Tokyo: The End (featuring Hello Kitty)

Oh dear god.

One of the criteria to judge whether or not a medium is obscene or just in bad taste is a lack of any culturally redeeming quality. Some things, not matter how vile or distasteful or generally sick, have some statement about our societies or culture as a whole. Some things just exist for no other reason than to be base or heinous. The guy from Two Girls One Cup violated obscenity law got hit with almost $100,000 forfeiture and 3 years of probation. Others have gone to jail and others should have gone to jail.

Which brings me to Hello Kitty Land.

I wouldn’t have ordinarily made an out of the way trip to HKL but the thing with travel and life in general is that we are all living “out of the way” sort of lives. Besides, Kelly is obsessed with Hello Kitty in much the same way that mammals are obsessed with air. I am fairly positive that one of the reasons she never got wise and ditched me while I was in Korea was that a long time ago I told her if we ever found ourselves in Japan we would go to HKL (actually called Sanrio Puroland).

She called my bluff.

It wasn’t terribly simple to get to the park but we managed. We hopped on one metro (our brief lives in Japan revolved around Shinjuku Station) and thanks to some girl with a decent understanding of English we were soon on another metro heading further out into Tokyo.

KH in HK's tub.

We rode that last metro for quite a while; long enough that I was quite positive we had missed the stop and was wondering how Kelly would take the news. We came so close, I would say, there’s some comfort in that.

I tried to tell Khall that I thought we would have to double back towards a stop that sounded remotely like the stop we wanted and she barely paid me any attention. She knew we hadn’t passed the stop we wanted and spent most of the rest of the ride looking like some manic psycho on the way to burn down some buildings.

Eventually, we stepped out of the subway, crossed the station, headed down a crowded street, hung a left and there it was: Sanrio Puroland, better known as Hello Kitty Land.

It didn’t look so horrible, I thought as we walked and Kelly squealed and spoke a mile a minute. From a distance it didn’t look too far off from Disney World. It had all the necessary requirements that allow the potential for a “forget yourself and get lost in your suppressed youth” sort of good time.

The main building seemed to pop out of thin air when you took that left. It looked like a cross between an amphitheatre and a casino. It looked decidedly unconventional, as all amazing theme parks should, and seemed to draw in everyone near by. The shops along the walkway sold food and all things Hello Kitty. All theme parks worth their weight should let out a sort of commercial sprawl that blots out any lame local specialties like paintings or sculptures. Beyond the gates was what I assumed to be the park grounds, where I would spend the day riding roller coasters and bumper cars and eating French fries. I didn’t even mind that the roller coaster would have a cartoon cat on its front.



Oh jeez..



Words cannot accurately describe my emotions when we stepped in and realized that the weird looking building was not only the main building, but also the entire park. Nor can they really accurately describe what it is like to walk into an “amusement” on the opposite side of the world expecting rides and games and carneys. Words also can’t accurately describe the nightmare of realizing your day was going to be spent in a poorly lit McDonald’s play place from hell.

Oh, wait, yes they can: What the f%@*?! would pretty much sum it up.

Hello Kitty Land is not a land, it is a giant building with hallways of magic (read: hell) that circle a huge fake tree scene in the center. Scattered about the floors are such amazing activities as make your own Hello Kitty being (through a series of semi-confusing mini-games) and Hello Kitty’s actual house. Then, of course there are multiple stores on every floor, vendors vending HK paraphernalia, and the worst food court known to man.

It wasn’t all bad, though. There is a ride. One ride. The entire park contained one ride. Given that it was fairly early on a week day, Kelly and I waited for about 3 minutes before we were sat in a log flume boat. All right, I thought. I love log flumes. Splash Mountain once broke down with me on it for a good 15 - 20 minutes and it was 15 - 20 minutes of heaven. Maybe there would even be a drop.

There were four of us in the boat. I was on the left, Kelly was on the right, and two women sat in front of us, the larger of the two also on the left. The result of this was that the boat at times seemed at risk of taking on water port side or straight up capsizing.

