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.

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.