of people laugh.
There were other beers:  Hoegarden, San Miguel and such but all of which can be bought at any convenience store by any of our apartments.

Still, the thing was free and it was something to do.  You get what you pay for and in this instance, crappy food and drink aside, we were getting more than we paid for.  This festival was one of the few places I have been, other than the bars at Itaewon, that had such a high ratio of westerners to natives.  It wasn't really necessary to speak Korean.  It is nice to know what is going sometimes.  That is a rare feeling.

The bands went on.  Rick and Lauren turned up for a while and we walked around looking for food.  Now, before I came to Korea I worked as a photographer for a magazine.  The first event I shot for them was a beerfest in southern Massachusetts.  I had two tickets and invited Ricky along.  I showed up first.  According to the organizers we would be given 5 tickets (everyone who paid the $20 admission and media) for free beer samples and 5 tickets for free food samples.  By the time I got there and finished shooting I realized too late that the free food had run out.  By the time Rick got there the only thing we could redeem our tickets for was a horrible, lukewarm hot dog.  The place was basically on its way to chaos.  There were many awesome beers and ciders there but I had mainly dragged Rick at the promise of awesome BBQ food at the expense of the magazine.

Beer stalls eventually started taking food tickets as well as drink tickets.  It was hot as hell and there was no free water.  People were baking, hungry, and soon enough the vendors were just giving people free drinks.  It was one of those situations where I made my way to my car to get the crap out of there before a couple hundred drunks put Douglas, MA on the map for the worlds biggest DUI case.

Daejeon Rock Festival was pretty much the same thing.  Granted Rick and Lauren live in Daejeon and didn't come as far as most people there and they came on their own free will, but still.  Rick tried to get a hot dog and wound up with some fried seafood jammed onto some chopsticks.

I tried boiled Bundigie (silkworm larvae) and discovered that they are pretty much what you would imagine.  They have this sickly-sweet sort of smell that fills your lungs like it is as thick as steam.  They taste a little bit like sweat and as with most weird foods it's that you are conciously aware that you just paid money to buy and eat bugs that really grosses you out.  That pop when you bite into them and the spray of hot briney bug insides sort of contributes to grossness factor too.

So, the festival was fun.  They never actually said there would be tacos.  It was a nice night.  I was there with my friends from home and from here in this strange little life we had.  Our plan was to stay until the finale at 4am and then hop a bus back to Cheongju at 6am.

Fault Two of the Daejeon Rock Festival: We don't need no stinkin' permit!

This was the first time anything like this has been done in central Korea.  It was the idea of a westerner and it was endorsed by the city council as a good way to get more people to make their way to our neck of the woods.  As it is, there isn't a heck of a lot of tourist business done anywhere but Seoul or Busan.

It seems the what ended up happening is the fault almost entirely on the entertainment company that set up the festival in the first place.  Nobody really knew what to expect as far as crowd turn out but the festival was given the greenlight to go on til 4am according to the entertainment company who also dealt with the logistics.  This, again, isn't really fact.  I am paraphrasing the people on the Daejeon Rock Festival's page who have come to the defense of it's creator.   

Crowd turnout was pretty amazing.  People came from all around Korea.  Basically everyone I have met in Korea was there.  Cheongju was probably a pretty empty place that night. 
It is because of this impressive crowd that it was such a disaster when the cops shut down the entire festival at 12am.

The streets near the festaval grounds suddenly took on the feel of a muted Cloverfield.  Dozens of foreigners left the same way as us and we wandered down the road for a while trying to hail cabs at 12:30am.  The occasional cab that passed as we sat or stood in the road with arms flailing sped right by.  It was probably the same mindset as in Titanic lifeboats that wanted to avoid being swarmed by the desperate, but in this case it was the thought of 10 drunk foreigners turned out to the streets that led to the "screw this crap" attitude of the cabs. 

