LoLifornia Beachee

The Summer Finals for the Korean League of Legends division (which feature some of the best players in the world) were happening ON A BEACH in Busan during one of my last weekends in Korea and, obviously, I had to go, and also obviously, they had a K-Pop girl group kick the whole thing off with a performance that nobody really cared about. K-Pop performances : any event ever in Korea :: The Star-Spangled Banner : sporting events in the US. It’s a truly awkward thing to witness. There was a ton of people at this thing. Like, more than one would expect. Our seats were really good (they grouped all the foreigners together in a surprisingly decent section – you know, for foreigners) and we were able to leave between matches to go get beers and food, so it ended up being a really enjoyable evening, even if I’m not a good enough player to fully appreciate all that was going on.

Here’s what the beach (Haeundae Beachee) looked like a couple hours before the matches started:

In my heart, I was rooting for KT Arrows, but on the back of my hand I was a Samsung supporter.

The production was as dramatic as possible, with hype dudes, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of lighting equipment, overglorification of the teams competing, and a drone with a camera getting shots of the beach like this one:

It was quite the event. The matchup in the finals was KT Arrows vs. Samsung Blue (KT is a cell phone service provider while Samsung is a cell phone manufacturer. Both companies sponsor multiple teams.). Samsung White was a heavy favorite. The teams were sitting in bunkers underneath the screen and they’d discuss the match with their coaches between games.

This is one of the players reacting to the teams that’d just been selected. The crowd would cheer whenever a champion was selected. It was surreal.

Turn on the bright lights, and all of the other lights.

In-between-game drama (probz just got destroyed by Maokai):

In the end, KT Arrows, the underdog, was victorious. Korea, like the US, loves a winner, so the majority of people in the crowd was rooting for Samsung, but there was still a pretty big ovation during the trophy ceremony. The winning team from this tournament accumulated a bunch of points in the incomprehensible Korean league rankings system but did not end up qualifying for the World Championships (Samsung White, however, qualified, and got pretty far, but Samsung Blue was the ultimate victor).

The next morning I had to get up way too early to go to California Beachee, a water park north of Ulsan, to ride rides and scope out babes. Here I am enjoying meal with Jon Wong, one of the teachers at my school.

California Beachee is a small-ish water park in which everyone has to wear a life preserver and a hat (thus the hats) at all times. There are hourly K-Pop performances, obviously, and its food is not obscenely overpriced. I saw one other non-Korean person there and he would not high-five me. Whatever.

The park has a bitchin’ tsunami-themed tunnel ride. We went on that multiple times. And its log flume is intense (for me, at least). The best thing, though, was when I got put in a group with three college-ish girls to ride a tornado sort of thing and we got stuck near the bottom of the ride because I was so much heavier than them and we needed to be helped along by one of the attendants. Never had I felt so unskinny.

We ended up leaving the park in the early afternoon because it was cold-ish and a little rainy and the lines were crazy-long, but we packed as much water-related fun into hours as we possibly could have, so it was a good day.

THANKS, CALIFORNIA BEACHEE.

It’s been just over two months since I left Korea, which is a weird thing to write and a weirder thing to experience. My time there was, no doubt, a very important part of my young emotional story, but right now, as I sit at my desk in my room in my parents’ house in Massachusetts, it feels like it never even happened, like I only dreamt of going there. Korea feels as distant as it did before I left (geographically, and, like, emotionally).

My brains have gotten used to being back in the US of A way more quickly than I thought they would. (And, I mean, of course they have – I’ve been in Massachusetts for like 97% of my life, so.) A thing that eased the transition was the fact that absolutely nothing changed about Worcester while I was gone beyond the wings place on Park Ave going out of business and Santander seemingly taking over every available building and advertising break on the radio. It’s a little silly to expect anything to change in a year, but I don’t know. I was kinda expecting it to (maybe because so much happened to me during the year). Which is not to say that the stagnancy is a bad thing. It’s really nice to be able to go to the Gold Star and know that it’s going to be cheap and that some of the silverware isn’t going to be clean. I really, really missed so much of this place and if a bunch of it had changed it wouldn’t have felt as home-ish.

And, really, I didn’t change very much either. I did some cool shit, sure (nearly dying while riding on the backs of motorcycles in Bangkok?!), but the only discernible difference between Pre-Korea Brian and Post-Korea Brian is that the latter says ‘but lol in Korea they do it like this lol,’ much to everyone’s annoyance. Most people don’t care about Korea and certainly don’t care that you were there, and certainly certainly don’t want to read a goddamn retrospective blog entry about your time there. If your friends and family were interested in it, they would have been checking out all the shit you constantly posted on social media while you were there, and most of them don’t, now, want to hear about the time you saw a dog wearing sunglasses riding a moped in Daegu any more than you want to hear about how Dave saw a dog with a scarf catching a frisbee in Northampton. But still, when you’re on the plane heading back to where you’re from, you’re kind of expecting everyone to drop everything he’s doing and meet you at the airport and throw confetti and take pictures with you and update statuses and yell to the rest of the people at Buffalo Wild Wings that THIS FUCKING GUY, THIS FUCKING GUY WENT TO FUCKING KOREA. KO-RE-A. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT SHIT? because you did a THING. You went to a place and did a thing and you deserve praise. But going to Korea ain’t that sort of thing. Teaching English there is a good way to be able to travel around Southeast Asia and get paid to get hammered most nights. It was a challenging thing to do, at first, and it was important, personal-growth-wise, but beyond that, it had very little effect on things, and certainly not a praiseworthy effect on things. The increased numbers of likes you got on all your facebook posts because you were doing something interesting relative to the malaise of doing actually difficult things every day were the only positive feedback you’re really gonna (or should) get for going there (In my case, it was most definitely worth it – I got like 50 likes when I changed my profile picture to one of me standing in a field of flowers in Gyeongju. FIFTY.).

But okay, you gotta be left with something significant after a year there. It sure felt important when you were there. You’ve obviously already forgotten all of the Korean you learned, so it ain’t that. I think the real important thing to take away from a year in Korea, at least in my case, was a feeling of being marginalized HOLY SHIT WILL YOU UNROLL YOUR EYES FOR LIKE TEN SECONDS AND HEAR ME OUT. I was the only non-Korean person on whichever bus I was on or in whichever building I was in, save the foreigner bars downtown. And that aloneness was really strange for me (this is a different aloneness than sitting in your room by yourself playing League). That feeling of aloneness was reinforced constantly, with people making sure I knew I was a foreigner every time I did anything. There were instances of outright discrimination (Koreans Only bars and clubs, I’m lookin’ at chu) and then cases of social dickishness (my co-worker’s friends refusing to hang out with us because I was a foreigner). Trying to get anything done banking or healthcare-wise done was incredibly difficult, even beyond the language barrier, because of notions of how foreigners are different than Koreans (obviously there were some exceptions to this – my dentist was great!). You get used to it, but ugh. It’s no fun to feel like that.

In Korea, the hierarchy, from highest to lowest, goes something like: Samsung, Rich Korean Males, Old Korean Males, Poor Korean Males, Old Korean Women, Rich Korean Women, Eatable Animals, Pets, Poor Korean Women, Children, Hyundai, Poor Dogs and Cats, Foreigners. I got to feel kind of what it feels like to be a non-White-male in the US for a little while, is what I’m saying, and that perspective was and is really valuable (though obviously I had the option of leaving that culture and so my experience was certainly not on the same level of a person’s whose entire life has been spent in such circumstances). Also, I know the patriarchal bidness is real bad in the US, but holy crap, HOLY CRAP, the US ain’t got nuthin’ on Korea. Women are only valued, at least by the people I talked to, for their physical appearance, youth, and cleaning and cooking abilities, and the most attractive job a woman can have (like, most marriageable) is a school teacher. Like, I know shit in the US sucks for women, too, but Korea has some very 50s stuff going on as its status quo, despite currently having a female head of state (It, like any other, is a complex place and I don’t mean to say that it’s all backwards, but most people I talked to had some troubling ideas about the place of women in society.). Also, age is really important in the whole thang they got goin’ on (you aren’t allowed to make any decisions unless you’re over, like 80), and it’s really, really, really important in choosing a wife; if you’re an unmarried woman over thirty in Korea, your life is probably going to be really rough. The US obviously luvz youth, too, but I think Korea luvz it a little bit more; when people in the US are asking each other about a girl one of them is interested in, their first question is often ‘Is she hot?’, whereas in Korea the first question seems to often be, ‘Is she young?’ And, like, the two are intertwined anyway, wherever, so the distinction isn’t particularly important, but good lord is it an age-obsessed place (so turning thirty while there was peculiar).

But okay so the point here is that everything sucks for anyone who isn’t a male and white and young anywhere in the world and that sucks and the thing I’m kind of celebrating here is me feeling uncomfortable on a bus and it’s idiotic to claim that people giving me weird looks is somehow a life-altering, formative experience, BUT I think that was very close to important, developmentally, and worth reporting, maybe, and will at least aid me when I’m put in situations where empathy and compassion are helpful (though how much growth I experienced, intellectually, with respect to gender issues or otherwise, I don’t know – probz not much, if the recent conversations I’ve had are any indication).

(Note: My time in Korea was largely an extremely positive experience, but I’ve discussed the really good stuff in detail in previous posts, so I had to balance things out a little.)

