I'm On a Boat

Sometimes people get confused when I say I traveled from Korea without taking a plane. "Did you go through North Korea?" No I did not, that place is fucking nuts.

I left on a boat, and went to Russia. This is the room of bunks Adam and I had shared with two other people. It was really comfy and a surprisingly nice boat. You could buy bicycles made by Hummer or Porsche in the lobby, and there were colored fiber optic lights and a big open deck.

We met some other American travelers and some Russian girls coming back from studying in Japan, and hung out in the otherwise empty nightclub.

Train to Donghae

Adam and I took an evening train to the port city of Donghae on the evening of last year's today. I should have appreciated the beauty of the the countryside more, but I was preoccupied with dealing with a last minute phone crisis until the sun had gone down and a genial but bad-breathed trainmaster decided to chat up us waygooks and show us cell phone videos of his wife driving in their car.

Adam's Birthday

Today is Adam's birthday, and it was Adam's birthday a year ago too. Happy birthday Adam. Here's a picture of you riding a mechanical bull near Suseong Lake in Daegu. After making rounds of the little amusement park which included shooting pellet guns, riding a mechanical dog, and me rear-ending my ex-girlfriend into a wall after she cut me off on the go-kart track, we hung out with a dog in a bow tie trained to ride scooters, ate Russian food for dinner and spent the evening with a voice actress from Seoul and her chubby friend. Ah, sweet memories.

A Retrospective Begins Because I Have Nothing Better To Do

Compared to traveling, not traveling kind of sucks. That's why I've been sitting around twiddling my thumbs for three weeks.

I decided to start writing up my notes and journals from the last year of travel. I'd like to write a book eventually, but what I'm doing now is just cleaning up a lot of sloppy diary entries and organizing thoughts and memories that aren't written down before I forget them.

What I'm writing now will not be a book itself. If it was, it would be boring as shit, and long as hell. I've written 15,362 words so far, describing only 18 days of travel. And most of those days aren't even interesting. A lot are from when I was sitting around in Korea recovering from an inguinal hernia surgery. When I get to the interesting shit, I'll probably be writing five or six times as much per day on average.

Either way, at this rate, my notes will work out to more than 300,000 words, or the length of about three novels if I ever finish.

So here's something easy I know I can do: each day I'll upload a photo I took exactly one year ago.

Thrilling, I know.

So up above, there you have it, the first photo of my daily photo retrospective. Go ahead, click on it. It's much bigger that way.

It was taken from Kristin's roof in Daegu. She let Adam and I crash at her place while she was off on vacation. The 23rd of September was the day after Chuseok.  The sky was incredibly clear this day last year, compared to Chuseok the day before which was rainy and gray. Looking south, the mountains were especially crisp in the clear air. I recall that even the ugly cement high-rises looked nicer.

Travels Soundtrack: East Asia

When I started traveling, early on, somewhere in Russia, I got the entirely novel idea to listen to songs about the places I was traveling through.

The natural choice for Russia is Back in the USSR by the Beatles, but I'm going to use that for all the ex-Soviet states, so instead my selection for Russia is 'Siberian Breaks' by MGMT.

I didn't embed it because I don't actually recommend that you watch the whole video. Like Siberia itself, this song is long and mostly boring. It's not really a great song, despite what hipster contrarians will tell you. The rest of their second album is masterful though.

Next stop Mongolia. This is a NOFX classic from my high school days - 'All Outta Angst'. It's not entirely about Mongolia, but there's a short verse about it. Close enough.



And then China. Good ol' China. I made a point to listen to 'China Girl' by David Bowie. Not really about China, but what the hell, it's a great song, and it beats 'Chinese Democracy' by Guns N Roses.




Rewinding a bit, I don't really know any songs about Korea. I was technically traveling in Korea, although I lived there long enough that I don't really consider it much of traveling any more. Regardless, I'll throw you all a great song that's about a certain neighborhood in Korea. I was going to go with the sublime majesty of Girl's Generation's 'Gee', but instead, you get 'Itaewon Freedom' by M/V, of which, for a long period of time, I just couldn't get enough.




Next installment: southeast Asia.

