Wangsimni

The Fork at Wangsimni.

I leave my tiny apartment in the neighborhood of Wangsimni in Seoul at 9:20am at the latest.  It takes ten minutes to walk the couple blocks to my school.  This is the latest I can leave.  I try to leave earlier but the reality is that it doesn’t matter: whether I arrive on time or early I sit at my desk and do nothing.  I do not utilize the 30 minutes of prep every morning. 

The route is a straight shot.  I hit the pavement, turn left outside of my building and keep walking.  Eventually I cross an intersection.  The intersection serves is in essence an unofficial border in much the same way Charles Street is the border between Beacon Hill and Back Bay in Boston.  From the other side of the intersection I cross another street, shuffle past a convenience store, down some stairs, into a narrow and dirty alley, and then into school.

My commute is no different from that of almost any member of any workforce on earth.  What makes this morning jaunt worth mentioning is that I am not from these parts.  In a previous life I lived in the homogenized borough of Gangnam.  My daily walk then involved Starbucks, Smoothie King, and Burger King.  Though my life is dirtier and less affluent, it is also more valuable to me as an observer.

I step outside my building and it is raw.  This is no surprise: my bathroom is part of a poorly made addition in my building and there is no insulation.  If I hang my head out of my apartment and look at the outside of my bathroom I see a window that holds in some Styrofoam and cardboard.  This is the only insulation I have in that room.  If it is freezing outside then there is a layer of ice on my toilet and I shit with my hat on.  I could see my breath in the bathroom.  I already know that it’s cold outside. 

Across the street is a small hair shop that caters to old men and women searching for something with no frills apart from some curlers.  It is empty at this time in the morning. 

A man walks through Wangsimni.

Next door to my place is a butcher, one of many in the neighborhood.  I live in a marketplace.  Butchers dot my daily life here.  They display their meat, bones, and insides on counters and in the open air.  On my way home at night the proprietors sit amongst hooks, knives, and saws as they watch Korean dramas on old TVs jammed into the corners of harshly lit showrooms of sorts. 

The butcher next to me is quiet as he cuts spring onions on the street.  He looks at his knife and to a pile of green stems lying on the wet pavement.  It’s tame.  The other night I wandered out to a steady thud to find him chopping the giant, lifeless head of a pig down the middle with an axe.  At home in the States butchers use saws or cleavers, butchers paper and gloves.  He used an axe.  The street was covered in skull fragments, brain, and gore. 

This morning, it’s only onions. 

I pass three food markets.  Boxes of cabbage, radishes, bananas, oranges, bean sprouts, and about a dozen vegetables whose name I have no idea are being pulled out onto the curb.  One grocer maintains a giant tent at the entrance, giving it the appearance of a perpetual east-Asian bazaar.  I pass them and see the first bit of fresh seafood of the day.

Squid.  Squid is a part of my daily life.  If it isn’t served at school for lunch or at the bar for anju (the necessary drinking appetizer at the local pubs), consumed by my girlfriend, or stockpiled by my students then it is a guaranteed part of my morning walk.  They swim in dirty tanks.  They lay in clumps in buckets.  They fester in cardboard boxes covered in ice.  Their grey, white, and silver bodies glisten in the morning light.  It is too cold to smell much but come nighttime even the cold can’t keep their stink down.

Squid have good company.  At one stall I pass by squid, crabs, scuttle fish, octopus, shrimp, snails, flatfish, mackerel, and a dozen other things I don’t want to see sitting in their own post-mortem slime right after I ate my coco ball cereal. 

The street glistens for the whole walk down this stretch.  Water leaks from bubbling tanks holding flounder and eels.  Vendors spray yesterday’s scales, guts, and general grime from their area.  Oil and blood from the butchers flow down the curve of the street and into the gutter.  Every wetness and trickle contains the insides of any manner of things you don’t want on the bottom of your work shoes. 

I pass the claw game.  I pass the game that requires the player to operate a piston that will hopefully knock free a little trinket.  The prizes range from stuffed animals, mp3 players, Zippos, playing cards, and vibrators.  There are all in the same machine.  It is also possible to win a pack of batteries for said vibrators.  I pass five of these machines.

The vendors operate in all manner of structures.  Most maintain wooden shelves of varying levels of utilitarian decrepitude.  Thought in these places is not put into décor or into making something more appealing.  The most common element in the local motif is blue tarp or pressure-treated hunks of 2x4.  One hunched old woman sits day and night on a tiny grey blanket selling carrots and other vegetables.  Her goods sit on crumpled and saturated newspapers of Korean script.  Her only shelter from the weather is the remains of a cardboard box that she has arranged as a wall to separate her body from the heaps of wires, trash, and filth of a dark alley.  Just outside of the market is a brothel.