Our group split off, crossed a bridge and walked through the longest park ever.  At the end we tried for a long time with no success for a taxi.  We eventually put up our thumbs and hailed a random minivan that told us he could only take two people.  Obviously, it seemed like a good idea that the girls all go with him.  Christina and Katie hopped in followed by Amanda who sprinted across the roads and just got in the passengers door.  They were off and eventually those that remained piled into a cab and headed downtown.

The girls survived.  That's probably important.  The night became a blur of people.  Yellow Taxi (or Cab, I don't know) basically had the entire festival inside and was packed.  Some of us ended up at Garten Bier until 3am, at which point we summoned the troops and cabbed it all the way back to Cheongju. 

Dissapointments aside, Daejeon Rock Festival was actually pretty fun.  At the least it will make a good story.  Also, I didn't shit my pants from eating 45 tacos so I have that going for me.

 

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Going to the @*$&@(@ng beach

So, I'll count the past few weeks as a hiatus.  I was running late anyway but then a week or so ago my Gramma passed away very unexpectedly.  It was one of those things that makes you realize life at home continues even when you are so far away having this crazy experience.  It's sort of hard to deal with that sort of thing when you can't be there so I dropped off the face of the earth.  Without further ado:



Sometimes travel, like the life it represents, is a complete and spectacular disaster. The trip to Dacheon Beach in on the western shores of peninsula was, and I reiterate, a disaster with a high casualty rate.


It started at 9am on a Saturday, an hour few people ever claim to see in Korea. I met my neighbor Amanda R. outside of our lovely apartment building (my provided fridge ceased to function about a month ago, I have cockroaches, and my toilet is emitting a steady spew of water onto my bathroom floor). A short taxi ride took us to the other side of the river in Cheongju where we met up with Tim and learned that the tiny satellite bus terminal did NOT offer a way to the city of Daejeon.

Daejeon, while not being our final destination, serves as a hub of this general neighborhood. From Daejeon, a bus would take us to Boryeong and another would take us to a splendid hot summer day on a sandy beach. Being that the way to Boryeong from Daejeon was made only hourly and we had already lost some time, we took a cab from the little terminal (I want to say it was called Bukbo, but I have been getting the terminal name confused with a Bill Cosby skit recently so who knows) all the way to the grand monstrosity on the other side of the city.

A half hour or so later we were on a bus heading to Daejeon to meet up with Andrew and Amanda C. We would be getting to Dacheon Beach a little later than we all had hoped with a 2 hour ride from Daejeon to Dacheon but there would still be hours and hours of fun and swimming to look forward to.

Things started going south as the bus pulled off the highway and into the main drag of Daejeon. Amanda, who sat in the seat opposite Tim and I had been minding her own business when the sleeping Korean guy behind her exploded. It sounded at first like somebody springing awake after unexpectedly dosing but was followed then by the unmistakable sound of someone shotgun-barfing into their hand and a sick splattering sort of sound. This was followed by the smell of tomatoes and a look of sheer terror on Amanda’s face and shock on those of everybody else’s.

In hindsight, maybe this would have been the appropriate moment to get off of that bus and straight into another that would take us home, but we went on. It seems that if one believes in omens and such that somebody almost hurling on you pre-10am might be a good indication to get on home.

We met up with the others and were soon on a bus headed to Boryeong with a handful of Brits sitting a few rows behind us. In all likelihood, the only place to which any foreigners on that bus were going to was Dacheon Beach and it is always nice to have reassurance that you are at least on the right damned bus.

We drove on for a long time. It seemed clear already that our chosen route to the Beach probably would be taking a bit more than 2 hours. Still, bus rides are always nice in a foreign country with a unique landscape.

After a handful of stops, some eavesdropping and shared information as to where exactly our stop was we exited the bus in a combined wave of two groups of foreigners.

My mother has always said that Brandon (my adventure friend, with whom I have hitchhiked, climbed and generally wandered for many years) and I should sign up for The Amazing Race. Each time I watched the show with her she would say so at least twice.

