AZIJSKI SPISI 2

Otaku life

2012-02-06T07:14:00.007+01:00

I hurried to Japan to be back home today. Today is the 대보름 (Daeboreum), celebrating the first full moon of the lunar year. It's something of a Spring Festival - which is hard to believe if you listen to the weather forecast. Actually, Spring already started on Saturday, on 입춘 (Ipchun) and, amazingly, the temperatures were a little bit above zero. For this week in Gangwon do they are expected to fall to 20 below. Today the first snowflakes appeared here around lunchtime but it was a false alarm. I have a strong feeling that the white crap will cover everything during the night.
I saw also some sunshine on Saturday when I went to Busan to board the ferry for Japan. Like always I boarded with a bag of beers to fight the boredom of a night on the ship, having no idea in what fun it will end. I already froze my ass drinking a bottle of beer on the roof of the ferry terminal, so I choose to drink the next in the smoking room on the ferry. And I almost choked myself when a pretty girl approached me. Not for the fact that she approached me, but for what she asked me.
"Hi! Are you Korean?"
How the hell did she know? Oh, she was just joking, she laughed heartily and asked me if I speak Japanese. Ah well, another situation when I bitterly regret for being so dumb at Asian languages. And then she told me that I look like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Carribean. I can only guess that was a compliment. After some small talk she introduced me her boyfriend and that sucked big time. (No, not him, a pleasant guy, just the fact that she has a boyfriend...) And after more small talk and more large beers she introduced me her sister. Single. Which made big time. And it went even better when after some jokes on my drinking I said yopparai des. "But you can speak Japanese!"
No, not really, I know just a few words that I picked here and there in Japan and watching anime.
"You like anime?"
No denying this time. Yes, I'm an otaku. "Sugoi!" chirped the sisters in chorus. "And which is your favourite anime?"
Easy question, was, is and always will be Evangelion! "Sugoi!!" I almost saw the double exclamation mark. "Mine too!" explained the older sister.
"Chincha?" I was already so drunk that I started talking in Korean. The next moment I was taking of my clothes, the girls looked somehow worried, but only till the moment I stayed in my Rei t-shirt - they just wanted to take some pictures of a crazy otaku in his Evangelion underwear. It's how they put it, I really don't have Evangelion underpants. It seems a nice idea, though.
It's not hard to guess what came next. A drunken chorus (oh yes, in the meantime we were joined by two Korean otakus) singing, shouting, grunting and squealing Zankoku na tenshi no teze... and the ferry hasn't left Busan yet!

"And what is your second favourite anime?" Deddoman Wandarando. "Sugoi!"
"The third? The third!" Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. "Sugoi!"
As for what went on later I'm a bit confused. I do remember talking about Tokunoshima and singing (sic!) Shima uta and I remember being a translator from Korean to Japanese and vice-versa. I was also invited for some homemade miso soup next time I will be travelling in Japan.
I woke up in Japan with a monstrous hangover and a painful stiff neck - I just hate those bricks that serve as pillows on the ships. The Immigration made no problems on my statement that I'm just on a visa run and the Customs officer took his time to check minutely all my stuff, stinky socks included. Funny thing, I clearly remember that just the same guy did the same three months ago. He just doesn't like me.
Three hours to wait. A short walk in the neighborhood and a check in the nearby park to see how my homeless friends are doing. There was only one, still sleeping, using a cat as a blanket.

Way to cold outside, back to the ferry terminal. I took my textbooks with me - to do my homework in Japan! Don't you agree that it's a bit stupid, ironic, crazy etc to do Korean exercises in Fukuoka? Well, I like it.

Before boarding I couldn't resist to take a picture of a warning in the Duty Free Shop. It's not engrish by definition but it's a good lesson in how to complicate the simple act of stealing.

I slept almost all the way back to Korea and had enough good sense to choose a queue with a woman Immigration officer. Yes, I did it out of a sexist reasoning. Because women are more nosy. When guys go through my passport they keep asking where do I go, what will I do, when will I do.. but all they want to know is WHY. And they never ask it. Because of that they feel miserable. But they have Power and they take revenge on me, making my life miserable. And actually there's another reason that has nothing to do with sexism but with racism. Koreans can be racist bastards and it's more probable to meet a male racist than a female one.
The girl - clearly I choose a pretty one - asked me immediately. "You are going to Japan every three months for one day and the rest of the time you are in Korea. You can't work legally so WHY are you doing this?"
At which I made an embarrassed and shy face and almost whispered "I have a girlfriend in Korea". She maintained a professional expression, but I saw the corners of her mouth bending upwards. "Is this your girlfriend?" she asked and pointed at the address of Sang Pyeong that I wrote as my address in Korea. "Oh no," I replied as I was in total shock, "we are not married, we don't live together! This is my friends' house, they live in the same village." And all her professionalism was gone, replaced by a broad smile.
"Welcome to Korea."
Fuck the karma if for being honest you get kicked in the ass.

Bread, Rice and Dragons

2012-01-23T13:06:00.007+01:00

Years ago, on another planet and in another life, my girlfriend asked me to which food I could compare her. My answer, without thinking, was bread. She wasn't exactly pleased, so I explained: "I could say you're like some delicious gourmet dish, something spicy, or sweet or you name it. But, the fact is, you're like bread because I can eat bread every day and never get tired of it and I just can't live without bread."
Ah, blessed naivety of fools in love! Bread? Who gives a fuck about bread!
Today is the first day of the Year of the Dragon. I arrived in Korea on the eve of the Year of the Tiger. What a year it was! A Winter with my sweet little princess, a Spring volunteering after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, a Summer of slavery on raddish fields, a Fall in a quiet place I might really start calling home. Without bread. With lots of rice. I started to learn how to mix different varieties to make it even more pleasant. At times I have five or even six different types of rice in my room - yes, I sleep with my rice. When it was in the kitchen, the mice were stealing it way too much. And you can make rice even better adding different beans and grains.

It's been pretty much boring in the last few days. New year holidays. Everybody gone for family gatherings. So every day I feed the animals, I make a patrol in the village to check if everything is OK, feed the neighbor's cats and go back home to find myself some work. So far there was enough firewood to chop and pile, but for tomorrow I really have no clue what to do. Maybe it's time to study a little bit. Or a little bit more. I read my second book in Korean - I think the cover says it all.

I almost stopped watching Korean movies and dramas. I just can't find movies that I like anymore. And I spoiled myself with the drama City Hunter, after it all others are plain boring. So I switched to Japanese anime. With a smile. I always claimed that I'm not an otaku. Till the moment when my son almost choked himself laughing at me when I was explaining this to a Japanese. It was because of my Evangelion T-shirts that I was again "mistaken" for an otaku. I was a bit drunk so I explained to the guy: "You see, I'm not really into anime, I'm fan only of Evangelion... and yes, I do like all Miyazaki's movies. And Otomo's Akira and Cowboy Bebop and Galaxy Express and Photon The Idiot Adventures and Fullmetal Alchemist and Space Battleship Yamato and..." Ummm... what was I trying to explain?
So I asked a connoisseur for some good stuff and for the past days I was glued to the screen all evenings and most nights watching デッドマンワンダーランド

ひぐらしのなく頃に and ひぐらしのなく頃に解

and today I started Serial Experiments Lain

But... but... you have to believe me, I'm no otaku... and it really really DOESN'T matter that I'm listening to 分島花音 while I'm writing this, really!
To complicate my life I installed the Korean Windows on my computer also. It's for learning, you know. And to challenge myself. For fun I connected another monitor to watch anime while comfortably lying in my bed and I found a pair of broken speakers, repaired them and no we go full volume. And yes, I still have too much time so I started another blog, Conficturae, dedicated only to fiction, poetry and photography. Feel free to visit it.

If Days Can Be Called Crazy

2012-01-18T17:22:00.007+01:00

It's almost boring hearing this one "I had a crazy day". How can a day be crazy? As far as the latest statistics goes, a day still has 24 hours, 1440 minutes and so on and this day starts for everyone of you in the moment you wake up. I remeber a time I was really allergic to newspapers news saying "the road killed two people". Come on, are you kidding me? Did the road awaken in a movielike and strangled the innocent drivers?
Uhm, this switch was totally unexpected, seems my subconsciousnes is working all the time. So, let's go back, for many years, when I was still a happy teacher in Surobenia and we had a great award trip for the best students from our school. Yeah, we did some amazing rafting in the Kolpa river, had a great time and on the way home... our bus minced a biker. The moron was racing with one of his friends and in one bend he just happened to be under our bus. His fucking bike got to flames when he was dragged under the bus so also our bus caught fire.
Was it a crazy day?
Days have nothing to do with it.
Like a day when you're invited by a yoga master to visit his ... well, whatever they call it.. a yoga 道場, till I don't learn the Korean word, his yoga center. And again, I have to make another jump in time, but only four days. It was a Sunday like many others, not many work to do, so a lot of time for gathering and having common meals. I was excited and happy my teacher was back, so we could start our lessond after three weeks of vacation, but... the Doc (friend of the Yoga master) had planned an all-out drinking night. So it was, for me, at least it's how I see it, since I don't remember shit of that night and I awoke at 1PM. My dear teacher was waiting for me at 9AM. I missed many appointments in my life, but I never felt so bad like that day. I was even too ashamed to call her back (I had two missed calls from her on the phone), not to say to go to her home to apologize. Clearly she was way pissed with me - and I really really do agree with her for being it - but she just smiled at me when we met for the umpteteh common dinner of our community the same day. I managed to send her a text message saying "I'm sorry". In Korean, of course. Everyobody predicted some hard beating as punishment, alike in Korean schools still nowadays, and, to tell the truth, I would feel better if she just whipped me instead of just smiling at me and giving me the look I-know-you. Next day was same, common meals, and in late evening two drunk fellas dropped in my house. With plenty of beer and soju. I suppose it was the first time in my life I said, loudly and cleraly, "NO! GO AWAY! I DON'T WANT TO DRINK! EUN SHIL WILL KILL ME!¨" I did my best to resist to these Asain barbarians, but they overwhelmed me. I had to drink with them.