I think writing about my time in Korea is coming out as a garbled mess because that’s sort of how it sits in my brains. It was a lot of stuff squished into a year and I’m not sure what to do with it, now. While I was there, time would pass quickly for a week, then molassesly for the next, and the next month it would feel like it was a total waste of everyone’s time and money for me to be there (my co-teachers would’ve rather had a dog there, most of the time), and then I’d be on top of a mountain drinking soju with a guy and feel like it was the best thing I’d ever done, and the whole time I was there was like that, all dilation-y and muddled with spikes of joy (ain’t talkin’ about syringes). The things that most often poke out from that achronal goop are the relationships with the people I met; I met some truly fantastic people while in Korea. What I miss most is not the food (totally overrated, guys – I lost like ten pounds, mostly because of the tentacle-heavy school lunches) or the kindnesses afforded to me by strangers or the gorgeous scenery (SHOUTOUT TO DAEWANGAM PARK) or the excessive drinking. I miss all of the friends I made (even Roy) so gosh dang much, more than anything else. We became so close! I think those friends will be the kind that keep in touch forever (or at least I hope so – it’s only been two months and already we hardly talk – gah!). The night I left was one of the most painful things I’ve gone through. Like half of my heart is still at Sticky Fingers. It really felt like I was making a mistake and sometimes it still feels like that. Teaching in Korea is a really good life, if you can get past all its not-so-great elements, so it’s an incredibly difficult thing to leave. But, in the end, it felt like I was sort of running from all the problems I had going on before I left, so I had to bounce.

My heart, though. MY HEART. 😦 😦 😦

😦 😦 😦

If I look drunk it’s because I was:

DOKDO FOREVER

I avoided posting pictures of the kids I ‘taught’, generally, because people get all weird about that (OMG BRIAN THEY ARE NOT ANIMALS IN A ZOO), but here’s one:

I’m really glad I lived some place besides Massachusetts for a year and I’m happy that place was Korea. I now both value what I have here more than I did before I left and have a better understanding of the incredible things that exist in the world beyond my hometown. Korea is a place that continues to undergo a crazy amount of change (most of it for the better) and it was wonderful to get to experience a place in such flux. No matter the place, though, the place ain’t all that important. People are people and they are complex and spectacular and worth getting to know and they make the place what it is.

Id est, Korea: good. People I met in Korea: great.

So concludes the Brian Does Korea blog (probably).

Tokyo Police State Club

My life, like many of yours, drastically changed a few months ago (has it been that long already?) when the world ripped my umbrella from my hands, then rained horrors, lost innocence, and rain upon me. Umbrellagate changed everything. It forced us to reconsider our notions of possession and comfort. We had to confront the nature of what it is to be without, to need and not have. I wish we didn’t have to live in a world in which umbrellas are stolen, but that is the world in which we live. Japan has developed a way to combat umbrella theft, though:

UMBRELLA LOCKS. These golden locks were in the lobby of our hotel and could have saved me from so much suffering. Where were you in my time of need, umbrella locks? Why did you not keep the umbrella-stealing wolves from the door? O, come to me in another life when I still have an umbrella and a will to live. We are the same, you and me: we both just want to keep umbrellas from harm.

I’ll see you in another life, umbrella locks, when we are both umbrellas.

We (Jules and I) didn’t have very much time in Tokyo (and even less after the four hours I spent expressing my admiration for umbrella locks to passersby – MOST EXCITING PART OF THE TRIP, SO WHATEVER), but we did really well with what we had, I think. On the way to our first hotel (love-motel-ish place near our fancy hotel) we passed by a Denny’s and vowed to not go there. The next day we absolutely did not go to Denny’s and instead went to a vegetarian-focused kaiseki place called Nagamine that the internet said was really, really nice and it ended up being really, really nice. At the restaurant we got a private booth kind of thing and our lunches were served in furniture. Here’s mine:

And here’s what it looked like with most of it opened up. So neat! There were like a dozen different dishes with interesting flavor combinations and lovely textures. And obviously the presentation was dope as hell. If I could always eat lunch out of hobbit-size dressers, I would.

Jules got the version of the meal without fish and with fewer drawers. Also, this picture makes it look like we were eating in an interrogation room – I assure you that we were not. But, also, if there’s a place that serves you food like this while you’re being interrogated I’m gonna head there and commit so many crimes cuz goddang it was great.

It was WhyDidYouGoToJapanInAugust degrees outside, so we hung out at the hotel for a while before heading to the Tokyo Park Hyatt to go to New York Bar, the bar that was featured in Lost In Translation. We decided to go there because we are douches and it was supposed to have a great view of the like thirty cities that make up Tokyo. In order to get to the New York Bar, which is on the 52nd floor of the hotel, you must go up a number of elevators. Upon exiting each elevator, you get that ‘I am not wealthy enough to be here’ feeling, but trudge onward, pulled forward by the promise of a ‘stunning’ view and some stockings to lip or whatever.

The journey up to the New York Bar, aside from the elevators, consists of a series of rooms that seems to really want you to know that it is a nice place. There are lots of sculptures and Arts and books and whatever else rich people like and it’s all very quiet and kind of calculated and sterile and it feels not unlike the post wormhole, pre-star-child portion of 2001 (though in our case we were transitioning from people who were very content getting many of our meals from 7-Elevens to those who don’t mind spending a bunch of yen on a martini).

A sculpture that says, ‘if you can’t comprehend this, turn back now, pleb!’

Can you spot the temple guard?

‘We have so much money that we keep a restaurant fully stocked and staffed and don’t even care if we get any customers – how many restaurants do you have?’

And then there’s a library kind of thing for no goddamn reason.

After checking out the view – which I’ll get to in a moment – we got Manhattans because duh. They were good.

Now, cities look cool at night as, like, a rule. But Tokyo is different, or at least this view of it is. Tokyo from the New York Bar goes on forever. It’s a city (or group of cities) massive beyond comprehension and this view of it makes you want to cry. It’s Bladerunner. It’s Tron. It’s the product of the combined efforts of millions and millions of lives, the setting for their courses. You’re looking at countless tons of steel and hearts innumerable and the loneliness you feel is your inability to know all of it. Tokyo is the future – the future that all of its brains, together, wanted. It’s a future of electric sheep, radiant excess, and bleak disappointment; it’s a place with paper tiger gundams at the ready and UFO games in which you can win potatoes.

None of the pictures I took came anywhere near capturing what it looked like. This was probably the best of them:

As you scan from side to side, your brain is like, ‘No, I reject the information you are providing. It is false. Here is a chill and some vertigo to show you how displeased I am with your efforts. Please try again.’

And that’s kind of what my brain is still doing as I try to write about it, so, like, sorry.

Tokyo sure did look like a dystopian police state from there, but I reckon it has too many dudes with Goo Goo Dolls hair for it to really be one. If I learned anything from reading 1984, it was that the only ways to survive in that sort of environment are to either have a ton of power or to find somebody you really like and carve out a place of joy until the state turns that love against you and destroys your will to resist. I don’t have the former, but I gots the latter, so I’d be just fine in that kind of dystopia, anyway:

The view from our hotel room was fantastic but it kind of got overshadowed (literally?) by the New York Bar and its ridiculousness. We could see the Tokyo Tower, though, and it looked like this the morning we left:

And, of course, it would have been a shame to go all the way to Japan and not see Mt. Fuji. Thank goodness for Nestle.

Japan is the best-lookin’ country I’ve ever flown over. It’s just gorgeousness next to other gorgeousness abutting a different sort of gorgeousness. Peach Airways’ totally tasteful fuchsia didn’t hurt, either:

My week in Japan was one of the best weeks of my life. I only wish I’d gotten to spend more time there. If you’re ever in the region, you really gotta go there over pretty much anyplace else(the Kansai area in particular!). It’s full of beautiful, weird, old, new, and delicious things. It has its flaws, surely, and I’m sure they would’ve become a lot more evident had I not been there with a total babe and been able to be there for more than a week, but it is, in toto, an inspirational place: it’s what the world could be if it stopped treasuring ignorance, lauding stupidity, and not seeing tentacles as sex objects. What a world it could be.

Yakisoba Gion

Before going to Japan, I was under the impression that Osaka would be new and cool while Kyoto would be old and pretty. So, after experiencing what was truly some cool stuff in Osaka, I was excited to go to Kyoto to see some temples or whatever. Jules had lots of good ideas for things to do and knew way more about Japan than I did, so our time there was a bit more varied than just trips to temples, thankfully.

In Kyoto we stayed at a ryokan (a traditional inn), which was as expensive as the fanciest hotel we stayed in but way more culture-y. It was awfully nice. We got nice robes to wear and a tea set to use and it all made me feel very Japan-ish. The ryokan’s staff was lovely and accommodating and if anyone wants to stay at a ryokan near Kyoto Station, probably stay at that one. Also, tatami mats are hella comfortable and I don’t know if Korea’s just trying to be different or whatever but come on, guys, up your mat game.The technology exists and it’s glorious. You can sleep on a tatami mat without feeling like your back is made of misery and nails the next morning. It’s amazing.