Korea - The Video

Over my last four or five months in Korea, I took a shitload of photos. About 25,000 roughly. The idea was originally to combine it all with photos and video that my other friends were supposed to take, and create a massive collaborative video project by animating all our photos into a time-lapse uber-project.

It never really worked out. A bunch of us got real pumped on planning the project, but no one really went through with it. I still took a shitload of rapid-fire photos and would occasionally animate them into videos for fun. Like this sweet compilation of high-fives Adam and I unleashed upon the exotic locales we visited.

Well I had always intended to take the massive bulk of photos I shot in Korea and mash it all together with some music to sort of sum up and close the door on the time I spent there. I certainly couldn't do it when I was on the road, but I knew I'd get it done once I got here to Istanbul and had my own computer again. And I knew I'd set it to 'Home' by Davide Byrne and Brian Eno. I didn't think I'd leave it until my final couple of days here to start and finish, but I did. No matter, it's done.




I guess that's it.

Onward to Russia

I really don't know what to expect in Russia. Maybe it will actually be like this. Maybe there really will be bears everywhere. Either way it's bound to be much harder to travel in than Korea.

While I'm writing this mostly insignificant blog, Adam is helpfully researching the ins and outs of Russian tourist registration, something everyone is subject to when staying anywhere more than two or three days. Not registering and getting caught by the police, say, in a random document check on the street could be bad. Fines, almost certainly. Bribes and jail? Maybe a little extreme, but who knows?

We didn't even have to give our names at the motel we stayed in last night. We didn't even get a receipt. According to the guidebook, one must keep all train tickets and hotel registrations on them at all times in the event police stop us to inspect our papers and visa information.

Russia certainly won't be as cheap as Korea. Any simple search through travel forums will bring up multiple claims of it being the country with the worst value for your money. Sounds great for a couple of guys trying to make their money stretch as far as possible.

Language won't be fun either. Beyond the fact that neither of us can speak Russian (we can sorta read though), you don't come across a lot of stories of helpful Russian officials or ticket agents when doing some basic research before heading there. I'm sure it will be a far cry from the over-friendly train master we talked with last night.

We'll certainly be traveling through interesting places totally new to both of us, something I haven't experienced since I went to the Philippines, and something I'm really looking forward to. I expect unforgettable train rides and an appreciation of how vast the country is. I just hope to make some Russian friends who can give me something more positive to think about rather than what I just wrote further up, and who hopefully won't get too offended about my ignorance and throw me to the bears.

Onward from Korea

We left Daegu on a train yesterday, on our way to leaving Korea for good. Staying in Daegu to heal and rest was nice, but not so much actually part of traveling for me. It was more of an epilogue to the two years working and living there. I did get to see all of my friends again, but I also had to say goodbye to Miju, and we both knew it was for good.

I don't want to elaborate any more than saying it didn't make for a very happy train ride, and not made any easier by the fact that my cell phone was deactivated, something I had asked my ex-co-teacher to do in the morning before I realized I couldn't go to the bank and transfer all my money home and close my account. I still had unreturned phone calls and text messages to respond to, and goodbyes to make, and I had to pull myself together enough to borrow the phone of a stranger to call her up and get it reactivated for a day so I could say yet more goodbyes.

And it would have been a great train ride. We were on a slow train north and east through the countryside and the mountains were green and rice paddies were deep. The air was incredibly clear and brought the tiny villages and land they occupied into such sharp clarity that I don't recall seeing before in Korea. It may have been the sentimental chemicals running through my brain, or maybe just the long, humid, and very hazy summer air from just weeks before.

Neither of us got much sleep the night before. We didn't get to bed until 6AM, and drenched in cigarette smoke, because we were celebrating Adam's birthday out on the town. I got up at 9:30AM to do some errands only to find that banks don't open on Saturdays in Korea. I napped a little on the train, and we played a game of cribbage to pass the time once the sun dropped below the mountains in the west and we couldn't look at the scenery.

The train master would speak to us in broken English every time he walked through the car, and a few stops before we got off, he planted himself across the aisle from us to have a conversation with us, whether we wanted to or not. His English wasn't great, and my Korean is not good, but we managed to communicate.