Believe it or not, I was so mad at myself and at them that I woke up at 6AM, made my breakfast, ate it, brushed my teeth, drank coffee, set fire in the gudeul and took the wrong books to my lesson. Crap again. No matter how much I want to learn Koran (and no matter how I really want to please my tecaher) I keep doing everything wong. But I'm happy to have my own GTO. Well, fuck the latin letters, I have my GT은! I survived even this lesson. And here the scary part starts.
We went to Jinju, to the Yoga master's place. Two hours of yoga killed me. I feel better after after ten hours making wood. Not to talk about th embarassment. It's a sort of public secret here how to make a couple of me and my teacher. Well, my first yoga lesson turned into ero-yoga (not my invention, it was laughably explained like this to othres later)and I really don't want go into details. Now, don't you dare to think it turned in an orgy or anything the like, no way, there's just some.. some things.. you'd be happy to do when you're alone.. I mean, when you're alone with her, with him..
Anyway I was a good boy today and I made my engrish homework (on a pissed note: I submitted some really good pics in the last year to the site but the admin seems not to like me). My comment on this is I miss crrasicar music

After lunch it went on some more common railways. I mentioned the Chalengger guy few times in my posts. He's not only my friend and my challenger (a challenge still unresolved), but he's one of the best floor heating builders in the area. To become his apprentice -wow! Well, we visited him on his latest work site, where he's trying to make a record floor heating. Bigger houses in Korea usually have separated heating systems for each room, but his project is to heat the whole house with only one furnace. For this house.

Later tehre was work waiting for me, digging arrowroota(Maranta arundinacea), unpleasant and hard work to do, but I'll have some dices of this medicine to make a good hangover tea.

After digging the roots we had dinner with three bottles of soju. Yeah, dream on, that wasn't the dinner, we have to go Mi Jeong ssi house... AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH eat, drink, sing!

A Memorable Birthday

2012-01-06T05:23:00.004+01:00

I was born in the year 4297, the year of the Wood Dragon, on the second day of the twelfth month. But I'm not used to the lunar calendar yet, so I missed my birthday. And I didn't care much about my birthday according to the solar calendar, but, as it usually goes, somebody else did care.
For a few days I was working in a factory of 된장. We had to make a few tons of 메주, bricks of crushed boiled soybeans. And during the afternoon break my coworkers made me the funniest birthday cake ever. It was made - or, should I say, built - of choko pies with a candle on top. And the boss had makkoli and soju instead of coffee for us. Just for a toast, there was more work waiting, but it was really nice.
On our way home in the evening 경희 said that we must hurry because dinner is waiting. What dinner? It's your birthday, isn't it? So 영란 made a ginger cake for you!
And we went to the house of my teacher, we were a bit late but it was not an issue, the cake was really there, with candles and the writing 꼬끼오 (which is an onomatopoeia for the sound of the hen) and my teacher made also seaweed soup (which is a must for a birthday in Korea) and 상평 hurried to open a bottle of red wine... and I was on the verge of tears. I have rarely been so touched. Because I rarely met such people. The food was simple (yet delicious) and the wine was nothing special (yet we drank it all), but the feelings were all so warm, friendly... hard to describe with words. Have you ever been lost on a cold winter night? If you haven't, you'll never understand these feelings.
I was happy that next day I had to wake up early again, so there was no abuse of alcohol, just that bottle of wine. To much drinking would have spoiled the greatness of the moment. In aeons I didn't go to sleep sober on a birthday evening, but it was also aeons that I didn't go to sleep so happy.
During this holidays I also managed to read my first book in Korean, 노란 우산이 좋아.

Yes, it's a book for small children, but it's a start. And I also had the guts to send a text message to my princess, without asking anybody for help and I could read (and understand) her reply by myself.
In few weeks is 설날, the New Year according to the lunar calendar. It will be one year - lunar year - that I'm in Asia. What a year it has been!

Another Goodbye

2011-12-29T04:13:00.006+01:00

Also the Japanese friend left. Almost a week earlier than planned, but it was the only option to get to Tokunoshima in time, ferry tickets sold out for the holidays. So he'll be spending a few days in Nagasaki before going to Kagoshima.
But I supposed you weren't fooled, he's no Japanese at all. He's my son. And he's Japanese in the way that I'm a Korean. We may not have almond eyes, we can't speak the language, but our hearts and souls are Asian to the core. And soon we'll also be speaking.
All in all ended well. He had a farewell party, too. Actually he had two. The first one was supposed to be just a normal drinking party. We went to a restaurant with some friends and then in a bar to eat more. I mean to drink more. And there it started. Few rounds of beer. Next step was somek (soju and mekchu, beer), the Korean screwdriver. It was not enough, so we did a few rounds of somakmek (soju and makkoli and mekchu). Bad idea. My drinking challenger was in the mood and he announced that it's a perfect day to have our contest, he went to buy beers and we went to my house. On the way home Ramon raised the white flag, he threw up all the alcohol to the last drop and he looked pretty much like a piece of crap. No more drinking for him. The yoga master quit even earlier, but not by his will - his wife forbid him to drink so he actually joined us just for a few drinks and later drank only tea. His doctor friend was already wasted which left The Challenger, The Poet and Sangpyeong to drink with me. And Sangpyeong had enough of beer so he brought soju and some other alcoholics with him.
Now, I'd be very happy to write that I won the drinking challenge. Hell, I'd be proud to write that I lost to such a man like my challenger. The sad point is, nobody knows what happened that night. Who gave up first? Nobody can remember. When did we fell asleep? Nobody knows. I woke up at noon and found that I have bruises on my arms and painful ribs. Did we have a fight? Nobody remembers. I couldn't have fell from the bed because I sleep on the floor.
It was then that Ramon found out it's his last day here. A farewell dinner was organized in a hurry, Sangpyeong offered him a lift to Busan and we started drinking.

Sangpyeong cooking

The Challneger

And his cute daughter Jin

The Doctor

And his cute daughter

Eventually we couldn't stand really a lot of beer. We returned home early and spent the last hours together like father and son, reading together the manga Evangelion. Then we watched Puchi Eva - Evangerion Atto Sukūru and before sleeping also the final scene from Evangerion Shin Gekijōban: Ha

Now he's gone. The room seems so big.
Have a safe trip, my loved son!

Why Am I So Boring

2011-12-18T06:21:00.004+01:00

Tiziano Terzani is an Italian journalist and writer who spent most of his life in Asia. In the late sixties he spent some time in North Korea. At the time he was correspondent of the German Der Spiegel and he wrote a long article about N. Korea. I remember the beginning, it went something like this: While the rest of the world is still struggling in the year 1969, people in North Korea live in the future, they are 15 years ahead in time. (If you don't get the point, do some quick adding, how much is 1969+15?) And on he went with descriptions of happy people marching for the glory of the loved leader and other similar crap. When translations of the Spiegel article arrived in North Korea, Terzani became the most loved foreign journalist by the government officials. They paraded with his article, bragging that he's the only foreigner who can see the deep truth of the communist system. Terzani was quite ashamed with the situation, but not for long. Someone decided to explain the meaning of irony to the officials. The very next day he was expelled from the country.
Irony is a very hard thing for most Asians, be it Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, you name it. It's a totally alien concept and I think it's because of the deep roots of Confucianism.
My posts used to be full of irony, if not sarcasm. Probably you noticed it's not so anymore. I'm afraid I can be taken seriously like it happened to Terzani. I'm afraid someone could be offended. It doesn't really sound like me, does it?
I fully realized what is happening to me just a few days ago. On FB I have a profile picture with the little chap on the bamboo stick. I took it the very last day the family was still here before moving. So, few days ago a friend commented that it's a nice picture. I replied saying that the pic is nice just because the chap is so cute and that I miss him so much since the family moved. And then it hit me. No, it struck me. I miss people that go. It's me who is staying. Transforming my home in a computer junkyard. Preserving vegetables, cooking jams and juices to stock them. Looking where to hang the 2012 calendar.
And last week I had a phone chat with the little chap, he is missing uncle Dag.

Mountains! Mountains!

2011-12-14T13:14:00.003+01:00

A trip to the Hwagmaesan last week... with unfriendly wind.

Hey, I can see our car down there!

And later dinner in a fancy restaurant.

A snapshot of how a Korean winter morning looks like...

And how my fridge looks like...

Yesterday's trip - Mosan.

It almost fell down! If it wasn't for me to save the day...

Our yoga master friend just loves scary places to meditate.

The Second Overseas Reunion of Iwanuma Volunteers

2011-12-08T12:40:00.010+01:00

The last week has been somehow crazy. Crazier than usual, I mean. Few days before leaving for Seoul I found a nice spot to have a break on the way home from the nearby village, where I usually go to buy beers. I sat on the rock, the day was beautiful and warm... and when I wanted to go back home I had no more beers and I almost fell from the rock.

The next day I was bragging a lot about my computer hardware skills. And I got two broken PCs, some really good configurations, 3GHz processors, 2GB of DDR3 RAM memory each, Radeon graphic cards, you name it. The challenge was, if I'm really so good at repairing computers I will be able to make a decent one for my teacher (who really needs a new one) with the spare parts. What's actually wrong with them? One doesn't start at all, the other keeps restarting. I knew the second one will give me some headache. And I got also an old monitor, I can't work without it! And my room turned in a workshop.