The first real thing we did in Kyoto was get ramen at Ippudo. Ippudo is a chain of ramen restaurants (they have two locations in New York!) that produces one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. Neither of us took pictures of it, somehow. I think we were in shock or something. But godDAMN. They have a small menu, like any place that doesn’t suck generally does, and it’s almost entirely ramen. I got the most basic one both because I’m a wimp and because I wanted to try the original thang before trying the more adventurous ones, but it turns out that there wudnt nuthin basic about it. Good lord. That place knows what it’s doing. It was a salty noodlegasm of pork belly and scallions and ginger and garlic, and I just wanted to punch whoever made it right in the face because I knew that from that meal on I could never be happy with other ramen. You ruined me, Ippudo. RUINED ME.

Ippudo is located on the same street as the entrance to Nishiki Market, a covered market known as ‘Kyoto’s Kitchen’ because it is home to over a hundred shops and restaurants, the majority of them specializing in food-related things. It started as a fish wholesale district and the first shop opened in 1310. 13-goddamn-10.

The walk through Nishiki Market goes something like this:

Oooohh. Nice! Ugh, okay. Kinda gross, but I guess I could see how somebody could like that. Mmmm! That smells great. That smells terrible and looks worse. Oh my god, look at those candy things! Oh god (disgusted)! Oh god (pleasantly excited)! We need to get some of those. Do not look over there. That is so many pigs’ feet. How can there possibly be five blocks of this? Oh wow! That’s so pretty. Oh, okay. Don’t look over there, either. That should not be on a stick. I dare you to get one of those. Oh wow! Look at these candies! We have to get one. Is this the end? Oh, nope. It goes on for another four blocks. This is so cool. Oh goddamnit. That’s a cup full of tentacles. The next place has candy, though!

Southeast Asia loves paper lanterns so much and they’re really very pretty, but this seems excessive, maybe:

Behold! Japan in a single picture (yes, that is a UFO machine full of anime characters):

The plan for the evening was for us to go to a blues/jazz club that Jules’d been told about and it ended up being one of the coolest things ever. Here it is from the outside:

The club has an all-wood interior and a hip grandmother figure working the door and it was populated by people who knew the members of the bands who were going to be playing (including lots of families, the children of which are going to grow up to be so cool). The first band was a really good blues three-piece of which I got no good pictures. The girlfriends/wives of the members were sitting next to us wearing some amazing kimonos. The second act was this million-piece thing (they had horns!) that I really, really liked. They sounded great. It was surreal to see very American-y stuff being performed at a tiny club in Kyoto and being there made us feel very cool.

I made friends with the band and had them help me record my first solo rap album that night. Here’s the cover art:

The Fushimi Inari-taisha shrine is huged and located in Kyoto and only just recently got the praise it’s always deserved:

(The girl in the picture above is seen taking advantage of the ordinance mandating that all hikable things in Southeast Asia be heels-friendly.)

Inari is the kami seen as the patron of business (and the god of rice) in the Shinto religion (I’m Wikipediaing this so don’t get your whatevers in a bunch if any of it is inaccurate), so all of the torii that line the path to the top of the mountain have been donated by Japanese businesses (seeing the names of all the businesses on the gates reminded me of when, as an altar boy, I got to wear a robe with a Pepsi logo on the back when helping out at masses).

Babe for scale:

The shrine, as a whole, is beautiful and impressive and it makes you feel things despite the crazy large number of other people who are also experiencing its beauty and impressiveness right alongside you. About halfway up we stopped and got some green tea shaved ice and it was lovely. Also during out ascent, we were stopped by a group of middle schoolers who were completing an assignment for their English class. I told them my favorite Japanese word was neko (cat) and that my favorite Japanese food was this next thing.

I neglected to discuss it in the last post because I didn’t have any good pictures of our first experience with it. Here it is, now, though, in its natural habitat:

That gorgeous thing is YAKISOBA PAN. Yakisoba pan is carbnado of joy. It’s the perfect drunk food. Its composition is simple: 1) yakisoba [fried noodles], 2) a roll, 3) pickled red ginger, and 4) kewpie mayonnaise. We checked every convenience store we came across. It was rarer than we thought it’d be, so morale was low at times, but we succeeded in finding it twice, thank god. I’ve never been happier than I was while eating yakisoba pan on a bench along this stream in the Gion district, an area known for its geisha-related history and yakisoba-pan-ready benches. The area is really, really pretty and peaceful and I wish we’d had a bit more time to explore it, like everything else we saw in Japan.

Near the Gion district there’s a gigantic torii and I took this picture of it while standing in the middle of the street because I’m a badass.

Kyoto was one of the potential targets for the second atomic bomb but was removed from the list both because of its religious associations and because one of the dudes making the decision had honeymooned there and liked it too much to allow it to be destroyed. Thanks, Nagasaki, for taking one for the team, because the world would have otherwise been robbed of one of its coolest and most beautiful cities. Everyone there rides bikes, and all of the temples are somehow older than the stones they’re made of, and they have yakisoba pan – I don’t know what else a person could want in a city. It’s this wonderful mixture of tradition and modernity and Kyoto seems to be totally getting the balance right. I loved Kyoto and Osaka so much and if I get the urge to live abroad again, I hope it’s in the Kansai area because holy sweet goddamn is it great.

Elevator Action Maid Parade

As soon as you finish passing through security at the Kansai International Airport you’re greeted by three anime characters who welcome you to Japan and implore you to shop at one of the many Daimaru department stores. I’d wanted to visit Japan for a very long time, and this was exactly the kind of welcome I’d hoped for. At the airport, we got our first look at the shelves of a convenience store in Japan and OH MY GOD. I’m not gonna post any pictures of the shelves in those places because I generally avoid posting pornographic images here, but if you ever get the chance, check out a 7-Eleven or Family Mart in Japan. Goddamn.

Also, if you have the option of buying a SIM card for your phone for like $30, DO IT. The SIM card won’t afford you very much in the way of data/minutes, but for purposes of navigation in Japan, having a phone is damn near essential if you don’t know the language very well, and it’s extremely difficult to find unlocked wi-fi anywhere. Like, even Denny’s had their shit locked down (not that we went there – that’s just what we heard). Most places advertise ‘Free Wi-Fi!’ but they really mean ‘Free if you have the particular cell phone provider that’s providing our Wi-Fi’ and it’s lame as hell. Japan is supposed to be ahead of its time. If this wi-fi dystopia is the future, just kill me now.

Here’s me hanging with my poké-bro, Pikachu. Trudy recently posted a totally-out-of-context and clearly heavily photoshopped picture of us hanging that suggested other things beyond the dopest of all hangs might have occurred, and perpetrators of such libel should be shunned. For shame.

Speaking of Tru-dizzle, here she is enjoying what I believe to be her first meal in Japan. The meal consisted of Udon noodles, tempura chicken, beer, and inedible beef tendon. (Note: It’s likely that that hand gesture is some Canadian gang sign, rather than the subjects-of-the-Queen insult, but I was too afraid to ask.)

This thing’s color scheme makes me very angry, but that it was present in the hotel room warmed my heart:

Osaka, the third largest city in Japan (by population) – betcha can’t name the second largest! – is like one big covered market lined with Pachinko lairs and UFO games (the former is like gambling on pinball and the latter is what they call claw crane vending machine things). It’s kinda sad watching grownups throw yen after yen into the UFO machines, but the prizes seemed pretty sweet, so I ain’t gonna judge.

Sega’s JOYPOLIS is a chain of, well, joypolises, that features UFO machines (there’s an ordinance whereby any establishment must have at least one UFO machine per patron), arcade games, motion simulator rides, and booths in which Japanese teenagers can put on makeup and take pictures of themselves (vanity simulators). This UFO game involved picking up tiny humans with a claw and really felt like a missed Attack on Titan tie-in opportunity. MIKASAAAAA!

This is the best name for an arcade game I’ve ever seen:

The game’s play didn’t feature quite the same skillful nuance as its title, but it was an enjoyable use of a hundred yen and I’d highly recommend it if you’re a fan of the other games in the Elevator Action series. Also, it’s apparently super popular in Russia, where it’s billed as a way for citizens to experience a ‘Presidential Friday Night’.

On top of the HEP Five Shopping Mall (the complex in which the Joypolis spreads its joyples) there is a ferris wheel and we went on that ferris wheel. It offers a lovely, if not slightly terrifying, view of Osaka and a speaker system so that you can color your experience with Jamz. Here’s Tru-dizzle putting on some G-Dragon, Bing Bang member and Korea’s greatest contribution to anything. Osaka is a gigantic place that seems to avoid expanding upward wherever outward is possible. It’s like LA but tolerable.

Japan luvz its fancy desserts, which makes sense: an economy in which a mixed drink costs like $46 is way more able to justify a five-dollar cupcake than, like, Worcester, might be, and a society as adorably saccharine as Japan’s undoubtedly renders its populace more dependent on sugar power than one would normally be. This shopping area is underneath one of its train stations and is like ninety percent shellacked confections. There are some tentacles, too, because Southeastern Asia, but Japan at least has the decency to offer edible alternatives.

Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure sugar sweeties

Take a look and what you’ll eat will give you diabetes

These are the hands of a person about to get macaroon’d on Deliciousness Isle:

After gorging, we thought it best to ascend the real-life version of this building (the vertigo resultant of dizzying heights is said to aid with digestion). To get all the way to the top, you have to go up multiple elevators and escalators, each one seemingly asking, ‘You sure, man? Do you even know how tall a hundred and seventy-three meters is?’