If we departed the bus at Boryeong or some other god-forsaken city I do not remember. What I do remember is that we found ourselves walking on a dirt surface amongst the pollution of diesel, a sweltering heat and the chaos of a poorly organized bus stop in some out-post town. We walked, trailing the Brit’s a bit until a Korean lady began yelling and gesturing that we were apparently in the area designated to busses picking up passengers as opposed to the human-only area, full of people trying to get the hell out.

We passed through the divider and were soon bouncing around Koreans under a strong-as-hell early afternoon sun trying at once to get out of the crowd and figure out one: where we were, and two: where we were headed.

Bus stations that go anywhere you actually want to go are generally fairly accessible and well labeled, even if it isn’t in English. This place was not. It was dirty and crawling with locals who had been around long enough to know all they needed to and therefore didn’t care much for the placement of signs to help others.

We stood for a while; our group of Americans here and the Brits off about 20 feet. There was some talk between the two of us as they too seemed to be a little dumbfounded. Passively, they followed us for a little and we them but ultimately it was decided that this place probably wasn’t going to be getting us anywhere we wanted to go.

We wished eachother luck as they hopped in a cab.

We saw them again, 20 minutes later as we waited in another bus station down the way and past a fortress wall perched atop a green hill. This station, thankfully, was labeled enough so that we were soon on a third bus, headed finally to the beach.

On the face of our plans, we anticipated a 2 hour ride from Daejeon that would give us time to relax and then a day at the beach before we made the return journey. Somewhere along hour 4 of our trip to Daecheon Beach, between Tim rocking a hard Texan accent talking about deep-fried butter with Amanda, and a couple of kids who had developed a 2 hour long obsession with Andrew and Amanda C; Amanda C had either the good humor or pleasant sense of sarcasm to say that “hey, at least we’re all together!”

That final bus dragged on forever. We whipped around on the sides of small mountains, on the edges of a lake and through village after village. We passed through town side streets and over highways that divided only one rice-patty from another. We passed even the point at which it was utter denial to think we were going to be spending the same amount of time as we had spent traveling to the beach actually AT the beach.

At some point the bus pulled into a sandy parking lot that housed couple of trailers that served as bathrooms, a convenience store that didn’t sell water, and a ticket counter.

Anyone looking to read about fun at Dacheon Beach will be disappointed to find out that here the bulk of the story ends. All told, we spent around 5 hours trying to get to the place and had now only a few hours to spend beachside before we had to pack on another bus that would take us direct to Daejeon and then home to Cheongju.

The first thing we did was buy beer, water, and snacks. We then proved to be a beach vendor’s good fortune by immediately renting a platform and an umbrella to enjoy what time we had there. We drank our beers and talked and I wandered back and forth looking for some place to change into my bathing suit.

I walked for what seemed like a long time in bare feet towards various buildings I hoped to be a bathroom but had no luck until Andrew and Tim came running up with my heinous flip flops and I found a bathroom in which to change.

Tim and Andrew came back some 45 minutes later (probably a good third of out time at the beach) with a full pizza box and a bottle of Coke (or Pepsi). I have gone on at length here, there, and elsewhere as to the properties of Korean pizza. Never is there real cheese, often there are odd and funky toppings, and always there is corn. This pizza, though, was something special. It proved at once to be one of the brighter points of my day and also the bane of my existence.

It was a cheese pizza. It was topped with sauce and a dump-truck load of cheese. Real cheese. At the time, the amount of cheese on this thing seemed absurd. You could feel its give and snap as you tore off a bite. If I were at home, the thing would probably be lackluster at best; but I was not. As it was, that pizza was the best pizza I have yet to have in Korea.

The water was freakishly warm, something that was quickly blamed on our proximity to China. We were bathing in the luke warm Yellow Sea and I will maintain that it is better to believe that one is swimming in toxic pollution than urine.