As I suspected, the first one was easy. Reset the BIOS and turn it on. Works like a wonder. The next step broke my heart. I had to format the hard drive. Previously it was working on Ubuntu. You have to know that Linux users are a rarity in Korea. And when I found a PC running Ubuntu... I had to format it. But it was another challenge - am I able to install and tweak the Korean version of a M$ operating system? Oh, the hell I am able! Well, the installation part was easy, I could do it blindfolded without a keyboard, I've done it so many times I'm sick of it. Tweaking the bastard was easy also, because I cheated. Command lines are the same in all language versions...
I know, the picture sucks, but it's an old monitor...

I finished with the computer the evening before I left for Seoul. Once in Seoul I started drinking. And I drank a little bit more and went to sleep. When I woke up next day I was still drunk and i was almost late at the airport to meet a Japanese friend who was in Europe and on his way home he stopped in Korea. He stopped here with a good reason - to meet me. We worked together in the ruins of Iwanuma. I was shocked when I saw him. I barely recognized him. I know how popular is plastic surgery in Asia but this guy has gone too far. He did so much of surgery that he doesn't look Japanese any more!

I was waiting him with beers. I know I should have been there with some Hite, Cass, Ob or Max beer... I had Sapporo. I know what he likes. And not to mention that Sapporo is... The Legendary biru.

We continued drinking together for two days in Seoul and left for Wonji. Where we bought more beers and froze our asses waiting the bus for Gahoe. From there was easy, I called a friend to pick us and we were home. With absolute delight I saw smoke from my chimney, Yong Ran was obviously informed of our arrival and she was heating the floor in my room. But noone of them was home so we just drank all our beers. They arrived around 10 PM and we started drinking with Sang Pyeong - drinking my brother's homemade poison, a special gift from Sveronia. The shit has some 60% of alcohol, probably more. We emptied the bottle. And that was really really bad because next morning I woke up late. I had Korean lessons that day. So I grabbed the computer and ran like hell. I was still almost 15 minutes late and the worst thing is that I was still drunk. Heavily drunk. I felt like shit and looked much worse - she noticed immediately that something's wrong with me so I just apologized and told her the drinking story. She acknowledged that doing anything in such a state would be a total waste of time. Instead of studying I went to work, there was a heating system to build, the Japanese friend with me. In a way we were happy that we already have some work to do, it means that we will stop drinking and be useful.
Such a nice dream it was... Yes, we indeed were working all the day, but we were drinking all the time, too. Soju, beer, makkoli - you name it. I realized how drunk I am only when I left one hour earlier than the others, I invited everyone for dinner so I went cooking, and Sang Pyeong gave me his car to drive home. Luckily I survived. The dinner was a nightmare of fun. In the end we were in 18 in my miniature room, laughing all the time because even the most skillful yoga master was hitting his neighbor's chopsticks with his knees, I was in pain all the time and everybody was taking pictures of this mess. My camera was in the opposite corner of the room, to reach it - Mission Impossible. The soju, beer and makkoli in daytime wasn't enough - folks that I saw first time brought some sweet raspberry wine, supposed to be the Korean fuck wine. At least so the folklore goes.
Next day I woke up still drunk. Yeah, I know, this post is so boring. But this day we were safe - or so we thought - because the guys finished the heating alone. It was a nice boring day, then evening came. And the invitation for dinner to celebrate the finished work. Dinner? It was a fucking party. Two boxes of soju and two of beer. Barbequed bamboo sticks stuffed with meat and kimchi. A lot of toasts and quaffing. I was done. Next morning Korean lessons were waiting for me.
Ah, more about copmuters. I bought a "wifi booster", a USB antenna to have a better reception here. It works smooth, but I had to install a program to make it work. In Korean, of course. Well, not really. If it was Korean, it would take me some time but everything would be fine. In this case, it wasn't showing the Korean characters. It was the hardest decision in my life...

And I got another computer to fix (or to use for spare parts). Only this was so dirty that I had to disassemble it outside and it was such a funny picture with the cows and hens staring at me that the Japanese just took it.

The Lousy Spy

2011-11-26T12:44:00.002+01:00

Have I told already that Korea is the land of magic? Miracles happen all the time. The last was my miracolous healing, unbelieveable.
After the wedding I started to feel really bad, I tought I've caught some nasty fever because I was shivering all the time. I was freezing and I felt comfortable only in my hot bed. It went on for two days then in the morning of the third day I saw little Guryun playing with something shiny in the yard. It was a big piece of ice. Ice? Where from? You really don't know? It's already three days we're getting way sub zero! I instantly decided to stop wearing sandals, India style hippy trousers and T shirts and to put on some decent warm clothes. A miracle! I was healed in a second, I felt absolutely no cold! It's a land of wonders, I tell you!
Now, about the title. It's me, I am the lousy spy. I was discovered to be a North Korean spy when we were making ginger tea. Kyong Hee spotted me immediately. While everybody was picking the ginger at a slow, comfortable pace, I rushed through the field like I learned when picking radish. Then she assumed that the communist former Yugoslavia had strong ties with N Korea and all the rest was obvious. I had no other choice but to admit everything (only later I found out that the real NK spy is Sungbae, you know, Tiger, but that's another story).
Two days ago we were planning the study schedule with Eun Shil, my teacher, and she mentioned that on saturday she's going to be very busy making kimchi. Now I know how enlightenment must look like. Of course I offered my help, I always help her to thank her for her time and effort in teaching. Only this time it was with a more selfish motivation. To see the way she is making it. To find out if she uses any secret ingredients or techniques. Informations are power. I was sure it will be like with the heating systems, every master of a trade has his secrets.
So this morning I merrily fed the cows, hens and dogs, skipped breakfast, took my camera and was ready for the mission "Kimchi". In front of her house the cabbage, cut in halves, was rinsing. She uses a different way to make it tender, not like the one I know from Gangwon-do or that you find in every web recipe for making kimchi. But before we started I had to make some Italian coffee and over the cups we engaged a technical discussion on kimchi making. When she started talking about the "sauce" or the "filling" or call it whatever you want, I almost fainted. It was all already done. Some ingredients were made months ago. Yesterday she cooked another few.

Ehm... so what are we gonna do today? How what, we'll be making kimchi today!
And so it was. Fill the cabbages, put them in the big clay jars outside and before lunch we were done. Maybe it's childish but I was sort of proud when she left me for making lunch to work unsupervised. We had some freshly made kimchi with lunch and I took some home. It tastes... like a fairy tale. I really love it fresh but I was advised to eat it as fast as possible, it will remain deliciously tasty for one or two days more, then it will become unedible for the next few months when it will be finally ripe and delicious again.

I didn't learn any great secret but eventually I found out how Korean cabbage looks like. I mean the real, the really Korean one. Today we used three varieties of cabbage. Two were the sort of the now popular and known in the west as the napa cabbage or, more commonly, Chinese cabbage. In a way I understand why this name is pissing of Koreans. They don't care that the scientific name is Rapa pekinensis (= from Beijing) and they swear that it's Korean cabbage. sadly they don't even know how the real Korean cabbage looks like. At first I didn't want to believe it's cabbage, it actually looked more like leaves of raddish or some huge dandelion leaves. That one we didn't taste yet. I can't wait till it will be ready!

Wedding Day

2011-11-20T12:21:00.009+01:00

Yesterday it was, today is hangover day. A nasty cruel hangover after all the beer, the soju and the so-mek, the soju-beer screwdriver. But hey, I had to drink twice as much as I would normally do - it was a double wedding! Two friends got married, 경희 and 동순. Here they are with the grooms, all still unmarried, but not for very long.

Girls ready to pave the way of the newly wedded with flowers.

With families:

And then came the food and streams of beer and waterfalls of soju.

Too much drink? Here they look just like thinking "My God, what have I done..."

Actually there was too much drinking. When I went out for a smoke, 경희 came to call me because it was time for "beating the drum". I swear I tought it's gonna be some musical performance, I just love drums, but when I entered I saw that the "drums" are the fresh husbands, neatly tied on the table, and the people fighting for the stick as who's gonna be the first to beat them on the soles. By the way they were whining I could guess it must hurt pretty much. Maybe I should reconsider my dreams about a marriage in Korea.

Probably the soju and the pain were enough to drive him crazy. I wonder if his wife was proud of him, but for sure everyone was having fun when he was dancing on the table.

All the soju also had strange effects on me. I ended playing football with the kids. Seriously, I'm not kidding you. Yes, I was playing football. And had fun, too. I guess this is why today I woke up with a headache and a very upset stomach. I fried some kimchi to tame it and went back to sleep till lunch. I don't know how I will survive a drinking contest that will be held here next month. I was challenged by a friend, first to drink soju but I gave up when I heard he can drink 4 liters. I will try to beat him on beer, he can do "only" 10 liters.

Brewed For Good Times

2011-11-08T13:26:00.001+01:00

Kirin beer, of course. As I promised I went to Japan to drink a beer. Just to drive crazy the Nipp-otakus in other parts of the world. It doesn't matter that I really HAD to go to Japan (well, it could also be China, Hong Kong, Thailand, any nearby country for what it matters, but Japan is still the fastest and cheapest way. It was nice to be the only round-eyed on the ferry, I drank my beers before the ferry even left Busan and went to sleep, to waken up by the cleaning lady in Japan, all the passengers have already disembarked. It was my fastest trip to Japan, in subjective terms of time. Another good thing was that being the absolutely last there was no waiting in the queue at the immigration. I had the Immigration and Customs forms already filled and the lady officer was not at all surprised when she saw that I filled "Planned stay in Japan" with a zero. "You are here only to extend the Korean visa?" It was put like a question, but it was a statement. I wasn't sure if this was a good or a bad sign, but I confirmed. "Than fill it in on the "Purpose of visit" line, please." Just like that? And I put like that, my purpose of visit is to extend the Korean visa. "Thank you, sir, have a good time in Japan." Again, I wasn't sure if she was mocking me or it was just an automatism. But I didn't really cared much, I was already nervous about my return to Korea, if here was so easy the troubles are almost for sure waiting for me in Busan.
It was almost 8 AM, two more hours before check-in for my trip back. Since I travelled very light, no laptop this time, only my study notebook, socks and a shirt (and two boxes of cigarettes bought at the Busan duty free shop, a real deal, at almost half price), I decided to take a walk on the Fukuoka streets.
The weather there is a bit warmer than here, but the morning streets were in the same misty sadness mood as I was. Looks like the depression is still holding a strong grip on me, even if for most of the time I seem to function as a perfectly normal social being. Well, normal... you know...