For anyone who doesn’t know how tall one hundred seventy-three meters is, here’s a picture of the ferris wheel we went on on the way up to the top of the Floating Garden Observatory (this picture was taken when we were about three-quarters of the way to the top).

The architect was a big meanie and felt it necessary to make these escalators a part of the trip to the top (these are like thirty stories up).

When you finally get to the observation deck, the view sure is somethin’, though.

The Yodo River flowing through Osaka, that is.

The highest interior observation area offers snacks and brewdogs and places to sit and watch the sun set over Osaka. That sight – the sun disappearing behind the mountains that abut the city – fuses your existence to those of all those who have consumed snacks and brewdogs throughout the ages along that river, and as the light gives way to the neon and streetlights of nighttime Osaka, you feel content (or you would, if the cafe-ish place had the pretzels displayed on its menu board).

The rooftop observatory provides a section of fencing which ~*~LoVeRs~*~ are to adorn with symbolic locks with their names on them. This extremely lockable fencing is presumably furnished so that the ~*~LoVeRs~*~ – who gon’ put their locks somewhere – won’t put their locks on other parts of the structure; it’s like the wall my school provided for graffiti artists in an attempt to dissuade them from defacing other parts of campus, I think. The Floating Garden Observatory is so into lock culture that they even sell personalized locks in fancy, puzzling gift boxes. Nothing conveys one’s passion while demonstrating an understanding of the true nature of a loving relationship than presenting your significant other with a hollowed out copy of Crime and Punishment containing candy and a set of locks.

The lights under and around this seat only light up if you’re truly in love, and well:

Then this woman was producing rabbits from her bag and giving them away for free (probably as part of the community service element of her magician’s training) and we were like ‘no doy we want a free rabbit.’

And we traded that magical rabbit for tickets to this magical place so that, if its unfortunate portmanteau of a name were correct, we might ream some maids:

Maid cafes are everywhere in the major cities of Japan and they are weird. The interior of the one we went to looked like this:

This maid cafe’s Super Mario World theme (note the Yoshi eggs) increased the starting-level weirdness by a whole lot, and none of its inhabitants did anything to make the place any less bizarre. The box lights would change colors when you hit them, though, so that was nice, at least.

Though ours was really brightly lit, a maid cafe is a bar, sort of, and all of its servers dress up in adorable maid attire. The maids (I’m going to call them that, but they are maids in attire only) first appeared to us at an intersection in a covered market a couple of dimly lit and unnervingly unoccupied streets away from the cafe itself. They beckoned us. Pied Pipers with magic pipes of pixie enthusiasm. Sickly sirens singing us to sugary shipwreck. We followed as one of them skipped ahead of us, her braids tracing the arc of her skips, her giggles assuaging our doubts.

Upon arriving at the cafe, which was on the third floor, as all reputable things are in Southeast Asia, we were greeted by a harem of other maids and were informed that there was a cover charge (and I think an hourly charge, too). We gladly agreed to pay, given the situation and surroundings, and were led to a table that was as close as possible to the door. Seated to our right and left were twenty-ish-year-old dudes who seemed to have also chosen to be in the cafe.

Once we had our table, we were assigned our very own maid (her name was Choko). She was to take care of all of our masterly needs or whatever. First, she offered to make us drinks at our table. There were a bunch of options for this, some of which cost a whole bunch of money. We went with the cocktail, pictures, and song option and after a few awkward minutes of asking each other if the thing that was happening was really happening our maid came back and made us a drink (or, rather, shook up some ice and alcohol and poured it into a glass in front of each of us that contained a mixer). The drink-making process included a high-pitched chant that we were asked to participate in and we did our best to comply. Our maid, bless her soul, was doing all she could do to traverse the language barrier, hoping her enthusiasm for the US and Canada would be an adequate fill-in for what would have no doubt normally been a sophisticated deluge of flattery.

(NOTE: I am having a very difficult time conveying the surrealness of this experience. It felt like deja vu but instead of the usual sort of hiccup in your experience of linear time it was a momentary shift into a dimension in which maid cafes can and should exist. While at one of these places you’re mostly thinking, ‘Man, I knew Japan was supposed to be weird, but…but, man, what the hell is going on here?’ They’re peculiar and sort of beyond words.)

Throughout our time at the cafe, other maids would come by our table and attempt to get us to buy CDs of the maids singing songs or glow sticks for us to use during the maids’ dance number later in the evening. It was like being inside of an infomercial. We declined everything because it was hella expensive, while the dudes at the tables near us were like ‘hellz yeah – keep that shit comin’!’ and seemed to really be enjoying what was happening. And at this point we were pretty convinced that the cafe was the sort of place that would offer you things not on the official menu. You know, like, sex things. It turns out, though, that this is NOT the case (unless there’s a secret room we missed in our survey). Maid cafes, generally, aren’t brothels. Dudes go to these places to spend crazy amounts of money to flirt with quasi-hot, chipmunky girls in maid outfits and the girls are paid to flirt back and nothing else comes of it and it’s the strangest thing.

After we finished our drinks – the alcohol contained in which had done nothing to mute any of the situation’s phantasmagoricality – it was time to take some pictures with our maid (who was kind enough to, later, change our photos from lulzy souvenirs to timeless, I-ain’t-letting-this-out-of-my-sight-til-I’m-dead keepsakes with her very very smile marker skills):

And then it was made clear that if we weren’t going to pay to be a part of the dance performance (which we weren’t) then it was time for us to leave (much to everyone involved’s relief, I think), so we paid our bill and thanked the maids and stepped into the elevator, returning to the world of the sane as the doors shut in front of us (though we were still in Japan, after all, so).

The next day, we were off to Hiroshima, via the Shinkansen (bullet train). Here’s what the interior of the Osaka station and its blurry inhabitants looked like.

The Shinkansen is incredibly quiet and very clean and very expensive. With the rail passes we purchased it was really, really easy getting around the country and we didn’t have to worry about how much it cost, so we were able to enjoy the bullet train for the awesome thing that it is. Totally recommend getting a rail pass if you’re going to be in Japan for a week and plan on seeing more than a city or two for some reason. This photograph captures both the front of the train and the back of one of the members of its cleaning crew and probably means something:

Osaka is a wonderful city full of cool things. I was sad to leave it and I hope I get to see it again someday.

I miss you, Choko.

 

The Militarized Zone

The DMZ is one of the things you’re supposed to see if you’re ever in Korea because it’s a pure manifestation of absurdity and insanity in a world purporting to be a rational one. The Demilitarized Zone, the largest and longest-lasting location of the otherwise defunct Discovery Zone chain of amusement facilities, is the most heavily militarized border in the world. Both sides of the zone are lined with land mines, guard towers, and artillery, and visitors to the area are asked to avoid doing anything that might start World War III.

Our trip to the DMZ began with an overnight bus ride up to Seoul because people in the military are big dumb idiots and insist on starting everything they ever goddamn do at hours that are really unpleasant for anybody who isn’t normally forced to get up at those hours. Operating on very little sleep, we somehow made it to the USO base on time and got our badges (pictured above).

After an hour-and-a-half-long bus ride north of Seoul (the DMZ begins about 53 kilometers, or 34 AMERICA UNITS, north of the city), we arrived at the Joint Security Area, and were given a briefing regarding the history and current state of the DMZ. Presentations given by members of the military are always hilarious because they recite them as though they are children giving book reports in middle school or telemarketers reading from their painfully banal scripts, with splashes of feigned authority and fear of reprimand. They make sure to build in only the bare minimum number of semi-jokes necessary to keep the audience from falling asleep and keep the whole thing as short as possible, which is nice. The presentation was informative and fairly unbiased, though the guys stationed there can’t seem to avoid making jokes at the expense of the North (e.g., lol more like Kim Jong-Unbelievably Stupid and Fat lol guys rite).

The US Military luvz pageantry, but in this instance they kept things simple and there was very little build up to Panmunjom, the grouping of buildings that sit on the border, the center building of which houses the meeting room in which the North and South formally discuss things. (Note: The name Panmunjom is taken from the nearby town in which the armistice was signed, and is now used to refer to the entirety of the Joint Security Area. The town’s only remaining building now functions as the North Korea Peace Museum and lies north of the Military Demarcation line.)

Here’s the table at which the two sides meet to discuss who will get a rose from Blake on The Bachelor this week or whatever (the North took it pretty hard when Amanda didn’t get one, from what we were told). Also, I kind of expected a nicer table, or at least a more frequently polished one.

Here is a blurry picture of me standing with a South Korean soldier (It’s okay, camerawoman – I’m sure I’ll have plenty of other chances to have my picture taken in this meeting room. I mean, it’s totally fine that the only picture I have looks like it was taken from a moving car. COMPLETELY COOL.). The door behind us leads to North Korea. I didn’t have the heart to critique this guy’s gig line when I was there (not that he would’ve heeded anything I said, anyway – I’m sure ‘your belt’s crooked’ is akin to ‘your shoe’s untied’) but that belt placement is probably worse than anything the North and South have ever done to each other. Come on, man, at least pretend like you’re not trying to provoke your neighbors.