Immediately, the ride was in darkness and I heard the chains straining to pull us up a steep incline. I put my camera down and held onto the safety bar. I am no fool when it comes to log flumes, this was the start of something good and I wasn’t about to let my camera get soaked when we splashed down at the bottom. There was a twinge of excitement as we reached the summit and pointed towards exhilaration.

The clasp let us loose and for a second we begin to slide down. Immediately we were seized by some sort of braking mechanism and descended the hill slower than our ascent. Seriously?

As I tried to keep myself from falling forward and into the laps of a couple of strangers I saw what I was in for. Imagine, if you will, that Hello Kitty and all her strange friends invaded and conquered It’s A Small world and you pretty much get the theme of the one ride at the park.

We bumped along the river, always dipping towards the left, and got to see horrible animatronics buzzing around brightly lit pink scenes. The climax of the ride was actually being present as Hello Kitty married her boyfriend. I snapped some pictures as I wondered what on earth I had done to wind up in this particular circle of hell.

Hello Kitty Land

There was one other foreigner in the entire place. He was an older guy from the States who had the excuse of working there. He sold silhouettes. You could buy a pre-made profile of Hello Kitty, or a custom cut profile of yourself and Hello Kitty. If you chose the latter option he even had the decency to throw in the negative side of your profile for no extra cost on top of the $50 or so the thing actually cost us.

That he was a champion up seller or not, the guy was actually pretty cool. He cut out a fairly accurate profile of Kelly in a minute or so and told us his entire life story. He had been working for Disney. He was apparently the creator of most of their well known profiles, beloved by silhouette artisans everywhere before he made the move to Tokyo. Then he single handedly created the profile of Hello Kitty and his fame led him to stand day in and day out in some sort of fluffy pirate shirt on the main thoroughfare. Sarcasm and bitterness aside the guy was actually pretty impressive as far as where he had been and what he had done.



Yoyogi Park



So, that was Hello Kitty Land. It wasn’t the greatest place I have ever been but I guess you can’t complain too much when your girlfriend gives you a free trip to a theme park. In any case, I can appreciate her wanting to go given that it’s an obsession of hers. Hell, whenever somebody opens up Lord of the Rings Land or Star Wars World I will be there.



Shibuya Intersection



We stayed in Japan another couple of days before we made our way back to Seoul. We went to a huge park called Yoyogi Park in Shibuya. We walked around there for a long time before returning through the Shibuya Intersection. I don’t know the cross streets but if you have seen any modern movie based in Tokyo (Lost in Translation) you would know the place. Basically there is a mass of people going in every direction when the crosswalk signs light up to the backdrop of a giant video screen in a building.

In Seoul, we got to see a giant Lantern Festival and eat really expensive steaks at Outback Steak House which I made up for by buying a new guitar.

Kelly came back to Cheongju and got to see what actually happens in my classes. For instance, she got to see me spray kids with water, wrestle them, and pin them into corners and teach them while holding them in head locks. I was sad to see her go, but all in all it was an AWESOME vacation!

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Tokyo: Meiji Shrine.

Lanterns.

We passed into the cleared swatch of land adjacent to Harajuku as twilight faltered towards complete darkness. Stars are rare where I live in Korea and the smog of Tokyo seems also to make their viewing stars an impossibility.

There was light still as we crossed the footbridge to the Harajuku metro station and entered the clearing and followed the crowd into a narrow path of cleared trees. To our right were a couple hundred white, paper lanterns with black Japanese characters emblazoned on the front.

We walked for a ways and the trees cut off what was left of the twilight and plunged the path into muted darkness. It seemed hard to believe that we were still in Tokyo. The sound of traffic and the rattle of the metro was absent; cut off like the light by the trees. There was a silence about the place that separated it from the realities of modern day Japan.

The place was the Meiji Shrine.

If the trees seemed unnaturally plentiful (in that the place seemed almost totally natural, despite being in the heart of Tokyo) it is because they were arranged that way. Though we knew none of this until we left the shrine (we were, after all, just following a bunch of people for no discernable reason).

For the sake of getting what little history of the Meiji Shrine that I know out there: the shrine was built to honor Emperor Meiji and his empress sometime between 1915 and the mid to late 1920’s. This structure was then promptly decimated in a whole bunch of air raids. The shrine, as it is now, was finished in the late 1950’s.