The city was just getting ready for the day. Only few poeple on the streets, but the traffic was getting heavier by the minute. But so different from the not so distant Busan. Yes, Japan is another country, but is also another galaxy. The most impressive is the sound of the traffic. It's so quiet. And no honking, no impatient drivers. I wonder if attitudes like this are possible without all the other behavioral drawbacks that make Japanese so... different.
On my way back I went to visit some of my "friends" in the port. They have mostly already gone, only one was still sleeping.

The day brightened a little, so did I. And I bought that damned Kirin beer and drank in at 10 AM. And ate one onigiri, with tuna. My favourite, with one exception. But I suppose I will never again be called by a little girl to "please, come and take more of my onigiri". I wanted to go to Iwanuma, to Nagasaki, to Tokunoshima. At 11AM I boarded the ferry and went to sleep.

In Busan, to my great surprise, were no troubles waiting for me. And to avoid any troubles at the Jinju bus station in late evening, I decided to stay in Busan for the night, in my favorite hostel, The Blue Backpackers, conveniently placed just on the way to the Intercity Bus terminal. Few beers on the roof, some talk with a tourist couple from Poland. At first it looked like they are travellers, what not, with the last year spent in travelling in Laos, Kambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, China, etc... and they finally came to Korea, their last stop before going back to Europe. They asked me for tips where to go and I mentioned the nearby Gwangju with the tombs, Bolguk temple and Seokguram Grotto with the stone Buddha, National park Jiri san and the Hae In temple with the precious Tripitaka Koreana... and they were rolling their eyes "Please stop, no more Buddha, we've been in buddhist countries for the last thirteen months and we're sick of all the Buddhas!" Christ on acid, what's wrong with you? Next time you'll travel to Africa and ask for places where there's no black people? You'll go to the North Pole just to protest because there is too much ice? Tourists! But... let them be. They are far away from me, I'm home. Everybody was happy to meet after just three days, little Guryun was so happy that he bowed to me on his knees, but when I reached out with my arms he jumped in my hug.
Home.

Japan, again. Mudang, again.

2011-11-05T01:41:00.002+01:00

The wireless is getting troublesome, looks like the one I experienced in Scotland - the signal's strenght was depending on the direction of the wind... yet another mistery for the geeks.
The ginger is finally over.

I wonder if the postman is afraid of the dogs or he just doesn't like the folks in our small settlement on the hill. Here is how parcels are delivered, something like 1 km from the first house. Yes, that thing on the ground -barely visible - is a parcel.

Few days ago I posted a scornful status on my FB profile about my trip to Japan. Scornful for the Nipp-otakus. This is my third trip to Japan this year and I go there just to drink a beer. Sounds nice, I go to Japan to drink a beer. And how does it sound if I say that I just hate such a waste of time, it will take me three days for that. And we have to fix the house for a friend that is getting married in weeks.
Back to the Nipp-otaku topic. I really laughed when I read the definition in the Urban Dictionary, it reminded me of... myself. And my son. How we avoided foreigners. Still, it was way way different (for me, I still suspect my son is true hardcore nipp-otaku). It was in Iwanuma, where else. There I didn't avoid just foreigners, I avoided all the "tourist volunteers" that came there just to show themselves. Mostly during the Golden Week. If I remember well it was the evening before the typhoon blew away half of the volunteer camp when we met some pretty Golden Week volunteer girls and we (Ramon and me) were introduced to them as Baka Gaijin and Baka Otosan, the crazy otakus from Sveronia. At the time I just gave up explaining that I'm no otaku. We've been there for almost two weeks, with only one proper bath in the time, so the pretty volunteers wisely decided it's time to intoduce us to their European friend, a true otaku from France. I don't remember if she is studying in Japan or working there, the point is that she speaks fluently Japanese and she knows everything about Japan. Probably more that the average Japanese does. She hated us from the first second. You dont speak Japanese? was her first question. You must be crazy to come here, was her first statement. At which we both laughed and Ramon showed her his shirt saying Baka Gaijin. She didn't understand what was so funny in our ignorance of the language, we knew. We've been working there, not conversating. She also didn't understand how we could came there only with a sleeping bag. We knew better, we have working hands and a will to help. Luckily we never saw her again. I tried to figure out how she felt. Like shit, that's for sure. You spend years in studying a language, you do everything possible (and sometimes impossible) to get to your dream country, you study (or work, I said I don't know) there and you do your best to be a Japanese more than they are - and then you meet two drunk idiots from Sveronia. That don't speak. Don't know how to behave. And are part of the community. That must be really frustrating. Oh, everyone was perfectly polite with her. She got all the respect for being a volunteer, even if only a golden week volunteer. Hm, not true. There were two volunteers who didn't respect her at all, but I guess we don't count. Does that make me also a Nipp-otaku? I don't think so. It makes her stupid, even more than her knowledge of geography (it was the first time I've heard that Austria is an Eastern Europe country).

Present time. Korea. It's summer again. Shorts and T-shirts, maybe something warmer in the evening. The insects also agree it's summer. Flies and mosquitos are swarming. Today I met another mudang, a Korean shaman lady. This one has no clue, she didn't realize at first sight that I'm a reincarnated Korean like the Gangwon do one did. But it was a nice session of astrology and fortune telling. Guess what, I'll be happy and will get married and have a house. Here, of course. As a mind reader she's a win, she told me just what I wish. For my health she was just a fail. As for my past... well, the sceptic in me keeps telling me that she gave so broad statements and general things that everyone could find himslef in. On the other hand the time limits she used weren't really that broad. Telling me the years when I was "out of my mind". Telling me when my relation broke. The ending win was when she told me that my ancestors were leading me to come here, first to Korea and later to this place. For me this was the aknowledgement about my reincarnation. For I surely know that my loved late father (and grandfather and so on) from Sveronia would prefer me being there and work the family vineyards, like my brother does. So it was my Korean ancestors that brought me here. Yet... maybe my dad changed his mind and he's helping me to be where I'm happy. I know he still cares about me.

Of Ginger And Rice

2011-10-28T15:02:00.001+02:00

This time's gonna be more pictures than text. Not much to say and it's also my time for depression.

It was a week signed by ginger. Pick the ginger, clean the ginger, wash the ginger, peel the ginger, wash the ginger, slice the ginger, mince the ginger, cook the ginger.

And we made some half ton of ginger tea, next Monday we go on. Today was rice day. Yesterday we spread the rice on nets on a huge parking lot under the Hwangmae Mountain.

Since we didn't have really much to do today it was a good time to repair the nets.

And to drink beer and cook ramyon.

And play baseball.

And take a walk in the surrounding valleys.

And have some yoga in the late afternoon.

And finally bag all the rice and load it on the truck.

And drink some soju for dinner.

The Catalyst

2011-10-23T13:16:00.007+02:00

Catalysis is the change in rate of a chemical reaction due to the participation of a substance called a catalyst. Unlike other reagents that participate in the chemical reaction, a catalyst is not consumed by the reaction itself. Maybe I'm a Catalyst. Today I've heard the third wedding announcement since I'm here.
I may not be consumed by this reactions around me, but I'm feeling a bit sad. No, nothing to do with weddings, for sure, they make me happy. Yesterday I've got here a few neighbors in the afternoon for coffee. Since I received some real (and really good coffee) my place became very popular among the ladies from the surroundings. It was a rainy day so we took our time, slowly sipping the hot Turkish coffee and appreciating the lokum. It was good for my brains since I was suffering from an epic hangover and when they told me the news that a young family is moving away it didn't really improved my state. It's the family of the little chap riding his bamboo stick. To make me feel really bad was the statement that they haven't been invited for any of my banquets. True, I've been never doing the invitations part, it was always someone else who did it in my name, but I felt bad the same. They asked me if there is any chance to have a goodbye dinner in my place in the near future and I just said "Today. At seven." I knew a busy week is coming with ginger tea making so that was the best chance. I had four hours but it was more than enough. Nothing complicated, two types of pasta, two different sauces. Some sesame seeds and oregano chapati to dip in ssamjang, eggplants with garlic and hot peppers, eggs with onion and kimchi and kaktugi (thanks to kind 영란 씨 ).

The little chap (I keep calling him like that because I'm not sure I got his name properly; better be that little chap than something stupid) was just crazy about my spaghetti with garlic and chilli and oil - a completely new recipe because I was out of olive oil and used sesame oil instead. Absolutely deliciousous, I agreed with him.

And my oh my is he cute!

His dad invited me to visit them when they will be settled. I was told he is a great cook so I'm really loking forwart to it. Just hope that they're not going too far away.
Eventually I made another friend like him today - only way younger. After the friends who told me about their near wedding left, I went back to my persimmon jam cooking when I heard some laughter and calling my name. Female voices, to be sure. I greeted them saying "I bet you're here just because of my good coffee!" So it was. Only no more lokum. We tried some cinnamon flavored coffee instead. And he became another great fan of my beard:

Now, I really love coffee time and chit chat with all these ladies. I only pray that I'll never receive a visit from a bunch of enraged husbands.