Dude out-fierced me somethin’ fierce.

There are strict rules about what you can and cannot photograph and the directions in which you can take photographs. Amongst the rules it was explicitly stated that selfies are allowed, so 

Here’s a view of Kijong-dong (also known as Peace Village in North Korea). As part of the 1953 armistice, both North and South Korea were allowed to have a town within the DMZ. South Korea’s town is called Daeseong-dong. The residents of Daeseong-dong are exempt from taxation and conscription, and must pass through like seven security gates to get home before the 11PM curfew. The two towns kept trying to out-do each other, flagpole-wise, because warring, prideful peoples are fractious children with guns. I think the North ended up with the taller flagpole (seen in the center of this picture), and the flag itself weighs like six hundred pounds, so they have that going for them, at least.

This is the building in which the tour started to get real uncomfortably propaganda-y. Inside, we were seated in a room that looked out over part of North Korea and were made to watch a short film that explained to us why the South is better than the North and how this whole thing could be settled if the North would just do the rational thing and give up already. The video featured an American (or at least someone who could put on a great American accent) speaker saying things that were clearly not written by a native speaker. We were then allowed to go out to a viewing area and use binocular things to look at buildings and mountains in North Korea and were reminded that North Korea is crazy and they only use their town within the DMZ as one big propaganda-spewing loudspeaker and that the South and US would never engage in that kind of thing (strange DVDs are way more their style).

Next to this building was a gift shop and I bought a bottle of North Korean brandy which promises to be vile. I did not buy one of these shirts but should’ve:

By the time we got through with the video that was shown prior to going down into the Third Tunnel it was clear that the DMZ is an amusement park, now. Or at least South Korea wants it to be that way.

The film, which was shown in a room with a giant screen and unsettlingly loud speakers and a staging that I hoped would be the apparatus needed for a 4D theater, felt like an excerpt from a movie in which Michael Bay is hired to direct a jingoistic ‘documentary’ for the government of some dystopian state (I know that ragging on Michael is real en vogue right now and I hesitate to pile on, but this shit is apt, I promise) and was given only like a hundredth of this normal budget to work with. The video spoke of the evil, evil North Koreans (the South Koreans have never been the aggressor in the situation, ever) and the miracle that is the DMZ, adding, finally, a one-sentence thing about how it would be super great if the countries found a way to be whole again (with an accompanying graphic showing South Korea expanding to completely engulf the North). To portray the DMZ as anything close to some kind of victory, as anything other than a disgraceful stopgap, is insanity, no matter how many species now find refuge within its relatively undisturbed lands. In no world should people be like, ‘The involved countries remain at war and keep lots of artillery pointed at each other and like to provoke one another every year or so…welp, work’s done here! What a miracle! Yay!’

The trip down into the Third Tunnel was lame as hell, also. Maybe I’m just feeling bitter about that. After marching down a two-football-field-ish tunnel ramp thing and walking through what seems like a mile of child-height horizontal tunneling, the big pay-off at the end is a window through which you can see a concrete wall, behind which is another concrete wall, and behind that is another concrete wall, and behind that is an empty tunnel leading back to North Korea. The tunnel is one of five that have been discovered and the tour guide (and film, and museum) stated that these tunnels were going to be used for an invasion of Seoul, and that 30,000 men could move through the Third Tunnel per hour (which, having walked through it, seems like an estimate that’s about 29,000 men too high).

From what I’ve heard from Koreans who’ve been willing to talk to me about it, it seems like the film, with its tacked-on ‘Let’s reunite!’, reflects the popular current attitude toward reunification: the South doesn’t really want it. The government goes to great lengths to demonize the North and make the DMZ seem like a spectacular goddamn marvel so that unifying seems like such a hassle. Most people I’ve talked to believe that it would be a horrible idea to unite the two countries because the influx of people from the North would destroy the South’s economy (they believe North Koreans to be unskilled and uneducated, and that they would have nothing to contribute to South Korean society). It seems like the actual South Korean stance on reunification has gone from, ‘Oh hellz, no!’ to ‘Yeah, we would totally reunite, if the other side would just give up!’ to ‘Eh, maybe it’s not such a great idea. I mean, why would we want to harm our economy and what would we do with all these tanks, then?’ The government’s official stance, though, has been one of a desire for reunification, and that will continue to be the case for as long as the DMZ exists, which will likely be forever.

This monument appears to depict two groups of people trying to push the sides of a sphere together, but at this point I’m pretty sure that each group is merely holding its side in place.

Of course, the politics and appearances of the thing aside, there are many, many people on both sides of the border with family members living on the other side of it who don’t really care about the politics of petulant states and want nothing more than to be reunited with their goddamn families, and these are currently the people most harmed by the DMZ’s continued existence.

People get so caught up in discussing how crazy North Korea is that they forget that North Korea has a population of about 25 million people and that its people are real people who live lives and have brains and are not just helpless zombies praying, in their sentient moments, for the rest of the world to rescue them. Most of North Korea’s people lead non-shitty, agrarian-ish lifestyles and are probably doing just fine without iPhones, somehow. The country’s leadership does some really silly and some downright horrific things, certainly (lord knows the US media goes all TMZ on Kim Jong-Un’s ass when he sneezes or sends a fax), but the complete lack of empathy shown by most regarding the North is appalling (straight up Pity don’t count, neither), and the videos shown during the tour do absolutely nothing to encourage a more nuanced and compassionate understanding of the situation. And come on, dudes: if there is a way through this thing, it’s via compassion, not mockery.

The DMZ is an unacceptable condition, or at least it should be, and I hope that it’s a thing that can be healed, but there are just so many forces in the world opposed to its dissolution that I don’t know if a few thousand torn-apart families should maintain any hope that it might one day cease to exist.

I bought a set of DMZ shot glasses in one of the gift shops, though, so I did my part, at least.

The Ajummas Templar

I thought it would be nice to get away from the Umbrellagate protests in Ulsan for a little while (martyrdom is tiresome), so I decided to go with a group of friends to see the Haedong Yonggungsa Temple, a gorgeous Buddhist temple on the coast of Gijang-gun, Busan.

The bus from Songjeong was so crowded that an ajumma sexually harassed both Megan and me.

Weird things happen when a bus gets that crowded. It’s similar to when an object nears the speed of light: passengers experience time more slowly than those outside of the vehicle, people are stretched or compacted into all sorts of strange shapes, ajummas slap the asses of waygookins. Ajummas, as we’ve discussed previously, are omnidimensional beings operating in a manner independent of what we perceive to be the fabric of space and time. They subsist in a bizarre plane of existence and an especially crowded bus affords us a rare glimpse into that world. What we perceive as their apparent staggering strength is a manifestation of their ability to manipulate space-time in ways beyond our comprehension (via their ajummal form): the ajumma is not slapping your ass – it is slapping the space and time occupied by the your ass, its hand warping all around it. This technique allows the ajumma’s hand to effectively move faster than the speed of light by taking advantage of the fact that the speed of the expansion and compression of space and time is not subject to the same universal speed limit that matter is. There is still much to be learned, but each sardine-can bus ride brings us closer to understanding.

On the way to the temple there are statues of the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac. YEAR OF THE RAT REPRESENT.

The statues were pretty cool, but they ain’t got nothin’ on the TRAFFIC SAFETY PRAYER PAGODA.

From what I gather, Koreans have been praying at the ancient Traffic Safety Prayer Pagoda (the TSPP, henceforth) for thousands of years, and many believe that this diligence has been responsible for Korea both maintaining a relatively low rate of fatality amongst its drivers and an extremely high rate of fatality amongst its pedestrians (It’s #1! It’s #1!).

The traditional benediction is as follows:

O, God of Traffic, spare our motorists from harm,

Give them the strength to ignore all lights and signage.

Give them strong windshield wiper blades

So that they might strike pedestrians without concern for their airborne offal.

Give them the ability to be aware of where every bus is at all times

So that they might avoid being crushed into a guardrail when they are inevitably and violently cut off.

Protect our drivers as they pull out into traffic without looking

And honk at other motorists for getting in their way.

 

May every crosswalk be pointless and every red light run,

We ask this of you, Our Lord.

 

This torii-lookin’ thing marks the beginning of the path to the temple and gives you an idea of the gist of the place, so I was like, ‘Okay, guys, the roof is gonna look like that and there be dragons here. Got it. Let’s head back now,’ but my friends insisted that we go past this point and see the actual temple because I don’t know why. Whatevz.

After a cave-ish passage, we saw this tiered-pool setup into which you’re supposed to throw coins. If you get a coin into one of the small bowls you get like a +6 to Luck for the next however long. I think there’s a multiplier that kicks in if you use 500 won coins instead of 100s but I ain’t made of won, so I only threw 100s. Megan got one in but it did not stay in, and thus did not count, according to the monk I consulted. It was rough, but them’s the breaks, kid.

The temple did end up being pretty sweet. It’s right along the shore and couldn’t be prettier. We spent lots of time looking at it from afar, then headed down to the rocks below where we sat by the water, searching for crabs in tide pools and watching the underwater rocks breathe in and out with the waves. It was as tranquil as the rocky shore of a very popular temple site could be. The spot down by the water became the hangout spot just after we left it. People were flocking to that shit to selfie the hell out of it. Waygook trendsetters forever.