Lamp.

What is most interesting about the shrine (to me, at least, most people would be impressed by the Buddhist presence and the temples and the sense of walking around a giant anachronism) were the trees. The forest was thick and overwhelming and dominate because it was made to be that way. People from all over Japan donated trees (evergreens) in such reverence to the emperor that the trees effectively serve as a barrier between the noise and pollution of modern Tokyo and the lantern lit paths of the Meiji Shrine.

Still, there was some pollution in the form of two tourists who didn’t actually know where the hell they were.

Kelly and I walked for a while from one building to another until it came that save a few electric lights and the general awareness of other tourists, our surroundings harked back to more traditional times. The darkness was overwhelming at times. As the last of the sun’s light fell, giant wooden structures with tiled roofs that were colorful and ornate in the day became masses of complete black. The only light to be had was an occasional lamp that gave of a dim yellow glow.

It was an effective mood setter.

Hand cleansing.

We passed what looked to be a huge fence-like structure with thousands and thousands of small wooden planks on which people from all over the world inscribed their hopes and dreams. We watched monks walk about their business in the darkness beyond where the general pedestrian was allowed to go.

Before we left we came across a place to cleanse our hands and mouths a small ceremony of respect to the sanctity of the shrine. Of course, we didn’t know this until after we poured water all over our hands and drank the stuff in the dark and looked like general morons. Apparently you cleanse your mouth my rinsing it with the water and spitting it back. If this is the truth we basically made out with the entire population of Tokyo.

On our way out I bought some ornate paper and cheap reproduction prints of some overused Japanese paintings. It seemed like a bargain at the time but given that I have the wrong conversion in my head I probably spent over $50 on some crappy paper.

In more recent news, this is Dr. Jones. Other than snot pouring out of his nose like Niagara Falls on occasion he is pretty much amazing.

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Japan: Harajuku

An alley in Harajuku.

Harajuku was, despite what Gwen Stefani wanted me to believe, not full of Japanese hipsters on steroids. Kelly and I climbed the stairs leading out of Harajuku station hoping to see the gothic lolitas, leather clad, blue anime-haired mentioned, well, everywhere that mentions Harajuku. No. That wasn’t the case and I was a little disappointed to tell the truth. I had brought my camera in hopes of maybe catching a couple of images worthy of FRUiTS magazine or at least prove I went to the original Hot Topic / Spencer Gifts.

“Well, it is Tuesday morning,” Kelly said. “They’re probably, you know, in school.”

I conceded to the fact but it was bitter. Kelly was more excited than I was as she seems to have grown up emblemizing the kind of fashion synonymous with Harajuku. So, I was disappointed for about half a second as we climbed the stairs of a footbridge connecting the station to a complex of shop filled alleys and streets.

  Tuesday morning or not Harajuku was hopping as all of Tokyo perpetually is. We stood for a time in a corner pressed up against the guardrail as cars whizzed below and people passed around us as though we were tiny rocks in a raging torrent. Opposite the alleys and streets seemed to be a wide clearing. Beyond it a couple of wide paths led into what seemed to be a deep forest in the middle of Tokyo.

“Something for later,” one of us said.

Harajuku brought an image of Boston’s Newbury Street on cocaine. There was the main road that went on for a ways but then was lost in the distance by turn and clothing racks. We walked into the street and found that seemingly every dozen feet or so there was an alley that led to another street full of jewelers and clothing outfitters.

In Korea, even in such developed places as Seoul’s Itaewon or Insadong there is the main drag, but the commercial or tourist influence ends there. The back alleys are filled with trinket shops with merchandise on a towel or down trodden and dingy vegetable vendors with goods sprawled out on dirty cardboard or the pavement itself. Harajuku is a maze of retail.

I can’t count how many times Kelly and I have gone to a mall (or Target) out of boredom. Before I left we would go to Target so that I could pick up some essentials but it was really just an excuse to go somewhere other than my house. We never bought anything.



That was pretty much the case in Harajuku; though it didn’t have that vaguely evil feel of going to Target just for fun. We went in a lot of little shops. They sold all sorts of conventional clothing and ridiculous accessories and everything in between.