A Quiet Day of First Times

2011-10-18T13:45:00.008+02:00

It started as an almost boring day, if you can call boring the morning panic when you find out that you haven't finished your homework. Luckily I woke up at six, so I had plenty of time to do it and also to rehearse the last lesson. But there was not enough time to make pancakes. Another attack of panic - well, not really panic but more a sort of "angst" to come at her door emptyhanded. Should I just put few apples and pears in the basket? No way, I have to make something original. With my hands. Something quick and with ingredients I have. So I came up with pears and caramel, with a dash of cinnamon. Did it for the first time ever. They came out un-fucking-believeably tasty.

After the lesson she asked me if I have time to help her on her rice field for the harvest. Are you kidding me? Harvesting rice in the traditional way? No machinery involved, handcutting and so on? It will be a pleasure! In fact I've never been in a rice field yet. Near it, yes. In it, no. My first rice harvesting!
On the way to the field we met a little chap, riding his bamboo stick. Just after we passed the house of his parents who were looking for him .

It was only yesterday that the little chap aknowledged that he likes me much. We had dinner together, a bunch of people, and he said that he likes "the uncle". After dinner I took him in my arms and went my way home. His parents were amused as he really didn't care about it. It only missed that he waved them goodbye... but it's too dark to my home and I really didn't want to scare him (but maybe he wouldn't be scared at all) so I eventually turned back till we were still in the light zone and returned him to his daddy.
This morning no time to play. First get a better technique with the 낫,
the Korean sickle, till now I used it only for weeding. And enjoy in the beauty mudpack for my feet. Tying the bundles was more troublesome, at last for me. 미정씨 taught me in a minute but I found out that my thumb, which is very important in the process, is quite bigger then hers and thus useless. It's too complicated to explain in words, you just have to take my word for it that I was funny using my index finger instead.

After lunch I had a sort of pleasant-unpleasant experience. Another first time, of course. 미정씨, she is the younger sister of my teacher, took care of my knees. You see, I still have troubles while sitting crosslegged. Not that my legs are stiff or the kind, it's that both my knees were badly injured at some points of my life. I can walk miles, but put on the floor and after ten minutes I'm uncomfortable. After twenty I'm in pain and after thirty I just can't do it more. So she came out with some nasty looking needles and fluffs of moxa. I was ready for my first moxibustion. (Also acupuncture, when it comes to that) The needles went in my knees smoothly (five points on each), but burning the moxa (mugwort) was... well, it was burning the fluffed moxa on the points where the needles were stuck. But that was not the unpleasant part of the experience. The point is that at the end of the session my left knee started to hurt. Badly. It's better now and we may have found out where's the problem so we should retry tomorrow.
When we went back to the field I was bitten by a Korean dog. For the first time. And then I had to build some bamboo scaffolding to hang the rice bundles - guess what, I did for the first time!

For dinner I was invited - again, not for the first time. This time I overdid my caramel pears, adding also apples, for it was a dinner for me and four ladies.

They laugh when I refer to them as ladies and they show their humble farmer's clothes and callous hands. I laugh back even louder since to me each one of them is worth more than millions of empty headed beauties from a big city.

Quiet Life... My Ass!

2011-10-16T05:19:00.004+02:00

There are things that are supposed to never happen to people who live a quiet life. But they do happen, often and merrily, to those who just claim to have one.
This week I went to Seoul and Gangwon do, to collect my winter clothes as I intend to stay here. Mainly it was an excuse, I wanted to visit my princess. The trip went smooth and as planned. Too much beer in Seoul, then shopping. Some "exotic" spices and food at the Shinsaege to bring back to Hapcheon and presents for my princess at the Kyobo. A pink diary, a pink hairpin, stuff like that. Cute useless crap. If she likes it, be it. First thing when I arrived she asked me how long will I stay. Instantly I realized that her English improved again in this month since my last visit. Could be happy to say the same for my Korean... but at least I managed to answer her, in Korean, that I'll be leaving next day in the morning. Most of our conversation went on like that, she in English, me in stuttering Korean.
When I bought the diary I didn't even notice that it has a padlock to keep it's content secret. It was the first thing she saw when she opened the box with it. As it always comes with the padlocks, it had two keys. To my great amazement - and delight - she took one and gave me the other. If I was to put it in a poetic way I'd say that now I have the key to a child's secrets. The key to a child's heart. But I suppose I've already had one for a long long time, since the first second we met. For sure it's true the other way.

As always I asked her if I should make spaghetti for dinner, sure that, as always, she'll be delighted. To my surprise she declined my offer and went to make dinner herself. I know well how lazy and lousy she can be at times, but she did wash the rice properly, all three times, before cooking it. If you didn't know it yet, rice has to be washed in cold water three times, not two, not four, but three. Believe it or not, it makes the final result much better.

Maybe an hour after I came the postman visited. With a parcel coming from Slobenia. Addressed to Hae In. She gave a puzzled look, asking if I sent this. I laughed, of course not, I haven't been there for a long time (and I won't be there for a long time, I do hope so). She opened it and found it full of chocolate. She looked accusingly at me and said, It was you! I explained her that this was a gift for her from my friend. Man or woman, she wanted to know. Man. What's the name? Robert. Please tell Robert very good man. I know that. All his friends know that, now a little Korean girl knows it, too.
Next morning was sad, with goodbyes, hugs, kisses, promises to come back and invites to come here to visit me for holidays. The long trip back started.

After changing buses and subways I was in Jinju in the evening, just to find out that I missed the last bus to Gahwe. Tomorrow morning, was what I was told at the ticket office and a dark despair rose in me. Clever as I am I didn't have any phone numbers with me to call anyone to pick me there. I was too sure I could make it by myself. And so I would! First, let's find a way to get out of the city. That is always the most difficult thing when you go hitchhiking - escape the gravity of big cities. I got lost two or three times and eventually found my way out. By the time it was pitch dark so I tried my luck for a minute or two, then decided against it. Darkness is a bad companion for hitchers. So I took a long walk. Too long. Got lost in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of rice pads and woody hills. With something like 30 kg of various crap in my backpack and flip flops on my feet. Luckily the rain had stopped. I stopped too, after something that seemed to me like 20 km. It was actually 27, but I realized that the next morning. Luckily most of the crap in my backpack were warm clothes and a coat to wrap myself in under a tree, where the ground seemed almost dry. I kept telling myself that I could do it, that I stopped just because I was lost and I should wait for morning to get a better orientation or to eventually ask someone for directions. Truth was I was exhausted. I'm no more in shape for crap like this. But I was ready to go on in the first morning gray. Eventually I managed to find Wonji and caught the first morning bus to Gahwe from there. And then there was the last part of the way home that I should have done on feet anyway, but it happened as I hoped, no, as I expected. A pickup stopped, a smiling greeting, bows and I had a ride. The wet night was replaced by a splendid shiny morning and I really felt like going back home. It was hard to leave my princess, but it was a pleasure to come back. Even if I became the laughstock because of this adventure. If I only had some phone numbers with me.. Sang Pyeong was in Jinju exactly at the time I arrived there!
Now I have to do something that people who live a quiet life never do. I have to go to the Jinju bus station and punch in the face the bitch who told me I missed the last bus. I didn't.

Quiet Life

2011-10-10T15:51:00.007+02:00

Yes, a quiet life it is. At least here. My greatest challenge these days is studying Korean. Three times a week, after breakfast, I re-check my homework, take my books and notebooks and walk downhill to our nearest neighbour. Most of the times I take with me some still hot pancakes, tufahija or any other sweet delight I invent that morning. For my teacher, of course. She is giving me lessons for free, so I try my best to repay her with work. In the garden. Repairing the road to her house. Fix her computer. It all comes easy. I'd rather build her a new house than study. I've come to a point where the learning process is just humiliating for my ego. Not her fault, for sure. I've never been so patient as a teacher. Learning new words is a piece of cake - but what to do with them? She asks me a question. I understand every single word but I simply have no idea what would it mean and I give her my blank moronic look. But I will not give up, not until she is willing not to give up on me. Not only her, everyone is supporting me in this. Even Guryun, the little boy with the long braid, is doing his best to help me and teach me.
Even if it's a quiet life, it's in no way boring. Not only that there's always something to do since here everybody helps everybody, literally, but because we have fun almost all the time. Believe it or not, I am considered as a most serious person - but that's only because I'm so shy.
Maybe because of my seriousness I was asked, few days ago, to take care of some kids. We went in the village for dinner and after dinner the folks had some meeting. Since the kids were in the way, i was with them on the school playground and we had some great time (if we don't count some nasty spanking I had to do with one). Tiger was with me but he was bored all the time. Oh, yes, Tigar Sungbae is another friend I've made. We've met at a dinner and he introduced himself as Tiger. Simple as that. So I introduced myself as Chicken, you know, Tak meaning chicken, even if written slightly different than my name but pronounced almost the same. Two days later we worked together and during the first break he announced that he should change his nickname to Cat. I call him simply Hello Kitty. I hope it will not piss him off even if he considers me stronger than him. I saw when three students pissed him off when we were at the Lantern Festival in Jinju.

Another day Andrzej, a friend from Poland who is studying korean in Daegu, came to visit me here and stayed two days. He wanted to see "the end of the world" as he calls the view from the top over our house. And he saw it, we climbed it at sunrise, not for any particular romantic reason but because at eight I had my lesson.

Later he helped us with planting garlic and was rewarded with a delicious lunch at the feet of the Mosan.