And we obviously couldn’t resist taking a bunch of pictures of ourselves in front of the temple (as is proper, dharma-wise).

But then Simon told some really off-color joke about crabs (which I shall not repeat), so everyone cleared out except for Tamsyn, who was too embarrassed to show her face.

We didn’t want to let that indecency ruin our otherwise lovely trip, though, so we continued on to the temple’s main building. There were people praying inside the temple. (Is the whole collection of buildings at the temple site the temple or is just the largest building the temple? A bunch of the buildings looked really temple-y and I think it’s kind of lame to not call them temples just because the temple temple already called dibs.) There were no monks chanting in any of the buildings, which was an especially deflating letdown because they had a recording playing that really got my hopes up (the monk[s] in the recording were singing the same thing the monks at the Gajisan temple were singing and I knew all the words). Yonggungsa is a monktease, everybody. Beware.

Jerks.

There be dragon(s) indeed!

The temple’s Positive Body Image shrine is an inspiration to all who have their pictures taken in front of it. Thanks to this statue, the people of Korea no longer feel that they need to be incredibly skinny to be attractive and nobody is shunned for being overweight.

The view from the temple was alright, but Drew and I decided to go find some privacy and followed this path up to the site’s highest point.

There wasn’t much privacy at the top, but there was this view, which wasn’t so bad:

And, of course, we still made out a bunch, so it was fine.

You’ll note that there are jet skis in the above photograph. Brian Teacher suggested that we all rent jet skis and travel to the temple in the most fun, jealousy-inducing way possible but everyone else was like, ‘lol okay brian,’ as though it were a ridiculous proposal but clearly other people had the same idea and probably had the times of their lives and I just don’t understand why anyone would be opposed to taking a jet ski anywhere. As I stared out over the ocean and the jet-skiers, I began to seriously contemplate whether my friends were really my friends at that point – I mean, what kind of people don’t want to rent jet skis and take them to a beautiful temple and be the envy of the jet-ski-less? The kind of people with whom I usually don’t associate, clearly.

But WHATEVER. It was still an okay trip.

For dinner we went to this pet store / restaurant where you can pet your dinner before eating it. Kevin chose to eat a kitten because he’s an adorabletarian. I went with a baby seal (the veal of the sea) and it was delicious. I hope places like this become a thing in America or I’m definitely going to have to go back to Korea.

I’ve been trying to fill my weekends with the coolest things I can, given that I have so few left, and I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job of it. This weekend was certainly filled with extremely cool stuff (y’all gotta check out Yonggungsa if you’re ever near it) and the next couple promise to be just as great. I’m starting to think that I’m going to really, really miss this place. Korea during the spring/summer is absolutely lovely, particularly when you have a stress-free job and get to frequently be around some of the best people in the world (and Roy). Sometimes it feels as though it’s really dumb of me to give this up, but the tables of Worcester ain’t gonna wait themselves, so I gotta get the hell out of here.

Umbrellament

I’ve been mostly silent regarding a horrible thing that happened prior to this weekend, but I think I’m finally ready to discuss it.

Well, here goes.

Tragedy is formative: we are our tribulations, not our successes.

It is with this in mind that I’ve been trying to avoid entirely lamenting that which I’ve recently had to endure. I know that I will be a better person for having gone through this. I know that. It’s important that I appreciate the virtue of calamity, no matter how obfuscated or distant that positivity might seem right now.

We’ll all remember where we were when my umbrella disappeared, but it matters not where we were. What is important is where we go from here.

It’s difficult to be rational about this sort of thing, though. You’re attempting to remain composed despite losing the very thing that had been giving you strength, holding you together. You are a post-hair Samson, a ringless Green Lantern, a maskless Stanley Ipkiss. One couldn’t blame you if you were to just cry in a corner for a while. But you can’t do that. You have to keep it together for everyone who will one day be confronted with this type of misfortune. You must be an example – an inspiration – for those destined to encounter the face of Satan as you have.

I hope that others do not look at me differently, now; I hope that I will not be pitied for the rest of my days or made to wear a scarlet letter ‘U’. This could have happened to anyone with an umbrella, to anyone who dared to imagine that his umbrella would not be stolen from its usual deskside resting place while he was at lunch, to anyone who dreamed of a world in which uninterrupted protection from rain were a right, not a privilege able to be taken or denied. The tendency in this situation is to heed the ‘why me?’ thoughts, to give in to the kind of self-pity that can destroy a person. Why me, indeed, out of all of the people in the world? Why did this happen to me? This could have happened to any of us. And, in fact, it did – it happened to us all. This happened to us. It was our umbrella. This is our pain. Umbrellagate affects all of us. I take comfort in knowing that this is a shared burden, that my now-damp shoulders need not bear the full weight of the world, but I derive no joy in knowing that I have contributed to the discomfort of others. I know that I am nothing more than the tragedy’s vessel and could have done nothing to avoid it, but I wish with all of my heart that none of us had to go through it.

Allow me, please, a moment for some less noble, more vulnerable notions.

I see it everywhere. Every umbrella I see could be my umbrella. O, if only this world were a fair world!

I often find myself off with the faeries, thinking of all the times the umbrella and I spent together, walking to or from school. I loved the way its handle felt. I loved how a couple of its aluminum bones were slightly out of alignment in a way that made the whole thing that much more adorable – spindly metallic versions of Jewel’s out-of-place tooth. Mostly, though, I loved its devotion, its selflessness. Until the moment it was taken from me, my umbrella protected me, made me feel loved. Never before had I felt as at peace as I did when under its arms and I very much doubt that I shall ever feel that tranquility again.

There’s been a lot of speculation with respect to what really happened to my umbrella. I’ve been hounded by the press and my friends, bless them, have been going to great lengths to compose narratives that might explain what happened so that I might feel a little better, if only for a moment (Thank you to all who have shown support in this difficult time. I couldn’t’ve have made it this far without it.). The uncertainty of not knowing exactly what happened to it eats away at me. It’s difficult to move on when there is still hope. Until I know for sure that it will never come back to me, I will continue to see it everywhere, continue to hope that one morning it will be there waiting for me in its usual spot next to my desk. I crave closure or rescue. I want this to be over with. I want to be able to move on, with or without my umbrella by my side.

It’s possible, too, that my umbrella wasn’t stolen. It’s possible that it might have run away. In fact, this could be the most likely scenario. I want to believe that it’s the most likely one, at least. Though my heart would remain broken and it would still be difficult to not feel slighted, I could eventually accept this course of events more easily than I could one in which my umbrella was taken from me by another.

I am going to choose to believe this is the truth of what happened to my umbrella. I want to believe. I do believe. If it wanted to be free from me, I’m glad it’s free. O, do I hope that it’s free!

Sometimes it’s still going to make me sad, though, my umbrella being gone (especially when times when it’s raining). I’ll have to remind myself that some umbrellas were just never meant to be kept by a desk – their nylon canopies are just too bright…and when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice, but, still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone.

I guess I just miss my friend.

 

Please post this flyer wherever you can around town:

Hello, I’m Gory!

When Tory first come ’round here we didn’ think much of it, really. Shore, he was covered in latex and could levitate and was always wantin’ us to ‘Touch here,’ but it wudn’ like we never seen a weirdo before. ‘Round here we say, ‘to each his own.’ If a man don’t want no trouble, we don’t give him none. That’s just how we do thangs.

Hell, when Dwayne got into that bidness with the crawdaddies we just said, ‘Well, that’s Dwayne for ya,’ and laughed and left it at that. Tory’s questions was all innocuous-like, to start, too, just wantin’ to know if we had pencils, wantin’ to know how many dogs we had. We didn’ know what he really wanted, but it wudn’ our bidness neither. He seemed like a nice enough…whatever he was.

Andy, though. Andy’s a smart kid. He saw right through Tory’s act. You can see it on his face in the picture above. We took that when Tory first got here, on accounta Tory lookin’ like that and all. We shoulda asked Andy right then what was wrong but we didn’. ‘Bout a month after he floated into town, though, some strange thangs started hap’nin’. At first, thangs would just disappear, or you’d see a strange light somewhere. Nothin’ too big. Didn’ think nothin’ of it.

One time, he had us all go to this magic show with some robot magician. Can you believe that? A god dang robot magician. It was a good show and all but lord was it strange. He kept askin’ us to say, ‘It’s a box,’ and, ‘Touch here,’ and I couldn’ make heads er tails of it and I don’ think nobody else could neither.

Then there was this blaze at Uju’s place. Whole house burned right to the dang ground. Poor kid lost his dawg in that fye-uh. I can’t imagine. It wudn’t til later on that the kid told everybody what’d happened. Turns out that that day Tory’d asked him how many dogs he had and Uju told him, ‘One, Tory! One dog!’, which was, apparently, not the answer Tory was lookin’ for cuz – and this is comin’ from the kid, who I’m inclined to believe, knowin’ what I know now – cuz the next thing he knows, Tory makes a dang can of gasoline appear outta nowhere and yells, ‘It’s a fire! Zero dogs!’, and drops a match and starts laughin’ like some villain. I can see his smile now. Those dead eyes. We shoulda seen it comin’. But like I said, it wudn’ til later that the kid told us all that so we just went right on lettin’ Tory alone.