After enough blind turns down narrow and over cluttered alleys we came again to the main road. People lined the sidewalk on benches doing nothing. They just sat there and waited for something, If this was Korea they would have all been smoking or watching TV on their phones and a few would be drinking. But, obviously, Japan is not Korea. It is never any good to compare two countries because whatever similarities are usually either coincidence or the results of years of invasion.



A shine in Harajuku.



The streets of Japan have Korea beat. That is one thing I will say. Japan’s streets and sidewalks are immaculate. There are no garbage cans anywhere but still you would be very hard-pressed to find so much as a cigarette on the ground. It seems that smoking is pretty limited in Japan as frequently one comes across a sign that seems to prohibit smoking on various sides of the street. Korea doesn’t have any trash cans either but it makes up for that by having garbage thrown literally everywhere. Smoking is dirt cheap and in open season in Korea, thus everyone smokes like a chimney.

We walked for a time down that main road and came eventually to some monstrosity of a toy store specializing in Peanuts toys and various Hello Kitty trinkets. We spent a long time in that store with Kelly buying basically everything and myself staring at a train set.

After we walked further on and left the novelty of the shopping district of Harajuku behind. As the day wore on the streets became more and more crowded; something particularly evident in the mass street crossings that look at times like 2 opposing forces clashing in battle.

One of the things I really appreciate about places like Japan and Korea is that while they are at the forefront of technology and seemingly modernity, they are both undeniably ancient. It is not difficult to wander around places like Tokyo and be overwhelmed by the sheer number of people oozing pure style next to you at all times and the constant presence of concrete and glass. It is only in places like these where it is just as possible to turn a busy corner and find some worshipped relic of a time long before the dawn of the U.S.

That was the case in Harajuku. We walked on for a while until we took a random left, walked up an alley and were greeted by a couple of small red pagodas that served as an entrance to a giant pagoda. The place was quiet and removed from the sights of the busy street we had been on (if not the noise). There was a wide open lot with stone paths that led to the large pagoda and off to the sides. Scattered about were large and full trees and basins of burning incense.

Working with bamboo.

Except for the noise of the street the place was quiet save the sound of a few men in blue erecting an arbor made of bamboo. Off to the left side was a cluster of engraved stones and statues with bright yellow flowers or the roaches of burnt out incense. Beyond them lay what I imagine to be a grave yard of sorts with dozens of tall wooden planks painted with jet black Japanese characters. This was my favorite place of them all.

 



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Japan: Part I

Shinjuku, Tokyo.

The next day we woke up refreshed. Scratch that. Kelly woke up refreshed. I didn’t wake up because I didn’t sleep. I simply ceased to stare at the ceiling. Planes have a way of reducing me mind to the rationality of child who swore that he heard something scuffling beneath his bed. Planes aren’t my thing.


That I ate a bunch of Dots and a Heath Bar right before bed probably played a significant role in it all, too.
Anyway, I did not die in the plane; nor did I lose my mind.

While the flight wasn’t entirely pleasant, and I wasn’t entirely relaxed, the 2 hours passed without any major issues. We boarded in Incheon amongst what seemed to be an entire battalion of American military guys with their camo bags. We found our seat in the middle row of seats. It wasn’t the ideal place and I felt on edge most of the way and more than a bit jumpy but that is what tends to happen when my rationality-barrier has been depleted by stuffiness and not enough sleep.

So, I kept my mind occupied the best that I could. After I released my armrest from the takeoff death grip I tried to focus on the TV. I watched a bit of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I don’t remember anything else because if I just sit back and watch things then my mind starts going to dark places. So, I spent about an hour and a half obsessively flipping through the music channels and heard California Girls by Katy Perry for what I think might have been the first time. I spent the last hour playing Hogs of War on my laptop and for that segment of time all was right with the world.

Narita International Airport, Japan

I get this odd sense of accomplished pride whenever I make it through immigration and set foot for the first time in a strange country. It seems like it wasn’t so long ago (and it really wasn’t) that I was awaiting the arrival of my first virgin passport. It was so empty, and it was so bland. Occasionally, while I have nothing to do, I will pull it out of my drawer in Korea and thumb through it. Obviously, every stamp is a memory and an adventure and all that clichéd but true stuff; but there is also a certain pride that goes along with it. I have a lot more of the world to see before I finally walk into my house in Shrewsbury but I have already seen places, met people, and had all these experiences that I never thought would actually happen a handful of years ago.