The lady on my right is my teacher.
Some friends of Sang Pyeong (Guryun's father) live quite far away, but we help them anyway. One lives near the Jirisan and has just finished his new house so we were there as a cleanup team. No real work, it was another excuse for social gathering and we had all the afternoon for one of the Jirisan valleys.

And last weekend in Jinju was held the Korean Pansori Festival. On Saturday I declined the invitation to join them with my troubled stomach as excuse, on Sunday I just couldn't do it again for I might seem rude. I'm not sure that they believed me that I really do know pansori, but I've heard my fair share of it two years ago in Gangwon do. Boring as hell when you don't understand a single word. I managed to resist some time, mostly because I had two kids to play with, but eventually I just left. And caught a nice shot of the moon over the gate of Jinju Palace.

I want to stay here. I'm ready to listen pansori for the whole evening if it comes to that.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

2011-09-27T13:38:00.011+02:00

This morning I ate rice with hot curry for breakfast, brushed my teeth and put the textbooks, CDs, notebook and pencils in my schoolbag, waved goodbye to my hosts, shouting that I'm going to school and they replied that I have to study hard. But let's start at the beginning, two evenings ago...
The dinner was a success. Well, everybody said so and if they are just being polite, well, next time they'll eat the same, like it or not. I told them, I was very explicit about it, not to praise my cooking too much; saying that it was nothing special would have been the best option because for the next dinner I would perform culinary miracles to make it taste better.
I love people that don't complicate things. At the end there were ten people for dinner. We barely fit in my room, but it was funny. The scary part was when I realized (when the guests were already taking their places on the floor) that I have only a midget table for one person. I borrowed some dishes from my hosts, also a bucket to cook the spaghetti, but no table. Even if I wanted I couldn't, they don't have such a big one. The clever and practical mind of Korean women is simply the best. They just found an old newspaper and spread it on the floor - as I've seen in many occasions - even if this was supposed to be a special dinner, who cares! And that's the way I like it!

And they all brought presents - be it socks (many of them), cookies (absolutely delicious), boiled chestnuts, a bag of rice and... a Korean textbook. Immediately I had an awkward feeling receiving the gift and thanking for it. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. I was right. The lady who gave it to me just asked, "So, do you wish to have lessons every day? And do we start tomorrow?"
Now, of course I wish to have lessons every day and learn as much as possible as fast as I can. What I don't wish is to pass for a moron. I quite pride myself about language skills, but with Korean I'm at a loss. The pronunciation still remains a mistery to me. Oh, I get words pretty fast, but to put a sentence together is harder than load a ten ton truck with radish.
At the end I survived the lesson. A little bit reassured about my pronunciation, she's evidently a good teacher, but still feeling stupid. You see, there's a guy here, who speaks just no English, with whom I talk in Japanese. I don't want to say that I learned so much Japanese, no way, is to say how awful is my Korean!
Luckily yesterday we worked all day so I had enough time to set my mind to be a student again. Because working together with all these nice people made me craving for knowledge of Korean!

Yesterday's work, planting cabagge and broccoli, maybe more than 5000 seeds.
Break time

The Japanese speaking guy

My pretty coworkers, don't mind the grimaces, they are pretty!

My pretty coworkers drinking beer during the first morning break

View on our house from the nearby peak

Some surroundings

This one left me speechless at the local store

A new home?

2011-09-24T05:46:00.006+02:00

In the rice fields the green color is loosing it's battle against the yellow. Autumn is here, my first Korean autumn it will be.
It's more than a week that I'm here, in another almost anonymous Korean village in the southern part, and I have still mixed feelings about me being here. All the feelings are positive, no worry about that. It's a place that could be called almost weird, but calling it that way would be probably offensive for the folk living here, so let's call it amazing. How did I find it? I didn't. I came here through a friend of a friend, I've never met her before but she was willing to help me finding a place to stay and to work. That was the first weir.. ahem, sorry, amazing thing. The second w.. amazing thing was that she told me that here folks are mostly engaged in organic farming. I was used to Korean "organic" farming, but it seems that here they take it seriously. To continue, she is vegetarian. Next, the fields landscape is not ruined by tons of vynil and other garbage. The nearest supermarket is 40 km away. But the most amazing of all is the family she found to host me. I just couldn't believe my ears when she told me that they have a ten years old son who doesn't go to school. I have to admit that for a short moment I tought of a total moron, unable to walk and speak... shame on me. No, they don't send him to school because they don't believe in this educational system. Which is cool. I couldn't agree more. I will never forget an article of a family in Slovenia that doesn't send their kids to school because "..in schools kids have to read stories about dragons and we won't let our children learn about that Satan's creatures...", as the mother said. Of course she had also other arguments, all concerning Satan and God. And that is just stupid.
So I moved on a mountain to live with this great folks and their son, one of the brightest kids I've met. Well behaved, friendly, curious, with a good taste. He likes my cooking. Above all he likes my laptop. Not that he hasn't his own copmuter, but on mine he found the complete Evangerion series and now he is daily struggling through the Japanese audio and the English subtitles.

Actually I live "on my own", in a small building near the main house.

And this is the view from my window. And it's the same all around, but I have only this window.

Through the same window, but from the outside, it looks like this.

With my own kitchen and fireplace for floor heating. Yes, I'm already using it. During the day the temperatures are autumnly nice, sometimes even hot, but the nights are already chilly.

I started working immediately. Different works. Building a toilet. Finishing a porch roof. Field work. And, surprise surprise, making a floor heating system. With my host as boss, of course, not alone. The best part was that we had to dismantle the old one, almost 100 years old, to make a new one. I can't tell you how much more you learn from this rather than from just making one. And I also learned a few new tips and tricks, that aren't used in the northern mountains. Clearly I will not write about them, they are our trade secrets, you know.
But I could write novels about the people living here. I didn't manage to eat a single dinner at home because I'm invited somewhere every day. Sometimes it's related to work, sometimes to pleasure. In two days I'm having more than ten people here for dinner, I promised a Mediterranean menu and I fear I will have to borrow my hosts kitchen and dinning room. Yes, I had to go to that 40 km away supermarket to buy spaghetti, but it's worth to entertain those who were filling my fridge with food in the first days, when I was still a bit lost. Yes, I had to pay quite a lot but I just can't believe that I actually earn more here than with slavery work. In a relative way, because here I'm working less. Mostly I have troubles because everyone here is so cooled and relaxed. They just keep telling me to slow down. One I had to be unpluged to leave the tools and have a break. I only have to learn Korean to realize how easy is making friends here.
The day I arrived I was jokingly told that they'll do their best to settle me down here. I laughed with them. Now I'm not laughing anymore, I just hope this dream can become true. Even if I miss my princess, she can come here for any holidays!

On kigo, again

2011-09-14T03:11:00.003+02:00

Kigo, 季語, the season word is used to associate a season with just one particular word (or phrase) in Japanese poetry, be it renga, renku or haiku. Few years ago I found out why one of the kigo for spring is kawazu, although I heard them in Korea.
古池や
かわずとびこむ
水の音
(http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm)
This summer I realized the kigo semi. I remember that I found them a bit annoying in the 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン (Neon Genesis Evangelion) series, chirping all the time over Tokyo-3, but still pleased that the makers used this poetic way to show the change of global climate after the Second Impact. (By the way, did you know that you can find haiku written even in Klingon? I didn't, since few minutes ago.)
静けさや
岩に滲み入る
蝉の声
(松尾芭蕉, again: http://carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/author/view/1)
Well, this year the cicadas are driving me crazy. I know cicadas for all my life. Their sound is the kigo of the Mediterranean summer, yet I knew only them, the Mediterranean ones. I don't know the Japanese, no summer there so far, but the Korean 매미 are enough. They are so loud that it's hard to believe. In the countryside it can be literally painful for the ears.
The loudest sound is from only one sucker, you can see it on the branch when zoomed on.

cicada by dagkleva

A censored post

2011-09-10T15:16:00.004+02:00

South Koreans are among those working the longest number of hours in industrialised countries, averaging 2,256 a year compared with 1,647 in the UK or 1,778 in the US, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. But despite being extremely hardworking, their productivity measured among the lowest of the OECD's members. (OECD 2010 average annual hours)
To me it seems normal that it's so. You just can't be efficient and productive in a long working day. But that doesn't bother anyone here. Long working hours are the sign of your devotion to work and it absolutely doesn't matter if you're just wasting your time in the office. Two years ago I met a genetist from Switzerland and we had a conversation about Japan. I told him of my experiences on Tokunoshima, where we spent a lot of time just pretending to be busy. He couldn't believe it, in his eyes the Japanese are extremely hardworking and to make an example he told me about two Japanese scientist that worked for a year at the same institute in Geneva as him. He started talking how the two were always first at the institute and the last to leave and then he fell silent for a moment. And recalled that while the two were always there, he can't really remember to have seen them working a lot of times.
Another example of Confucian historical burden in Asia is the educational system. In Korea they spend insane ammount of time and money studying English. They have a set of exames to pass and when I saw some books I tought that I could hardly pass such an exam. Yet the results are very poor (but still a bit better than in Japan) and they have hard times to make a decent conversation. Of course nobody dares to point out that it's the fault of the system, how could you possibly have tought of that, no, it's the students that don't work hard enough so now they invented a way to solve this conversational deficit: they are adding to the already demanding exams an oral test. I'm almost positive that it's gonna be just a huge amount of text to memorize and repeat like a parrot in front of the commission.
Another sign of this very well organised disorganisation is present also in the slavery I do now. Near the house where we live there are some huge radish fields. Do you think that we do them? Don't be naive, it would be too simple. They drove teams here by bus to do the work. And few days later we went to work something like 150km away, just on the border with North Korea, near the DMZ. Just being near the DMZ was unpleasant enough, with guardposts every few hundred meters and all that barbwire. When I was shown a sign near the field I felt even more uncomfortable - we were working near a mine field. I was warned not to make stupid jokes like throwing radish on that side. And then came a moment when I became worried. Well, to tell the truth, I was scared. It was cloudy, but it wasn't thunder what I heard. I really don't understand how anybody can mistake artillery fire for thunder. And when it went on and the locals were still cool I understood it's just manouvres but the bad feeling remained. At least we had some great sightseeing on the way back, we passed near the Seorak mountains.