A wagon stocked with cardboard.

This woman squats for hours looking straight ahead at the mandu shop.  Steam rises from the jutting stall of dumplings.  The proprietor of this stand sells pork, kimchi, and vegetable mandu.  There is a small selection of steamed buns and large slabs of rice cake to be had, but her main business is in cheap dumplings.  It is possible to sit in her florescent cubicle of a dining room in the back and watch a flickering TV as you eat but nobody but old men half drunk on rice wine indulges in this luxury.  Mandu is a utilitarian meal best enjoyed to go.

Towards the end of the walk I pass a stretch of building populated by stores selling pots, pans, bug killer, floor mats, flowers, cutlery, candy, and all manner of junk.  Across the street a bent old man is pulling the covers off of the same Styrofoam boxes of slimy fish he was trying to sell last night when I made the return trip at 7pm. 

I pass by empty restaurants that will be teeming with the locals in a few hours.  Now empty tables will be teeming with men and the occasional woman grilling pork bellies, intestines, kimchi, and garlic.  Soju spills early in these places and come night time the entire neighborhood will reek of sizzling meat and oil. 

In Korea the difference in fare between breakfast and every other meal is thin if not, at times, entirely nonexistent.  Small restaurants that are hardly bigger than the greasy kitchen populated by one or two wrinkled old women are already full.  Men and women slurp noodle soups, scald their immune mouths on boiling red and brown stews.  The most common fare in this neighborhood is sundae gook.  It is a soup not made of vanilla ice cream but of a kind of black blood sausage filled with cellophane noodles.

Fish drying in the sun.

Before I make it to the intersection and into the part of Seoul that looks no different than the working class districts of Boston, of New York, of Worcester, of any city anywhere in the world I pass one of the dozens of fried chicken joints in the market.  The windows are dark now but in a few hours bones will be crunching and oil will be dripping from the fingers of the classiest Samsung execs.  An empty counter sits in the open air.  It is abandoned but soon there will be a couple dozen chicken feet steaming in the cold, coated in a spicy red sauce.  Those that enjoy them will eat them with clear plastic gloves and let the tiny bones fall out of their mouths as they enjoy the succulent but tiny amount of gelatinous meat on them. 

The last stall I pass sells tteokbokki, a kind of rice cake not unlike gnocchi that is braised in a sweet and spicy sauce.  It is popular with everyone in Korea.  Students and business people, local vendors and old women will stop by for a glutinous snack and walk away with a thick red mustache in an hour’s time.  It is likely that I myself will drop a dollar and walk away with a cup full of the rice cakes, fried mandu, and sundae to snack on while I walk back.

After I pass a Dunkin Donuts, cross the first intersection and then another on my way to do battle with my lot of kindie students.

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Angor Wat, Cambodia

DJ Camera and the manager of the Noura Motel were kind enough to set me up with transport to and lodging at Siem Riep, a few hours north of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. So, early the next morning I was picked up in an overcrowded van and made my way to one of the most beautiful places I had ever been to.

The way to Siem Riep is gorgeous and at times difficult. There are valleys of deep green with scattered bodies of water that are no deeper than a glorified puddle. Water buffalo and other manner of livestock graze, drink, or block the road. Then there is the ever present presence of extreme poverty; worn bare feet walking in the dust on the side of the road, shanty towns made largely of tin and blue tarps. Emaciated dogs darted into the road every so often.

Still, I was thankful that the trip did not take so many hours as the bus trips I had made in recent weeks as I had been jammed into seat that would not have enough leg room for a small child and the air vent was apparently just for show.

The van arrived at a dirty but quiet bus station in Siem Riep sometime around noon. The town seemed a good deal smaller than Phnom Penh, but still it was overwhelming to be hit by the barrage of hawkers and tuk-tuk drivers.

This time, it had all been planned in advance. A squat man, similar in features to DJ Camera but a good deal younger and less enthusiastic, approached me from the shade of his cart.

“Thomas?” He asked.

“Yes.”

“Ok, I take you to the hotel.”

We drove through the streets and it became apparent that I was a long way from Phnom Penh economically, if not distance-wise. It looked -how do I say this without coming of as insulting or belittling- bland. To be honest, I appreciated bland. The level of poverty was nowhere near as apparent. The landscape was not as impressive and rough as Phnom Penh, but it maintained the sort of charm that comes with a small town in New Hampshire, or Vermont. It had that feel that true, it wasn’t polished, but nor was it rough by any means. It was worn but comfortable.