Two things happened on the way home. Tim’s wallet never got out of a taxi cab in Daejeon and by the time he noticed (about half a second after he closed the door) the guy was gone. I think things turned out ok, but I don’t imagine it is a good feeling to lose that amount of important objects (money, bank card, Alien Registration Card) all at one go.

The other thing that happened is I all but confirmed my inkling that I might be the slightest bit lactose intolerant by spending an hour trying with all of my might not to crap my pants. The cheese, glorious as it was, turned into napalm somewhere inside of me. I will spare the details but suffice it to say that the pain was excruciating, the sweats were cold, the tremors fierce and at one point my mind had accepted that there was a pretty good chance that I was going to have a worse story to tell than the tomato-barfer.

Beach photo courtesy of Amanda.

What did I eat today? A peanut-butter sandwich and kimchi-fried rice.

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Busan, Part I

I spent this past weekend in the southern port of Busan. Larry and I had been planning on heading that way for quite awhile but things hadn’t been working out. Primarily, we were hoping to meet up with my friend Sun Young, with whom I spent days digging in Greece, but she is perpetually on the move or otherwise occupied. This time she was in China. It would have been nice to have somebody with us who 1: spoke the language and 2: knew the city like the back of her hand and could be our tour guide. We decided against postponing because Larry is down to his last few weeks in Korea. We are at the end of the line and he is checking out at the end of intensives.

There was something familiar about our trip to Busan: it reminded me of taking of on an adventure with Brandon. It had this nostalgic feeling despite being basically as far from home as I can get. If I had to put a finger on what kick-started my memory I would have to say is that we had NO PLAN WHATSOEVER.

I talked to Larry in the short breaks between a full schedule. Actually, he had a full schedule; Fridays are a joke on my end. I had three class scheduled and two of them didn’t even show up. I had a total of 30 minutes of classes on Friday.

The furthest along in the planning process we got was that I bought tickets for a KTX train leaving Daejeon, the next city over, at 10:45pm. We would arrive in Busan at about 1:45am. From there we had no idea what we would do. We barely got tickets as Busan is a pretty popular beach destination and figured it would be catastrophic to pay for a motel for two weekend nights. In which case the sensible thing to do is obviously to spend the night in a bar. Problem solved. Done. Worry about the rest after the hangover.

I spent 4,000W on a cab to the Cheongju bus terminal and 3,000W on a bus only to have it stop directly in front of my apartment in Gaesin-dong (my neighborhood). On the plus-side I had Popey’s. The first time I ever had Popey’s in my life was in Cheongju, Republic of Korea. Cool, I know.

From there Daejeon was about 45 minutes with a decent amount of local stops and traffic thrown in for good measure. I had a vested interest in this bus ride as two of my best friends have taken a contract in Daejeon so it is a trip I am expecting to make frequently. It was not bad at all and the way was scenic with the constantly-present mountains raising a bit more dramatically. What is more is that every now and again lightning tore through the black sky and vivid and often repeated flashes. I enjoyed the ride.

Another cab took me from the Daejeon bus terminal to the KTX station. Not too long ago Korea joined the handful of countries with ultra-high speed trains. The KTX has managed to shrink an already tiny country into a more convenient, bite-sized portion. The KTX runs from Seoul in the northern reaches to Busan in the very south with various outward stretches here and there. It’s top speed is 220 mph.

We got lucky with our train. It stopped only once or twice instead the handful of ordinary stops and brought us to Busan in the 2 hours it promised. We were unlucky in that we had to sit backwards the entire way. It is unsettling and a bit disorientating to travel 200 something miles-per-hour backwards in the dark. Further, we had to watch a little Thomas the Tank Engine type show that featured an animated KTX constantly being attacked by an angry train that often sent the KTX flying off the tracks and into the air. It was a pretty stupid thing to show.