The second part of tis entry was censored. By myself. It was long, raging and full of violence and hate speech. But now I'm all so soft and tender that I'm almost disgusting. It will be clear at the end. To make it short and simple, without rabid raving - someone stole my money. It was an insider job, some Chinese. Don't start shouting about my racism - there were only and only Chinese around me. I was almost done there, had enough money and then this blow. It left me speechless. I could only scream in frustration because there was 10 people in the house and I will never know who did this. So I prolonged my slavery till today, made my money again and for the last two weeks lived like a paranoid - sleeping with my wallet and passport. And today I packed and left - for Jinbu. With a big bag full of different Korean cakes - it's chuseok and my princes first bowed to me than jumped in my hug and kissed me. Home sweet home.

Hobo again

2011-08-29T03:27:00.003+02:00

Can't really say a lot of positive stuff about modern slavers, but one is for sure, they are masters of applied psichology. The boss waited for me in Imgye with a beer. Who needs more?
Now I'm in the middle of nowhere, between the mountains, a place to spend the honeymoon, not to live with a bunch of Chinese workers.

It took me three days to make clear to them that I'm not from Uzbekistan. Than for a short time I was from Singapore. The boldest of them (who speaks some Korean) asked me if he can be my friend. Now he's so cocky when at least ten times a day he points to me and tells the others that we're friends.
And after a week I'm again an Uzbek...
Last year when I was posting about stinky tofu I tought I will probably never try it and yet, here I am, survived the experience. It was served in a soup with some unrecognizable things and it wasn't blueish as I read but had more of a violet dash. The smell? Not that bad, really, I ate much more stinking cheese! And the taste wasn't so special, a little bit different, I can't say the difference, but it was there. All in all, a pleasant experience.
The other stuff ain't pleasant at all. It's raddish again, no cabbage and I plain hate it. I'm staying here just because of a promise I made and the same instant I can fulfill it, I leave. Mostly because of the shitty company. I know why in China they have their so called "communism" - because they deserve it.
I adore child's surprises. They are so inventive in their cuteness that it's amazing. After two or three days here I found in my backpack a wooden medallion, a round piece of wood, on it handpainted a cute rabbit and on the reverse she left a message: 닥 아저씨 화이팅! 해 인
Life hasn't been very nice to her in the last time but she still has enough good will, courage, love and kindness to worry about me and comfort me. She really is a special girl. I suppose today is another day off so I go to visit her. Something like 6km on foot and 2 hours by bus in one way to buy her ice cream and see her smile. Of course I will demand a hug, too!
From the pictures you may deduce that we're having a good time here, but you'll be wrong. I just choose some nice pics, that's it.

Odaesan Hike, The Defeat

2011-08-18T14:10:00.009+02:00

First the promised pictures from the last entry. This is the evening near Woljeong sa.

A morning walk here can really make your day!

But also some weird signs in the park. protected area, you know... No what???

Some konglish also. Here you are...

Now, about the defeat.
From Sangwon sa I reached Birobong to have an amazing view of... nothing. The top was in the clouds, it was raining and it was cold so I just gave up on following the Odaesan crest to reach it's highest peak, some 3 meters more than Birobong, and went back in the valley the way I came up. Since on the way to Birobong there are two more temples the path was pretty crowded even in a rainy day. My next destination was Dongdae san and that was a tough one. Had to do 1000 meters in altitude on a 2.7 km long way. Had to have three breaks, I'm getting too old for fun like that. Not for the mountains, it's just my philisophy "omnia mea mecum porto" and I end carrying a 20+ kg backpack with me. From the top of Dongdaesan I had the same pretty view as from Birobong, with the addition of a really hard rain. And then I was really soaked wet. Anyway I had to laugh when I finally recognized some Korean mushrooms. Now I know I can do mushroom picking also here!

Yes, it's definitelyy him - Boletus!

But I won't do it for economical purposes, in a country where fruits and vegetables are outrageously expensive, 1kg of dried boletus is about 5 euro!
I had no choice, I had to follow the sign showing me to the left - sort of "nothing there"?

I descended in the next valley, actually it's a pass, having in mind to find a place to sleep and continue in the valley of waterfalls. Descendig - the stairs!

According to the map on the Jingogae pass there is a rest area, the Park entrance and so on, so I was expecting it would be easy to find any kind of place for the night. But it was a real disappointment - a huge parking lot, a small restaurant and a closed ranger station. A roof so small that I barely managed to have a smoke without wetting the cigarette. And yes, a so stinky toilet that I opted for taking a crap under the rain. The nearest shelter is on the Noinbong peak, some 2 hours walk. I couldn't do it. It was getting dark, I was too tired and there was again a very good chance of the shelter being closed, abandoned or who knows what. No way, back to the valley. I gave up. I had only one barely dry shirt, no chance for making a fire for cooking and it was dark already. But I slept nice and dry and woke up at 9 AM, the clothes were almost dry, the river nearby was clear, so in the end it was a pleasant defeat.
Even more pleasant because after just a three hours walk I was knocking on the door of an apartement, shouting "It's uncle Dag!" and a shiny smile welcomed me.

If only all the defeats would be like this!

Odaesan Hike, The Beginning

2011-08-17T04:22:00.002+02:00

Day 1
I managed something like 15 km (conservative). Found shelter halfway between Woljeong sa and Sangwon sa. This "sa" means temple, so I won't write "Woljeong sa temple" as I won't write "Odaesan Mountain" - san means mountain.
I left Dong Seoul station at noon, after a nice chitchat with a perfect stranger, who surprisinly knew where is Slovenia. He was there 20 years ago, when Yugoslavia was falling apart. I arrived in Jinbu at 2.30 PM, didn't stop there because my princess was still at school. Instead of taking the bus to the Park I started walking. Yes, I was definitely in the mountains of Gangwon do! Temperatures way more friendly than in Seoul or in the south, some nice breeze, cold water in the river to refresh my feet. Some 2 km before Woljeong sa a huge SUV stopped and a lady asked if she can give me a lift. Why not, I never exactly enjoyed walking the asphalt roads, I jumped in the car and thanked her. One surprise a day is more than enough, but no, no need to explain her where is Slovenia (not Slovakia) as I usually have to do, no, she was in Ljubljana and in that funny cave with spaghetti hanging from the ceiling...Is this a joke or what? Two Koreans that both were in Slovenia in one day? I insisted to be dropped off at Woljeong sa even if she was going further in the mountains nad was willing to take me. No, I wasn't afraid to be raped or molested, actually I wouldn't mind that. Woljeong sa is one of "my" temples. My first experiences, so whenever I pass by I stop for a prayer and a short meditation. So she wanted to give me food, a drink, some coffee... I almost went back in the car, hoping that higher in the mountains she would be willing to offer me something else... OK, stupid joke - just that it isn't a joke at all. Anyway I stayed at Woljeong sa, refilled my bottle with fresh water and changed my sweaty smelling shirt before venturing in the Buddha Hall. I skipped the 108 prostrations, it's something I really don't need on a trekking, but I was amazed that I managed almost 20 minutes of the Japanese seiza without any pain.
Yes, I was definitely in an almost perfect mood when I was leaving the temple and to make even closer to perfection was a gently drizzling rain. With the drops so small that you don't feel them and they don't wet you, only the air around you becomes cooler and that is something as dream weather for walking. Thirty seconds later I knew how the Egyptian soldiers felt when the Red Sea closed upon them. Seems I shouldn't have skipped the prostrations... Wet as a rat I waited for more than one hour under a roof at Woljeong sa, ate my dinner and finally the rain stopped. It was already dark, here there is no such nonsense as daylight saving hours, but I went on. To find a confortable shelter. As for the moment I have no clue what it is, I just know that it is located on an empty parking lot in the middle of the woods, it wasn't locked and it has electric power. If this post will appear on my blog with a year or so of delay, it means that I was arrested for burglary. I'll try to find out more tomorrow.

Day 2
Woke up early, 5 AM and the first tought was that I need some long sleeved shirt. Long what?? Christ on a cracker, I haven't seen long sleeves since Iwanuma! Lucky for me, I know Gangwon do. It's a place where I was removing snow on April 12th, two years ago. So at the bottom of the backpack I found some better clothes and also decided for the rubber boots. Another good idea. I was sleeping here:

Still have no idea what it's for, maybe for the parking lot keeper when there's something to keep. Did some scouting and found that the Odae Shelter is just 200 m away - but I was really lucky in the dark to first find the alternative for the night. The shelter is closed, it actually looks abandoned. One door was open, it looked like the emergency room to be used when the shelter itself is closed and when I peeked in I almost puked. It reminded me of the shelter I found on Monte Amaro in the Appennini. And that one I had to use because it was 4 below zero and nothing around for kilometers. I love saying that I don't like people in Slovenia and love to make jokes about them, but what's fair is fair - I'll never say a bad word about how they keep the mountains and the huts and shelters there!
At least there's a decent and clean public toilet here, so I shaved and so on and now I'm stuck in it for the last three hours. It's raining cats and dogs outside. Yes, the toilet is clean and spacious and it has power so I'm not using my laptop on battery, but it's still a... toilet. I think I can manage it for two more hours than I go, no matter what weather.
Whoa, this is the Korea I know! I catched a break in the rain and did it to Sangwon sa where it started pouring again. So I'm under a roof, a little bit cold, but I have wireless!
Only 3 km so far for today, but as soon the rain stops I go on Birobong peak and run back down for roof. The morning scenery was enough to make my day, but I want more. Junkies, you know...
Pictures some other time, connection too slow.
Ah yes, I found out where I slept, it's a ranger station.