I changed 500,000 Won in Seoul and we began to blow through it immediately upon setting foot in Tokyo. Travel in Tokyo seems inordinately expensive when you currently live in a place that will take you across country for little more than 10,000 Won. Kelly, who had paid for and booked a hotel in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo, managed to get us aboard the airport limo that would drop us off in front of the Hotel Sunroute Shinjuku (or something like that). It cost us either 3,000 Yen each or for the two of us, I don’t really remember anymore, but either way 3,000 Yen has nothing in common with 3,000 Won. With Won, I tend to simplify and assume every 1000 is equal to about $1. The double conversions going on in my mind confused the hell out of me and I frankly have no idea how much anything actually cost. I think I spent $30 on paper in a gift shop.

Kelly and I have stayed in some phenomenally horrible hotels in the time that we have been together. There was the place in Hampton, NH that was maybe the size of a small dorm room with a crap bed and 1970’s faux wood paneling. There was the place in Lancaster, PA with the pool that “might be a bit short on chlorine” and was, in fact, totally green which made no difference to me because I jumped in anyway. So on and so forth.

The hotel in Shinjuku had a lobby. A lobby! It had a bunch of benches and sofas that sat around a fountain that glowed in the dim light. There were velvet ropes, luggage, elevators and a line of people in UNIFORMS behind a deep-dark wood counter. I never thought I would stay in anyplace with a genuine, matter of fact, lobby! The place also had a fancy restaurant / bar / café.

We didn’t do too much that first day except throw our bags on the floor and walk around.
Something I knew about Tokyo but failed to appreciate the truth of the fact is that Tokyo is huge. While Seoul is number two in the world as far as population, Tokyo comes in at number one by a pretty hefty margin.

The size is evident as soon as you set foot out the door. We walked around until the sun went down and noise and neon filled the night. Street crossings were like black and white exoduses and it took some work for Kelly and I not to get separated.

We stopped off at a dark little noodle house that was no bigger than my room with a couple of counters to sit at. The counter looked directly into the kitchen which was dark save for the flames of gas burners and the shadows of piles of fresh noodles that sat in a bowl next to a boiling pot. Metal containers held herbs, eggs and other ingredients.

We walked in pointing to photos on the wall and had already screwed up. Machines have already taken the jobs of waiters in Tokyo. The cook led us back into the night and pointed to a vending machine that sat beneath a sole light.

Kelly in Tokyo.

The machine had a few rows of photographs of various noodle dishes and the assorted sides they came with. So, with the guy standing there we inserted our money, hit a couple of buttons, took a seat at the counter at the kitchen and handed him our sheets of paper with our selections typed out.

A soba noodle dish with a savory pancake to boot for myself and an udon noodle dish with a bowl of what looked like vomit, but tasted amazing, for Kelly.

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Seoul: KHall Arrives

I spent a lot of the weekend a couple of weeks at Incheon Internation Airport. I turned up sometime around 5 with a rolling bag of clothes and electronic distractions and a backpack that held a smaller backpack that held my camera and lenses. It was like a really lame Matryoshka doll.


Whatever weak plan of action I stepped of the Cheongju - Incheon bus with involved checking into an airport hotel and ditching my bags. I was at the airport, meeting my girlfriend whom I have not seen in 7 months. The next day we would fly to Tokyo. I wanted to have a grand airport reunion and I didn’t want to be all hot and grimy from lugging around luggage for 3 hours or so before hand. I wanted to show off my new crappy prepubescent pubical-hair beard and slightly slimmer frame. I wanted her to come through immigration and see somebody who had adapted to life abroad. It’s hard to give the appearance of adaptation when you are pulling luggage, looking frazzled and ready to get the hell out.

KHall

Guess I should have actually made a hotel reservation.