Busan is the second largest city in Korea. It is the largest and most active port in the area and makes an attempt to be the vacation destination of the mainland. We figured that our best bet was to head to happening Haeundae beach; but not before we took a stroll down Texas Street.

We came across Texas Street accidentally. We chose to walk to the right and that’s where the street was. Texas Street, according to guidebooks, was a pretty good place to avoid at night. While it certainly had an appropriately seafaring level of seediness to it, it didn’t seem to warrant a “don’t go” label. The first thing we saw was a banner hanging that said “Welcome U.S. Navy!”

Larry and I picked a funny time to go to Busan. Somewhere, not too far away was the GEORGE WASHINGTON, a nuclear powered air-craft carrier that is currently serving as flagship while the combined forces of the U.S. and South Korea stomp their feet and make other very loud noises to show North Korea what’s what. Busan was crawling with U.S. Military.

For a time we walked with the Shore-leave “police” unit assigned to haul in the too-far-gone and misbehaving sailors on Texas Street. In a few hours that would probably be every sailor on the street, but at this point it all seemed pretty festive. There were Russian restaurants and bars with open doors. Signs written in Cyrillic hung here and there. Clubs pulsed to beckon the waterlogged and Russian whores stood by the doors. Definitely worth a walk through and it didn’t seem to be as far gone as Itaewon.

A taxi took us from Texas Street to Haeundae Beach. We were a lot further than we thought we were. Haeundae Beach was still hot and busy at 2am. Sailors and Koreans walked every which way, from bar to beach and back with a steady flow of booze.

We didn’t spend the night in a bar. Instead we classed it up by walking around the beach, dipping our feet in the freezing water and then spending the night drinking and laughing outside of a convenience store. At one point while we dangled our feet over a sea wall two Korean guys came up and asked if we had accomodations and seemed to be asking if they could stay with us. We replied that our accomodations were the beach and a bottle of horrid Mongolian vodka. Soon after, or during, an older Korean guy joined us and barraged us with drunken Korean and promptly ripped a fart and then we left.

We managed to stay awake until 6am, when we skulked into a BBQ restaurant in search of charred meat. A few minutes before we came across an old guy from the U.S. who was crossing the street with a pack of cigarettes. He told us that he had come from the GEORGE WASHINGTON and was also in search of meat.

“I just bought this Korean guy some cigarettes,” he said, “so hopefully that’ll work.” He then offered to buy us a drink or two with the rising sun but I got the impression we were both looking for different kinds of meat. We wished him luck and he to us and we parted.

The BBQ was horrible. Most likely, the older Korean women had served one too many drunk U.S. sailors and wasn’t too happy to see us walk in at dawn. The meat was pretty terrible and most of the food was tossed onto the table without so much as a smile. Scratch that, they were pretty openly pissed off at us for being there.

Bill paid, we found our way to the cool sand of Haeundae beach and built a couple of sand pillows and tried to sleep. Larry, was successful and was unconscious in seconds. I, on the other hand, have been having a lot of trouble sleeping on my bed, let alone on the sand. Ordinarily this would have resulted in me laying around irritated and grumpy. This time, though, I was rewarded with one of the funniest experiences of my life.

I saw the beach combers, 20 or so people dressed in orange with garbage pickers and little nets to clean the sand for the masses that would soon come, about a fifth of a mile away. I should have nudged Larry so that we might get out of their way or otherwise NOT look like a couple of foreigners sleeping in their clothes on a beach with no tent or sleeping bag- kind of gives off a bad impression. Instead, I said nothing pray Larry would not wake up and took out my camera.

It was everything I could have imagine. Larry laid like a little child as Koreans walked by and picked up the garbage that laid around us. They looked at us and gave us (me) a few laughs as I sat there taking photos and laughing in hysterics. One of them even had the amazing idea to pick up Larry’s glasses with her picker.

Alas, eventually they left and I had nothing to do but lay there and look out into the sea as the sun began to burn off the morning fog.  I guess it's not such a bad place to have insomnia...

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