He was a jolly enough guy, but had terrible breath when he got in close enough to show us a video of his wife pulling out of a parking space on his cell phone. His oldest daughter was in Ireland for the last four years and never came back. He lived in Yeongju and rode on slow trains 11 days out of the month for a salary of 6.5million won. That's a job, schedule, and paycheck that's hard to beat.

It was easy finding a cheap motel once we stepped off the train. Donghae is a small city with nothing more than a port, at least according to the guidebook and our impressions from simply looking around. The ATM was closed when we arrived last night but open this morning when I sent money to my ex-co-teacher to pay for my phone.

We got some food and went to a smoky PCbang. I couldn't upload any photos. I brought a worthless SC card USB adapter that doesn't let me access my photos, or even register with any computer I've used. I'll have to use Adam's plug in the future. We were left with only a few hours in the morning and early afternoon to kill before we make our way to the ferry and whoknowswhat after that.

Back in Daegu

It's been a week healing, in Daegu again. I spent a night in a guesthouse by Yeungnam University, two nights in the clinic, two nights in the incomparable Herotel, and am currently residing in my friends apartment while she's on vacation. I can walk almost normally now, though I'm still a bit sore where they cut me open. I guess there's a lot Adam can see and do around here, but I mostly want to sleep and read and recover.

I'm yet to start on my epic travel ballad, but that'll happen soon. I just finished reading Kristin's copy of Shakespeare by Bill Bryson in two days, which has kind of put me in an appropriate mood.

I must say, reading his Shakespeare was a joy compared to reading Bryson's In A Sunburned Country/Down Under. In the former book, Bryson mercifully left out the unbearable novelty and cuteness of phrase that he seemed to think was so entertaining to read from the latter. The upshot was I finished Shakespeare because it was interesting and informative, rather than because I felt obliged since I had started it.

My former co-teacher was kind enough to help me arrange ferry tickets to Vladivostok. Adam and I originally planned to leave from Sokcho, but found that leaving from Donghae was half the price on a nicer looking boat. Then we found it was the same price when we actually reserved the tickets, and that I was just looking at prices for children when I was doing my research. In my defense, the browser only allowed me to check that option at the time. And the boat is still nicer.

Iodine Jesus!

There's a graphic picture of me getting cut open below! Watch out!

I got my operation on Tuesday, two days ago. They stuck an IV in my arm, wheeled me into the operating room, had me curl up in the fetal position while they injected anesthesia into my spine, and splayed me out on the operating table, legs straight and arms out wide like a horizontal Jesus. I didn't get nails in my hands and feet of course, I instead got half of my pubes shaved and my entire crotch coated with iodine.

A nurse popped some earbuds in and played an intersting combination of Simon and Garfunkel, the Black Eyed Peas, and some other incongrous Western stuff. Through some strange trick of the anesthesia, which made me feel like my lower half of my body was asleep, right before the pins and needles set in, it felt like they were cutting up near my belly button, which would've been the totally wrong area. That thought sort of frightened me a bit, but after the surgery when I was lying in bed, the anesthesia also made my right leg feel like it was bent upward when it was very clearly lying flat, so I knew it was just causing some strange, inaccurate, sensations.

Here's a picture of what the surgery looked like, though I couldn't see it at the time thanks to a sheet they put up in front of my face.

I mostly sat around in bed for two days. I couldn't eat or even lift my head the first day, but could walk around the second day. Adam showed up not long after my surgery on the first day, it was good to finally see him again. I also got visits from Miju, Moe, Paul, Kristin, and Dustin; what a great bunch of friends. And it's hard not to appreciate guys like Dustin when he says touching things like "I'm not even bangaweoyo to see you. It's too soon." To be fair, I knew what he meant, it's not like I had really been gone long enough for anyone to miss me.

It's Thursday now and I'm out on the streets, moving to a guesthouse for a couple days before taking over Kristin's pad when she goes on vacation. It's tough walking, I kind of shuffle like Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, but I should be in better shape soon.