On my own, I would have just squatted in the airport. I spent multiple days (not all at once) in Athens and about a solid day in Mexico City. But, Kelly was coming. Last time I saw her I was living off of a pretty low magazine wage and whatever I managed to scrape together with freelance work. I had decided that for the first time in my life, this was a no-expenses-spared sort of trip. It seems so long ago and another world away that I was ever so poor. It seemed so long ago and another world away since I had seen K Hall. I guess that was pretty much true.

In the end, I stood outside of immigration with my luggage sprawled on the floor around me. I waited as people came back home or stepped out to meet strangers holding signs. My favorite sign was taped to a pole: BOB SMITH: WALK STRAIGHT THROUGH THE DOORS TO THE BUS.

A bit earlier and further down the corridor I passed a man as he sobbed uncontrollably as his family looked on, not looking much better. I wondered how long he was leaving for or whether he was going to a hospital somewhere far away, or a funeral. I blocked it from my mind as I waited.

The most obvious difficulty in travel is the distance from loved ones. After a time it grows to be more than just a physical fact and a lesson in world geography. Time goes by and life continues on while we are gone; whether the place we are gone to is across the state or across the world. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily. It’s just different. It happens when you aren’t paying attention. There’s that hit of homesickness or that feeling of being so far away at the beginning of a trip but you adapt to it and you cope with it.

The person I was when I stepped through the same sliding doors I was waiting at now seems so different. I haven’t learned any massive life lessons and I haven’t had some huge philosophical growth, I just feel a little different. Growth through travel, I guess.

I have my own little world here. It’s temporary and the clock is always counting down on it, but it is an obvious truth. I have my friends here that bare little to no resemblance to my friends back at home. I have my habits, my little apartment that nobody from home had ever seen. I have this reality here that is so far removed from my reality in Shrewsbury, MA that my two lives don’t seem to really overlap. People at home, save regular phone conversations, stop being part of your day to day life.

That’s part of the reason why I was so nervous as I stood there waiting. It felt like that first date feeling in that battery acid seems to be pumping through your veins and that it feels nice and exciting but mostly you just want it to stop.

K Hall was the last person out of immigration. I was scared to see her. It seemed like it had been so long, despite talking regularly. Distance is hard. This trip had been a long time coming and I half expected that instead of actually stepping through the doors and into Korea (the one overlap in my past and present realities) she would vanish or at least be deported or something.

She wasn’t. She wheeled her red luggage around a crowd of people and over to me.

Sometimes you don’t realize how much you really miss your home until a piece of it drifts your way.



Anyway, we spent a night in the most expensive hotel we had ever stayed in together. It was an airport hotel that was 5 minutes from the airport. It was 5 minutes apparently if you sat on a plane going full speed and bailed after 5 minutes.

I tried to wow K Hall with my awesome knowledge of Korean formalities and greetings that starts with “hello” and basically ends with “thank you.” In my daydreams I imagined a gourmet dinner and hours and hours of conversation and stories. Reality wasn’t quite so dramatic but it was equally as nice. We watched The Office and America’s Funniest Home Videos in the hotel as Kelly fought the fatigue of traveling from Boston to NJ to Beijing to Korea while I ate a horrible cup of noodles with a toothbrush.



Things she brought me:

Dots

Everlasting Gobstoppers

Jujubees

Snyder’s Buffalo Sauce Pretzels

2 Heath Bars

A box of precooked bacon

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Korea vs Ghana

Well, it is the end of the line for the South Korean soccer team. I will not pretend that watching the World Cup in Cheongju has opened my eyes and converted me to the thralldom of soccer but it has provided me with loads of fun.


A Korean asked me atop the roof deck of MJ’s, an expat bar located in downtown, during the Brazil vs. Portugal game why Americans were so drawn to football while the rest of the world goes glossy eyed over the checkered ball and athletes that pay as much attention to acting as they do the game.

I mustered some terribly lame and fairly pretentious answer about it being a spectacle of controlled violence with enough testosterone to keep us warm against the falling winter.

Later on, as we were leaving MJ’s a girl from Philadelphia summed it up much more accurately.

“It’s the social atmosphere.”

That is what I will miss the most with the elimination of South Korea.