Andy even invited him to his birthday party. He thought maybe he hadn’t given Tory enough of a chance. The other youngins’d all taken quite the shine to him. Andy thought maybe he was missin’ somethin’. Tory was always makin’ sweets appear outta nowhere, always had a Coke for a thirsty kid.

I don’ know what he sprayed at poor Kate at the party but we shoulda likely ended the whole thang right there. We didn’, though. Later on, we realized that the stuff Tory’d sprayed at Kate was some kinda brainwashin’ thang. By the time we realized it, it was too late – he’d already sprayed all the kids with it.

And the doll Tory made for Andy…never seen somethin’ so, well, creepy. Sent a shiver through my whole body. I think Tory knew Andy was onto him, wanted to send him a message. Well, I don’t think he got it. I don’t think none of us did, really. Tory had the kids Skype with things like him, from his planet or wherever he was from. Now that I know the kind of evil that was behind those smiles, it makes me sick lookin’ at this picture. I reckon Andy was winkin’ to the camera here, sayin’, ‘Hey, somethin’ ain’t right here,’ but we didn’ see it til it was too late. God, if we’d only listened to Andy.

People started disappearin’ soon after the Skypin’. First to go was Jim Hubbardston, then Lyle George. They were plantin’ one day and was gone the next. We didn’ reckon Tory had anythin’ to do with it til one day on Uju’s farm when Tory was pullin’ some strange-lookin’ potatoes out the ground. Uju, the poor kid – I’m not sure what Tory had against him in par-tic-ul-ar, but my guess is that had to do with the brainwashin’ stuff not quite workin’ on him – he comes runnin’ from the field, up to my house, screamin’ his lil head off. Turns out Tory’d said to him, ‘Look! It’s a fetus!’, while holdin’ up one of the potato-lookin’ thangs he’d been pullin’ outta the ground and kinda broke it apart in front of him, and sure enough it was somethin’ that looked like a fetus.

So that was when we finally put it together, right then. I know, I know. We shoulda seen it before then. We shoulda known that somethin’ wudn’ right with ol’ Tory. Hindsight’s twenny-twenny and all. When you finally see it, you start seein’ everythang he did for what it was – god dang trickery. We found out ’bout lots of horr’ble things he done, eventually, but I’ll spare you from hearin’ ’bout those. I sure don’t wanna say ’em. ‘Course, soon as we found out what he was, we sicced the dawgs on ‘im, as we do.

We thought we had ‘im, too, but then the kids. The god dang brainwashed kids. They came runnin’, hollerin’. Scared the dawgs right off, saved that sumbitch’s life, I reckon. The youngins carried him off, if you can believe it. Like he was Jesus or somethin’. We got our rifles and went after ’em, but we got there just when Tory was flyin’ off in his spaceship. He had the god dang nerve to draw a god dang heart in the sky on his way out. I reckon he was the kinda monster you never want to run into in your life, the kind you wanna keep in your nightmares.

We found his lab – I don’t think there’s a better word for it – that night. The carnage in there. My god. Bits and pieces of…people. God dang people. It was a massacre. He was warpin’ the youngins and he was gonna slaughter the rest of us. He was mixin’ bits of good, honest people with bits of his kind, those monsters, makin’ these hybrid thangs, then plantin’ ’em in the ground like god dang potatoes. Jesus. That monster was tryin’ to make a whole new kinda thang. We won’t never know what he really wanted, I bet, but I reckon he mighta been tryin’ to take over the whole world. Sure seemed like it. I don’t know if he expected us to just roll over and take it, but we ain’t that kinda people.

The youngins got back to normal, slowly. They didn’t remember nothin’. ‘Cept Uju. He remembered it all. He got the worst of it, that’s for sure. He ain’t been the same since. Likely won’t ever be. Dang shame. He wanders around, mostly, mumblin’ to himself, ‘One dog, Tory. One dog. One. One dog. One dog, one dog.’

I hope Tory didn’ make us worse. ‘Fore he came here, we was a trustin’ people. I think we still are. But we’re more careful now, that’s for sure. We stay clear away from robot magicians. We never tell nobody how many dogs we got ‘less we know ’em real well. I think we’re still good people. We’re still good to other people. I wish thangs could be like they was ‘fore Tory got here, though. Thangs was simple then. Thangs was good. I hope we can be like that again someday. I never wanna hear that name again, long as I live. I’m done talkin’ about it. Let me be.

Han YOKO

I’ve sometimes avoided talking about the people of Korea as a singular entity because generalizing is dumb and problematic and everyone I’ve met has been majorly different from everyone else I’ve met here and I’m reluctant to basically throw a version of the ‘all foreigners do this’ thing right back at them because the ‘all foreigners do this’ thing is really awful, but I feel comfortable discussing this particular thing because it is as universal of a thing as you can get, within reason (I’m finally putting my degree in Qualifying to use!).

Here is that thing: every thing that a Korean person is experiencing at a particular moment is the worst thing that a person has ever experienced or will ever experience, and anyone who is not Korean could never, ever know the specific pain created by whatever thing is treating the Korean person poorly. I’m talkin’ ’bout Han (한), of course, which is something I’ve mentioned before, I’m sure. (I don’t think I’ve talked about, though, the t-shirt I’d like to design and sell to Korean Star Wars fans when I get back to the US! The shirt would say, ‘Han Shot First Because He Was A Manifestation Of A Sadness That Greedo Could Never Know’, on the front and on the back it would say, ‘Aiiigoooooo!’, with a sad face.)

Han is an old friend who the people of Korea invite to everything; he is an unyielding force of lament and unavenged injustice and he is great at parties. From keeping every window in the country open all winter to intentionally eating cabbage that has been rotting underground for however long, people here cannot seem to get enough of the thirty rack of suffering Han brings with him wherever he goes. People introduce their loved ones to Han when they are young. They grow up with Han. They learn to trust and love him.

Han is, himself, invisible, and thus not directly observable, but one can see his evidence of his presence; Han is a black hole with an accretion disc composed entirely of sadness and bitterness. His influence can be seen most with older men and women, who, for instance, release these guttural, steam engine bursts when he is around. These expulsions hint at a complex inner system of actuators and pistons and increase in volume and disdain as a person gets older, as a person gets to know Han more and more; Han is creating an army of steam-engine ajoshis and ajummas. (Note: I hereby reserve Steam Engine Ajumma for my next band’s name.)

It seems like Korea has kind of taken an If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em approach to anguish: if we can’t do anything about how shitty life is, we might as well make it worse! A lot of people appear to be of the mindset that suffering is good because it toughens you up. And encouraging hardship is not the worst way to go about things, really. After all, you can have the sweet without the bitter and you can’t have the potbingsu without the kimchi. And, obviously, the more difficult you make it to exist in your country, the more you can tell foreigners that it is understandable that they cannot handle life in Korea because their bodies are weak and it is bali-bali, which is a perk, also . But jeez. Sometimes I just wanna be like, ‘Hey guys, you really don’t need to be at work for ninety percent of your life. I know that when you feel happiness it’s probably a greater happiness than I’ll ever know, given the miasma of despair that surrounds it, and that Korea didn’t transform itself into a world power in like thirty years without working hard as hell, and I’m obvi mad jelly, but it’s also maybe the case that if you didn’t work for fourteen hours a day you wouldn’t have to drink yourselves to death every night to cope with how little you get to see your families and how little you get to sleep.’ This is a real competitive place and there’s a ton of pressure on everyone to not let up. Nobody wants to be the first one to be less diligent and that fear perpetuates a lifestyle that wears people down more than life maybe should (right-angle ajummas are manifest examples of the lifestyle’s effects).

It is a sadness that is actively passed down through generations, I think mostly as a preventative measure, in case things ever get that crappy again, but there is also an element of  pure dickishness in its dissemination: older men seem to want to make things horrible for everyone who is younger than them because when they were young, older people made things horrible for them. And, because of the rigid hierarchical sort of thing going on here, there ain’t nothing the younger people can do about it. Most of the time I think it’s more that the older men just don’t give a shit about the needs and concerns of those younger than them, but once in while it really, really seems like they’re making their decisions based on what will make things worse for everyone else. I think part of it’s that they’ve gone through their entire lives being bullied and now that they’re the oldest dudes around, they feel like they’re entitled to do a little bullying of their own, and they sure as hell ain’t gonna give up what they earned. This sort of thing happens in any situation in which people have to, like, pay their dues, but the Korean form of this is a frustrating thing to deal with sometimes (‘Oh, you had dinner plans after school today? The principal wants to go eat 홍어, so you have to change your plans lol.’, or, ‘Oh, hey, the new superintendent doesn’t like foreigners all that much so he’s going to suddenly get rid of all of the positions that were supposed to be for already-accepted EPIK teachers lol.’).

