Wandering Downtown

Cherry Blossoms.

A year minus a day or two I said my extended "so longs" to my girlfriend (at a train station), my sobbing mother (in my predawn livingroom), my less sobby sister (same room), and my dry-eyed father (amid exhaust and noise at the departure drop-off at Logan Airport). In a few days I say goodbyes that are likely to be permanent to all of my Korean friends.

I haven't thought too much about the real end of this Korea thing. Most of the time it seemed to be so far off that giving it too much thought wasn't worth it. Then, before I knew it, I didn't want to think about it because I knew it was right around the corner. Now that I have less than a week left in Cheongju; in this one room apartment with warped floors and no attached plumbing on the sink, I have no other choice.

I now realize that I basically have no departure plan. With preoccupations (the lost passport) and money issues with my school (with a dash of extreme procrastination thrown in) I have failed to book any hotels, looked into any activities or things to do on my trip. Hell, I haven't even booked my final ticket home yet.

The plan:

Leave Seoul on 4/25 and arrive at some point in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.

The next ticket I have booked leaves Bangkok, Thailand a couple of weeks later, give or take.

In the mean time I am spending a few days in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and MAYBE a brief trip in Malaysia.

I then fly to Barcelona, Spain to see my friend Jordi with whom I used to wait tables and be taken apart by customers routinely.

Then, I fly to Logan whenever I get a ticket and complete this around-the-world loop.

The River.

As for what I’ve been up to recently: nothing very productive. The cherry blossoms have come and have basically left. The days have been really nice in Cheongju, a couple I would dare say hot, so I have made time enough to walk along the river even though I usually end up in Home Plus just the same.

The Yellow Dust also came. It blows in from the industrial towns in eastern China as an off colored haze full of mercury and lead. Between that, the radioactive rain from the disasters in Japan, the over-reactive minds of Koreans when it comes to health, the news would have you believing Korea was one toxic heap at the moment. But, it isn’t. I don’t think. I will make a note to see if I have super strength before I leave.

I’ve seen some pretty cool things recently while walking around the river. While meandering around with my camera (soon to be upgraded!) I followed what sounded like drumming. The beats led me to the track near Downtown (or Uptown like I used to call it) where everyone skates or ride all sorts of inane, ass-backwards bikes.

Members of the Ajumma Army.

It was here that I saw a dozen or so ajummas marching around in circles, drumming in formation. There were some older guys and college students mixed in, all led by a young guy in some sort of fancy pants. I don’t know what they were doing but I guess they were practicing for some sort of traditional performance. Either that or the guy in fancy pants now has well disciplined army of ajummas.

Last Friday / Saturday and Saturday / Sunday I spent a lot of time at the bars with my friends here. We saw a band that played Oasis covers and they made me prematurely nostalgic for Korea. It is hard to imagine a Friday or Saturday that doesn’t involve the same four bars and my Cheongju friends. Heck, I still expect to see my friends who have left walk in.

On Sunday, after realizing that I was way too hungover to deal with the hell that is Home Plus on a Sunday, I walked a but further down the river than I had before. Where as traditional drumming led me to the Ajumma Army, old-school bob brought me to some festival at a Buddhist temple that I never noticed until that day.

I walked in and tables lined the courtyard. A few were covered with canopies as those sitting under it served simple Korean foods or made crafts. Across the dirt ground was a cluster of covered tables withh a half dozen families eating. Monks walked here and there. I could see shadows of people bowing in the main temple.

A Buddhist temple in Cheongju.

I lingered for a while there until an older guy, having something to do with the party, came over and talked to me for a while, asking if I wanted to eat something or anything else. I bought a bracelet and left as Louis Armstrong came on over the loudspeaker.

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Uptown and Downtown

I woke with a hangover on my second day in Korea and began to wonder what the hell I was doing here.

I dug the Korean cell phone I had been given at some point the night before out of the disaster that was my room and checked my text messages. The first was from Albert, saying that from now on we were family. The second was from Larry calling me a bitch for not coming over the night before.

Sometime after noon, I was met by Han and Boram who had been tasked with keeping me entertained for the day as I had no internet and no TV. Together we three walked into daytime Cheongju and I became aware of just how not small this town was.

The Rink in Uptown

There are two extremely happening places in this town, both centering around the universities of the area. First, we took a cab to Uptown. Uptown is dominated by a river and a park. The river cuts the city in two like a muddy Charles. Dotted along the river are sets of exercise equipment free to the public like some sort of South Beach perversion. For the most part the equipment served as very lackluster jungle gyms for little kids. Along the river bank is a giant blacktop rink that is perpetually overloaded with kids through adults on wheels of all manners. There is a little stand at which one can rent anything from a two wheeled skateboards and roller blades to bicycles. A couple hundred people with questionable balance and skill is something to see.

Spanning both shores of the river is a foot bridge that resembles the rib cage of a giant fish. One side of the bridge is red while the other is blue but the ribs do not meet in the middle.


“This,” Han tells me, “is a unity bridge. There are many through out Korea.”

The Unity Bridge of Cheongju.