The hotel I stayed at was the nicest place I stayed throughout the entire trip in that it was a characterless, uniform hotel that I have stayed in dozens of times before. There was no dirt, no grime, no prostitutes and no beggars meandering around. There was a little restaurant that served mediocre food, a small in-ground pool that I meant to use but never got around to it, and an actual reception desk. My room was large and unassuming. Further, the manager at Noura had gotten me a good deal and I was paying only $25.

Truth is I didn’t know very much about Angkor Wat. It was not the purpose of my going to Siem Riep. I went to Siem Riep because a lady in Vietnam told me that I didn’t want to spend too much time in Phnom Penh and that I might become bored or dead. So, when DJ Camera suggested it and mentioned Angkor Wat, I figured I should go.

Sometimes in travel, everything just works out.

My tuk-tuk driver drove me a handful of kilometers outside of the city. We passed what seemed to be a university and came to forested land. At a kind of toll booth I spent a good $30 on an entrance ticket to Angkor Wat. We then followed the narrow roads that wound around the edge of a forest. It was here, at the edge of the jungle that I saw what might rank as one of the highlights of the entire trip: wild monkeys!!

I saw wild monkeys!

I almost flipped the tuk-tuk whipping around to see them sitting there. I was hoping they might do something funny like steal somebody’s glasses, hell, I would probably laugh if they stole my camera, but they just sat there eating. Still, totally awesome.

The complex of Angkor Wat is massive. It sits behind a moat and is surrounded by jungle. Outside are throngs of people: vendors, beggars, scammers, tourists. My driver parked his tuk-tuk amongst hundreds of others, warned me not to buy anything and soon I was off.

I didn’t know much about Angkor Wat and still, this remains the same. I could include some facts here but that would all come from Wikipedia, and what is the sense in that? The important things:

-It is the largest religious building in the world.

-Its grounds are expansive.

-It is still a place held sacred by monks who make regular pilgrimage.

This is what I saw:

I sat for a while on a stone wall overlooking the structures across the moat taking photos. Aesthetically, if Angkor Wat has a theme it is contrast. Ancient stones sit atop deep green grass with patches of burnt dirt. All of this is reflected in the greenish waters of the moat.

I spoke for a time with a Khmer man. He asked if I spoke Khmer and I told him that I didn’t. He asked if I spoke French and for a time we spoke in broken French. The man was this warm, timid, meek character. He asked why I was here, where I had been, and then if I could give him any money. I gave him what I could, which was admittedly not very much, but he let me take his photo.

Across the moat is a photographer’s haven. The very stone these massive buildings were made from puts focus on their age. The darkness adds to shadow and gives everything this almost mystical quality. On the foot path, green grass pokes out.

There is a pond some ways into the complex. On one side is a kind of bazar populated by over-aggressive vendors vending overpriced merchandise. If you refuse to buy a painting they will try to sell you a Pepsi.

A canoe sat on the shore, tied to a kind of palm. About the pond nude children ran about as their parents begged the hundreds of visitors for change. A horse in elegant and festive dressings stood tied to a post. An Indian woman crossed in front of all of this and the crumbling buildings in the distance. She was dressed in a flowing gown of bright colors that contrasted with her skin, and for a minute I forgot what country I was supposed to be in.

Inside the main building are both empty, forsaken corridors that are empty and dark save echoes from afar and light from some stone cut window, and courtyards filled beyond capacity. Across, a group of children dressed in shiny soccer uniforms of every color of the rainbow pose for photos against the dark stone and shadows. The flow stops as people photograph them. The occasional lone child, dressed in red or blue darts around a corner or is stopped for a photograph. Then, a man asks for a donation for the orphans- smartest scam ever.

In the main courtyard, a line stretches almost full-circle around a great tower. Visitors climb to the top and then crawl down a set of metal and wooden stairs that make for better chances of survival than the crumbled steps beneath them; still, some are going down on their ass.

I do nothing but wander and sweat and click the shutter of my camera and dread the day I have to go through all of these images. I wander to every corner of the obvious compound and marvel at the age of the place. It is that nice sort of attraction that does its job by making you feel insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Every now and again obvious bullet holes dimple the stone, a product Cambodia’s past and present conflicts with Thailand.

The last photo I make is of a young monk in bright orange robes standing against stone carvings. I count my blessings and leave.

In the hotel I watch, of all things, the Red Sox because NESN is playing on Cambodian TV. I also become aware that I forgot to close my window and that there were now hundreds of bugs flying around.

The next day I went to Thailand.


**For more photos go here

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