Anywayz, Han shows up, too, in a dialect of Korean spoken most commonly by people under the age of thirty or so which relies heavily on the word ‘hajima’ in its syntactic constructions. The dialect appears to be at least semi-tonal, from what I can ascertain. A native speaker’s pronunciation of the word ‘hajima’ looks something like this when its pitch is graphed versus time:

A graphical representation of the phenomenon should, really, contain many more peaks and troughs, but my patience and MS Paint skills ain’t what they used to be, I’m afraid…picture a seismograph reading, maybe. Note the spike at the end of the line – most speakers terminate the utterance with an vaguely sexual half-moan sort of thing. It should also be noted that there is a common variation on the standard hajima that consists of one peak followed by a linear descent (rather than that jagged line). Teen- to college-aged females generally let out the lengthiest, whiniest, and most violent hajimas, but adolescent males should not be totally overlooked in this regard. (Fun fact: the world record for longest hajima is held by Park Jung Eun of Ulsan, whose hajima spanned three and a half octaves and lasted an amazing thirty-three-point-nine-eight seconds. It resulted when her then boyfriend grabbed her cell phone and would not return it for thirty-two-point-three-nine seconds.) ‘Hajima’ (하지마) means ‘don’t do that!’ or ‘stop that!’ and is generally followed up with ‘aigo’ (아이고) which is a multi-purpose ‘oh no!’ or ‘oh my god!’ kind of exclamation used so frequently that it almost seems like a filler word akin to ‘uh’ or ‘like’ in English. Aigo and hajima worm their way through the vernacular like suffering does through the people.

aigo and hajima : spoken Korean :: suffering : the people of Korea

Of course, even with all of the hardship and whatnot, joviality abounds most of the time, and a lot of the hajima-ing and aigo-ing is in jest. I’m going to miss so much of this place so much and I’ll especially miss things like those. I’ll treasure every hajimAAAaaAAaaa I hear before I go. It won’t be long before I go. Aigo.

Aigo indeed.

Wearisan

Jirisan (‘san’, meaning ‘mountain’, and ‘jiri’, meaning ‘jiri’) is mainland Korea’s highest mountain, with an elevation of 1,915 meters (or 6,283 feet for all those Brian Does Korea readers in Myanmar, The United States, and Liberia). The mountain attracts thousands of hikers throughout the year, most of whom would rather hike Hallasan, Korea’s highest mountain; workers in Korea are only allotted five hours of free time per year, and the flight to and from Jeju Island would eat up most of that, so many choose to hike Jirisan instead.

Our trip to Jirisan was to consist of a challenging day hike but became much more than that before its end. Upon our arrival at Jungsan-ri, a town near the base of the mountain, it was clear that something was awry. A darkness had fallen all around the mountain. What is normally a bustling town of more than (I’m guessing here) 3.8 million people was all but deserted. An older woman hobbled toward us as we reached the town’s center, her face more tears than anything else. ‘You must put an end to this,’ she exclaimed, and proceeded to tell us about the monster that had been terrorizing those who’d been foolish enough to attempt to summit the mountain recently. At first I thought that she was using the wrong word for whatever it was she was trying to say – surely there was no monster at the top of the mountain – but, after repeatedly confirming that that was indeed the word she was looking for, Justin and I began to realize that we’d stumbled into something dire, but we were still in need of convincing, so the woman took us down the road a bit to see what the monster had done.

Whatever the woman was talking about had made Mjölnir of a pot and nearly thrown it through that fence. We were clearly dealing with an entity with strength beyond our own. There was a chance, though, the woman explained, that we could acquire the strength we would need through prayerful diligence. She took us to The Shrine Of The Silver Monkey and showed us how to properly request the help we’d need to battle whatever it was we were going to battle. Most were not capable of handling the power that the Silver Monkey would grant us, if our prayer were successful, but the woman saw something in Justin and me; she thought we could harbor a strength that would tear apart our lessers.

“O, Silver Monkey, Who Art On Monkey Island,

Give Us The Secret Of Monkey Island,

So That We Might Gain The Strength Of Forty Ajummas

And Defeat That Which We Must Defeat”

The three-hour-long invocation seemed to do the trick. I felt something begin to materialize within me – it was a power I’d never known before: a kimchi flame in my heart. I felt as though I would soon be able to take and hold any seat on any bus in Korea, that whatever wait at the peak of the mountain would be no match for us. Asking the Silver Monkey for aid had a disadvantage, though: the beast knew of us, now. Our waygook blood had previously concealed us from its gaze, but now that we were imbued with ajumma strength, we were a threat. If we were not careful, it could find us and end us while we slept, before we ever even had a chance to reach the peak and use our acquired ajumma strength to battle the creature.

Our aide was prepared, though – she’d been praying and preparing for our arrival since the monster had first appeared. She’d used her own ajumma strength to build this fortified bunker, which she called a 민박 (‘minbak’ – a bed-and-breakfast-type lodging). It featured running water, a stove, and even had cable television. There was a group of college students hanging out outside of our accommodations, seemingly unaware of what was going on around it. I suppose the students could’ve been drinking as their way of dealing with what was no doubt a stressful and depressing situation, but I don’t know if any amount of soju could soften the horrors they’d no doubt heard about.

We stayed the night in that room, eating ramen – to keep our kimchi fires burning – and getting as much sleep as we could (which didn’t end up being very much).

The following morning, we posed for a picture to commemorate what we hoped would be the last day of the monster’s reign. The kimchi flame gave us each the ability to transform into our spirit animal. Justin’s was a small bear, mine was a park ranger.

We had to be ever vigilant in our ascent. We didn’t know what kind of impediments the beast would send our way, and, obviously, falling slippery!

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We paced ourselves, not wanting to be exhausted by the time we got to the top, but we felt that it was important to stay sharp. Here is Justin fighting a tree in preparation for the final battle:

And here is me posing at the grave of the last two people known to have attempted to fight the creature (I am smiling because I am celebrating their lives instead of lamenting their demises):

About halfway up Jirisan there is a temple. It is said to be the highest temple in all of Korea. It is a beautiful temple and I wish I’d been able to experience it under different circumstances. A monk was banging on a wooden block in this room in order to provide the rhythm for a chant. About a dozen people joined him in the incantations and they all seemed to know who we were, somehow. They gathered around Justin and me and took our hands, encouraging us to join them in the chant, which we did. We were to save them and they knew it. They did all that they could to help us.

I was very surprised to learn that the temple’s ‘Highest Temple In Korea’ designation has nothing to do with its elevation, and I was sad that we didn’t have time to indulge:

We documented our journey as thoroughly as we did because we thought that posterity would want to know how exactly it had all happened. The peak was nearly within reach at this point. Our spirits were higher than the people at the temple we’d just visited – we could do this, we thought.

The final portion of the ascent was extremely steep; the whole climb was steep, really – Jirisan offers no rest for those taking whichever route we took.

The top was much more crowded than we’d expected it to be. How had all of these people made it to the top? Had the beast left the mountain, never to return? Had we scared it off?

Here’s Justin mocking the complete lack of monster (or what we thought was a lack):

I wasn’t able to finish my cautiously celebratory line of thinking before we felt a powerful rumble all about us. Something was awakening. Something was upset. The monstrosity hadn’t left – it had been waiting…for us. The monster formed out of the clouds in the picture above. It was like the smoke monster from Lost, but without all the industrial, garbage-truck-ish sounds. It roared and the roar knocked everyone from the peak except for Justin and me. I don’t know how many lives were lost in that moment. I hope some of those people survived, somehow.

Justin and I knew what we had to do. We joined hands and care-bear-thrusted, unleashing a Cyclopsian blast. We turned about the peak, aiming our rays at different parts of the monster. It squealed and attempted to dodge the beams. It wasn’t long before all that remained was a cloudless sky of the purest blue that I’d ever seen. A mist closed in around the mountain soon thereafter, but for a moment it was as clear as we’d hope it would be when we first set out to climb the mountain, before we’d even heard about the monster.

During our descent, the rest of the mountain seemed undisturbed by the matters of men and beasts:

The battle, though short, was draining, but we decided to stick to our original plan for the hike, anyway, which involved walking another eight and a half kilometers along a ridge and over three more peaks because we believed our ajumma strength would return. It did not, however, and we ended up drunk-walking for much of the rest of the way. Among the other lessons we learned that day, we came to understand why hiking poles are so popular amongst the hikers of Korea. Here is Justin fashioning a walking stick for each of us:

After about ten hours of intense hiking and battling, we finally made it back to the woman who had recruited us. We began to tell her that we’d succeeded, that we’d vanquished the beast, but she stopped us – she knew. She could feel it in her ajumma heart. And she also knew exactly what we needed to begin to recover from our journey: the best-tasting watermelon I’ve ever had. (NOTE: People in Korea LUV L-U-V watermelon. I regard it as barely a top-15 fruit, and will usually decline it if it’s offered, but after that hike, it was perfect.)

It’s been weeks since our adventure in Korea’s largest national park and I still find myself trying to summon the strength I once possessed. I sit in bus seats and flex my abdominal muscles, hoping that my body will remember how to be that strong again, that I’ll be able to fight for my seat when an ajumma stares me down.

I feel an emptiness that won’t relent. It seems like it might never go away. Sometimes I wish I’d said No Thanks when Justin asked me to go on that trip. That trip changed me. It changed how I see the world and my place in it. It’s hard not to lament my situation because I fear that my ability will never again be as great as it was on top of that mountain.

Still, though, I go on, somehow.  I wander the streets, hoping that I will one day be called upon, again, just so that I might feel what I felt on that day. I spend my hours hoping for monsters and trying to keep the madness from turning me into one.

I’ve been to the mountaintop and I want to go back. I want to go back.