The idea is that the bridge will not be completed and the two colors will not unite in the middle until the country is finally reunited with its brother in the North. Given recent events, this means that it will probably never happen. Near the far end of the bridge and across a path hangs a banner with the unaware photos of the sailors of the Cheonan; all killed by a torpedo that most likely came from the North. As it is, tensions are high and open war is always a possible reality.

We continued on until we were in the main part of uptown. It was overwhelming. Once you turned off of a road you were in a pedestrian-only street that looked like Newbury St. and Downtown Crossing on crack. Thousands of people walking this way and that. People in animal costumes beckoned you to whatever they were selling. Music from loudspeakers and girls in costumes yelling into microphones. At the end of the street there was an open-air fashion show! So much black hair and pale skin coming my way that I began to feel dizzy as I cut through them.

This was the first time I truly felt like a foreigner in a strange land and it will not be the last.

We passed street food stalls selling everything you have ever seen on No Reservations or Bizarre Foods. Smoke of a thousand different smells saturated the air, and everywhere I looked everyone was dressed in the hippest clothes. I was wearing jeans and a Star Wars t-shirt.

A few streets later we were sitting down to lunch. Kraze Burger. One would think it would be pronounced Crazy Burger, or at least phonetically, but there are apparently invisible accents on the a and e that makes it sound like Krahzay Burger.

What do Koreans like to eat when they are not eating fermented and pickled vegetables? Burgers and chili cheese fries. The only thing that is really worth mentioning here (I didn’t really plan on writing about cheeseburgers and fries in Korea) is that everyone ate their burgers with a fork and a knife. This is something I failed to notice until I had ketchup and mayonnaise all over my face. Actually, writing this reminds me of the time Hadley ate a hamburger and somehow got mustard in his hair. Thought I would share because it makes me happy. Sorry Hadley.

We sat in that place for quite a while talking and getting to know each other until it was decided that we would go to the movies at the cinema next door.

I do not recommend Clash of the Titans. I am happy to say that it was not depressing; my first night in college involved my roommate Kiel showing us SLC Punk and it bummed me out for like a week. What it lacked in depressing-ness it made up for in being a solidly horrendous flick.

After the movie we headed downtown, which was closer to my neck of the woods. A short taxi ride (which are insanely cheap here) and we were walking in the tangled streets of the Chunbuk district, named for Chunbuk University. Boram used to go to school here, and she was happy to take us on a stroll through the campus to the little pond she liked. The sun was setting and already college drunks had populated the far side of the pond. It was Saturday, after all, and some things are universal.

Downtown was a bit dirtier than uptown. It wasn’t down trodden by any means, but it was obvious that it catered to college students looking for cheap thrills and cheaper booze. Each street had bars offering everything from hole-in-the-ground dives to places advertising high-style beer (whatever the hell that is). Along with the propane fires of food vendors, the night was lit by game stalls. For 500W (about 50 cents), Han and Boram had me pull a tiny stub of paper out of a hundred other stubs in the hopes that I would win a little rabbit. What I would do with a rabbit had I won was beyond me but it didn’t come to that as I won a bouncy ball.

Finally, we stopped at a lounge called Seduce. It was a multi-floor place with no light, offering the standard food and drink. Here, we ordered drinks and a buffalo chicken salad.

It is funny how a familiar drink can make you feel a little bit more at home (and at ease) when you can recognize absolutely nothing around you. Thank-you Jack Daniels; I appreciate your friendship.

We talked for a long time. I asked questions about the school I would be working at with them and they put me at ease. The school, KHS, was new. My worries that I would be teaching a dozen or more kids were, despite the attempts of Albert, not going to happen anytime soon. In total 15 kids attended the Hagwon and the biggest class size was only three. The relief this brought me was immense.

“Generally,” Boram said as she picked at the salad, “the kids are very nice. They will have a hard time understanding you because they are young but they are nice.”

“There are three boys that are horrible though!” Said Han and they both laughed. “You will meet them anyway!”

Another round of drinks came, this time a Zombie for me, and we continued talking. Try as I might I could not eat much of the salad. I love buffalo chicken but this was not buffalo chicken. It was covered in some sort of honey mustard sauce and ranch, but this is not why I wasn’t eating.

Boram asked me why I didn’t eat much and I told her that it took me a long time to get my appetite back after I went to some place, any place, that was not my home. It is lame, I know, but I have a tendency to get extremely homesick. Call me a wuss, call me a momma’s boy, call me anything but it is what happens to me. At this point I must say that I was doing pretty well, all things considering. I had not been able to speak to my family or my girlfriend since I had arrived but I felt…. OK. I felt better than I thought I would. Besides, after eating what I ate at home I was in no danger of using my fat reserves all in one day and starving to death.

“Thomas,” Boram said, “we want you to know that we know how you feel. We have both gone away to another country for a year to learn English so if you ever need to talk, please talk to us.”

“Yes,” added Han, “I went to Canada for one year and the two things that I could not handle and missed too much was my mom, my mom and food, ha!”

Here the night ended, or rather here my night with them ended. They walked me to a PC Bang (a place to rent super-powered gaming computers by the hour in a room full of WOW addicts) and I finally sent word home that I was OK.

So, to my room I went, and I did feel OK.

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