Hours before the game, I met up with a handful of fellow expats at one of the hundreds of barbeque restaurants of Cheongju. If you asked me the name of the place I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It is no exaggeration to say that nearly every street in Cheongju has at least one, if not many barbeque restaurants and they look just about the same: a dozen or so tables with holes cut into the center and a few dozen plastic chairs strewn about. There are times when the Cheongju night is ripe with the smell of burning meat.

It is, thus far, my favorite food here in Korea.

Barbeque in Korea is different than barbeque in the States. For one thing I have not seen a steak since I have been here and while I have seen hamburgers (or very horrible takes on what we would call a burger “I didn‘t know hamburgers were orange?”) they do not appear at Korean barbeque. Instead you are given a plate full of chopped raw meat, a million sides and a fire in the middle of the table.

The meat that you cook (by yourself though the waiter will usually come and replace the grate after you have succeeded in charring the meat and sending up amateur plumes of white smoke) is not limited to traditional cuts that are familiar to westerners. I’ve had thick slabs of lean and fat that resemble a giant’s bacon (pretty good), volcano hot chicken (amazing if you don’t mind sweating profusely), chicken anus (not so good) and pig organs (surprisingly delicious).

On this day we had pork. It is now one of my favorites.

The day had threatened and delivered rain off and on. A couple of times during the meal workers would rush to pull a canopy over the outdoor patios, killing any sort of breeze on a humid night and bringing on the dreaded spicy-food-way-too-humid dinner sweats.

With time to kill we found our way to another common sight in Cheongju: Garten Bier. In an odd sort of way this place reminds me of home. My girlfriend, while a full blooded American, was born and partially raised in Germany before moving to California, Texas, and finally Massachusetts. She has a passion for schnitzel and sausage.

While they do serve Koreanized sausages there does not appear to be any schnitzel at Garten Bier. In any case we got neither, instead we ate the traditional Korean soccer food of fried chicken and beer. The neat thing about this place is that each place at the table has a sunken cup holder that is kept chilled so that the hookah-like shaped glasses of beer are consistently frosty.

The original plan was to watch the game at Chunbuk Stadium. The place has been ground central for Korea’s World Cup fight. Chunbuk Stadium is located a whopping 3 minutes from my apartment and is less a stadium than it is a bunch of concrete bleachers surrounding a multi purpose field, where a screen has been erected on which to watch the games.

Earlier in the day I had scoped the place out to stave off boredom. At 3pm kids were carrying banners across the field, souvenir carts were already stocked and van upon van was unloading its goods (a massive amount of booze) onto the side of the road. It was looking like a good night.

The weather conspired against us, though and we didn’t end up at the stadium. Instead we ended up again on the roof of MJ’s with the place to ourselves with the exception of a few older Koreans who sat on a sofa beneath a canopy.

By the time we sat down Ghana had already scored. Most of the predictions floating around had Ghana taking the victory and Korea being eliminated. Of course, this is what happened but the game was not without its excitement. With each attempt on either net there were screams of hope and despair with at least a few people (and all of the Koreans) jumping from their water-logged seats.

At some point Korea scored but I didn’t see it. I only heard maddened screams as I stepped into a rooftop bathroom that smelled like a port-a-potty in the hottest part of hell.

The tie didn’t last long though, and Ghana’s next goal proved to be the last of the night. While Ghana rejoiced the Koreans atop MJ’s (and likely all about the country) smashed their glasses of beer to pieces on the floor.

There is a sense of heartbreak every time your team loses. This is also true with an adoptive team in a sport you really care very little about. When the players stopped running and moped off of the field they took with them the patriotism that won’t be seen until the next time around.

I remember watching the Red Sox take on the Yankees in the post season of 2003. Framingham State College and all of New England was galvanized one moment and distraught the next as we all saw that ball sail out of the field. It was over. Now the World Cup is over and the vevuzelas are silenced in the Land of the Morning Calm.

The group broke up and I ended the night playing Jenga and eating Nachos in another expat joint called Pearl Jam. Korea might have lost to Ghana, but I owned at Jenga.



Things I ate today: Kimchi mandu (dumpling), omurice (omelette and fried rice), sundae (blood sausage) and ttekbokki (rice cakes in a spicy red sauce with fish cakes).

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