Under the Knife

I found out I had an inguinal hernia before I left Korea for some time at home. It was small, didn't bother me much, and from what several doctors told me, wasn't really a big deal. However, surgery is the only way to deal with hernias and I thought it was probably a good idea to get it fixed before I went off to the middle of nowhere in Mongolia or China, to avoid rare but serious complicatons. Too bad I didn't have enough time to do it before I left Korea. It would've cost about $300 when I had insurance.

Getting it at home was out of the question. I have no American insurance, and an average figure I found on the internet put the cost at about $7,000. I called a local hospital just to be sure, and they assured me that it would be between $9,000 and $13,000.

So my first order of business in Korea is getting cut open and sewn back up. Even without insurance here, it will cost me less than $1,000, and I get a swanky private room with my own bathroom and flatscreen TV for two nights. In fact the room is so nice that I may stay another night or two since the room itself is costing me little more than a hostel.

The Easy Start

Attempting to board the plane in Manchester, my boarding pass set off a strange tone from the machine and the chubby guy told me I needed to step aside and have my travel documents reviewed. Apparently he was afraid of being fined for letting me on the plane without an onward ticket, like I was going to sneak into Korea on a tourist visa and never leave.

I sorted it out, showing him my Russian and Chinese visas and official Russian tourism invitation. He had to call up and ask someone a bunch of questions that clearly betrayed his inexperience while I looked out the window to make sure the plane didn't leave without me. I got on, only holding the plane up a few minutes, though I feel like the crew and passengers resented me for it. A stewardess banged my knee with a beverage cart and maybe I just wasn't awake enough, but I don't think she bothered to apologize.

I barely had to wait for either of my layovers in Detroit and Tokyo. On the two international legs I sat next to two university professors. Maybe it's a sign, along with working 20 hours a week and having three or four months off per year.

I didn't know how I'd feel about coming back to Korea as a tourist after living and working here for two years, but it felt perfectly normal when I zoomed through customs and got into a cab that drove way too recklessly without providing seatbelts and brought me to a "hostel" illegally located in some guys apartment. I did know that starting a trip in Korea would be easy for me to slide into a traveling mindset, but first things first: I need to find a surgeon to fix me up because it's too damn expensive in America.

The Plan

Right to left, that's the plan. When I step off the plane in Korea, I won't step back on one until I get the European Atlantic at the very earliest. I'll take a boat to Russia, and trains and buses from there on out, with maybe another boat or two across the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. And maybe a bicycle or motorcycle for good measure.

I leave tomorrow, and so far I have plenty of room in my pack. I'm foregoing a large backpacking pack in favor of a smaller and more manageable day pack, along with the case for my travel guitar. I've yet to pack with a sense of finality, but it seems I never do. I'll throw everything in at the last minute tomorrow, I'm sure.

Beside my guitar, ready to go in its case I have a book of scales and arpeggios, a fat guidebook for China, a small daily planner that I've been using as a mini journal, and in the outside pocket, a small padded box containing mini travel games such as backgammon, cribbage, checkers and chess. I'm going to have to learn some of those games so Adam and I can stay sane if we're held up in some godforsaken place waiting for a train or a sign or our salvation. I also have some pencils and pens in a case given to me by a student, a tuner, capo, string winding tool, and picks. One of the picks was used by B.B. King when I saw him at the Whittemore Center; I hope I don't lose that one.

In my bag I have my camera and case and cords, a lightweight down windbreaker, Gore-Tex outer shell, and pack towel in the bottom pocket. I have two extra pairs of boxers, three extra pairs of socks, two extra T-shirts, and pair of running shorts, a short sleeve shirt and a long sleeve shirt. I have a couple small gifts to give to my girlfriend on the occasion of our last time seeing each other, perhaps, for good. I have a small bag of toiletries and I have some important documents and an alarm clock, Korean cell phone and charger, spare boot laces and insoles, flip-flops, decoy wallet, buckle strap, and other small miscellaneous things. In the outer pocket I have a mostly empty journal and a copy of Three Cups of Tea next to my shades and glasses.

With the exception of a sweater, and maybe a hat and some gloves purchased here or there, those things should get me from right to the left side of that map. Should, however, is a very unreliable word.