Mountains, mountains!

2011-08-15T16:02:00.003+02:00

I feel really great this evening. And it's not just because of the beers in the fridge. It's the map in my pocket. And the food supplies in my backpack.
Tomorrow morning I leave Seoul for the Odaesan National Park. Odaesan originally means "Five Peak Mountain", so it can be took as an upgrade of Triglav (Three Peaks) in Slovenia. Well, a poor upgrade it is, the highest peak, 비로봉, reaching 1563 m, but as I saw on my previous visits there, the scenery is amazing. I wasn't there for hiking, the peaks and waterfalls are all still yet to be seen, but I visited many temples there. Mainly the Woljeong sa. Many times. With my princess, too. I plan to stay there for few days, waiting for the cabbage. Not in the temple, in the nearby mountains. Few shelters there, much more temples, if there will be more rain than the forecast says. I got my cooking pot, a bag of ramyon, a box of kimchi, hot peppers, coffee and tomorrow, for the trip, hard boiled eggs. It's something that almost every Korean has when she/he goes somewhere. Saw it first in the movies and later on the trains or the buses. I just have to avoid the trails. I don't want to be the target of too much concern or some mockery. I plan to do the hiking in sandals. And that is a no-go in Korea. Folks here, when they go to the nearby hill, must have all the high tech gear available to Himalayan expeditions. Let alone when they go up to 1500 meters. Ah, but I forgot to say... many times, to reach the top, you have a built stairway. Don't really like that.
Bought me new batteries for the camera and just had to take a picture of them.

It was taken under yellow light - the batteries are pink ;-) Just love them. And again, I didn't buy a fourpack but two twopacks because it was cheaper.
Hopefully the next post will consist of pictures of mountains, valleys, streams and waterfalls.

Tourists, Travellers & Junkies

2011-08-14T09:42:00.002+02:00

In Hakata I slept with a bunch of homeless Japanese in the park near the ferry terminal. In the evening I was already in Korea, sharing beer and travel stories with other guests at the Blue Backpackers hostel in Busan. Informations picked at times like that are usually worth more than the latest edition of Lonely Planet. So when a girl complained that she's expecting to have a hard time in China to obtain the visa for Tibet, I advised her - as I heard from many travellers - to try through Nepal instead of China, it's way easier. "Oh, no, we don't have so much time, we have only five days left, three for China and two for Tibet!"
I choked on my beer and wanted to laugh in her face. I didn't. Because it would be laughable if she had said that they have three days for Beijing - but no, they have three (3) days for CHINA. And that's pathetic. I suppose that the visa processing takes longer than that. Filthy tourists.
Tourists are like people that buy books, but never read them. Or like folks who have a cellar full of wine bottles from all over the world, but they didn't drink a glass of it. Tourists are mostly complaining. About prices, food, transportation, accomodation, people, weather - you name it, they will have a complain about it.
And then, there are travellers. They don't complain. They don't mind sleeping on the floor. They travel with a smile, they are willing to help, they are good company and a reliable source of information. No, I'm not talking about my virtues. I'm talking about people that I meet in hostels, on ferries, on the road. I'm lucky. I meet more travellers than tourists.
As for me, I belong to a third category. You see, tourists travel because they heard that travelling is cool and they can afford it. Travellers do it because they really like it and can afford it. We - the travel junkies - do it because we simply have to. Being affordable or not is not a question. We have to. It's an addiction.
Cleraly I didn't get any teaching job. Never will. There are too many plumbers and electricians from US here and being a native speaker is the best reference. Actually, the only one. Sure that between them there are some amazing good teachers, but I will never forget the guy I met at the Hong Kong airport. An electrician. Don't get me wrong - I really respect every trade, but electricians are supposed to work with wires, not with kids! When he heard I was heading for the UK, he was worried about me: "Oh, but in what language will you speak there? Is there a lot of people who understand English?" He wasn't joking about some cockney or other dialects, he simply didn't have a clue what language is spoken in that misterious country in Europe, called United Kingdom. Thank you, teacher.
Cabagge is waiting for me, starting this week. One good thing about it is that we'll be in Gangwon do, being the region where my princess lives. I can visit her on every day off.

Hiroshima mon amour?

2011-08-11T03:30:00.005+02:00

Elle: They make advertisements for soap. Why not for peace?
(Hiroshima mon amour, 1959)

Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima...
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki)

It's two mornings ago I was safely in Korea, cleaning the mess.

And saying goodbye to some really nice folks, even if the blind granny laughed at me all the time - she was nice!

And yesterday morning again in Japan...

Call me masochist or whatever you want. I really do some choices where to go when in Japan: Nagasaki, Iwanuma, now Hiroshima. Of course I had to go to the Ground Zero, The Memorial Hall and the Peace Park! Even more because of what I read about on the web. That the Memorial hall is a monument to Japanese innocence. That in Nagasaki at least are mentioned the Korean slaves that died in the bombing. Now I would love to remember the web sites with these informations, hunt down the idiots who wrote them and smash their faces on the walls of the Memorial Hall.

No, I wouldn't really do that - not there, but in a dark narrow street of Hiroshima, yes, with pleasure.
Because the first thing I saw, entering the Hall, after a slow walk in the Park, was a sign saying - I write by memory - "At a certain point in the 20th century Japan stepped on the path of war..." Yes, it doesn't mention the Japanese war crimes, I agree, but it cleraly states who choose to start the war. And the third sign admits that this decision caused so many death and suffering. The second is about the victims: "The bomb killed indiscriminately, not only the citiziens of Hiroshima, but Korean conscripted workers, Chinese conscripted workers and American prisoners of war" (again, by memory).
I'm so sick. No, don't worry, nothing to do with my health. My brain is so sick. I started to have hallucionations today on my way back from the Hall. I was avoiding people that weren't there. I was walking and suddenly there was someone in front of me, I jumped aside not to bump into him and be a barbarian baka gaijin... but there was nobody.

Morning in Hiroshima. I quit writing to show a guy from Denmark what umeshu is - hell, he's in Japan almost a month and he didn't have a clue what I'm talking about. Some beers (Kirin), a few sips of pure Korean soju (Jinro) and a full glass of umeshu put him to bed.
Not me, I'm a stubborn SOB.
No, I'm an idiot. And I mean it. We - meaning me (of course in the first place), Morten - the Danish guy - and some Japanese, not to mention a Japanese student in pink underwear that is here to make some research how the survivors of the bomb managed to overturn their hatred to a quest for peace. Don't ask me about her underwear, just believe me, it's pink. It was fine, talking a lot, drinking and eating, why not, I had plenty of Korean seaweed, soju, orange chocolate from Jeju island and ramyon (or, how they call it here: delicious but not healthy seaweed,; shochu made from potatoes; chockoreto from an island we yet have to make our own; and ramen that Koreans think they invented just because they call it ramyon). I agree with the last, its true.

So it was a nice late evening for all the bunch, me in a .. mood. Morten just had to ask her (the pink panties, you know) how the Japanese really coped with the bomb, with being colonialists and warmongers and upon being beaten so hard to turn to peace making and so on. Two of them started talking about suffering and how hard it was to overcome all that... when The Idiot just couldnt manage to keep his filthy mouth shut and said "Ask Yukio Mishima about that" Of course I stressed the name wrong so it took almost five seconds to the Japanese to realize who I'm talking about. And even without the air conditioning the temperature fell for some 30 degrees. I clearly heard the eye contacts freezing and crushing, yes, it was like something fell on the floor and the next moment I wasn't there anymore. Nobody saw me. I was just another no-person for them. Morten didn't have a clue what it was about, he went on with his private research about the Japanese quest for peace and all the Japanese - shit, I have to admit it, they did it really well - just looked at my non-existing I and my non-existing I just bowed and left the kitchen. I didn't want to put Morten in a delicate postion, I preferred to drop it off.
If you think you know something about Mishiam - well, I suppose you don't know a shit about Mishima Yukio (三島由紀夫). First, it was a pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡公威) and he was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature for three times. Oh, you knew this already? Maybe you should follow his example! Don't just read The Golden Pavillion... live his life! The bimbo, I have no better word for him, died committing seppuku. As the leader of a paramilitary organsiation, sworn to protect the Emperor, he failed a coup d'état with the intent to restore the Emperor's power and when the soldiers who were adressed by him started to mock him, he decided that his bowels need some air. It could be just another sad story of a psychopath with literary gift, but what REALLY PISSES ME OFF ABOUT THIS MOTHERFUCKING COWARDLY SADIST is that "Mishima received a draft notice for the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. At the time of his medical check up, he had a cold and spontaneously lied to the army doctor about having symptoms of tuberculosis; he was thus declared unfit for service." (Wiki) Ah, sending others to die for your motherfucking emperor is something natural...if you stay at home and look them perish for YOUR cause.
Shortly - even nominated for Nobel, he was just a Japanese nazi. Hidden under the cloak of bushido. But he DID seppuku in the 20th century. So he's a sort of an icon for Japanese. Clearly the point of his avoiding military service when it was really dangerous is avoided all the time, it's the bravery he showed in peace time that's important.
I hope you can get how Mishima doesn't really fit in a research about Japanese peacemaking. Again, don't get me wrong - don't know why folks so many times wants and do overturn my words just to fit their daily point of view - Mishima has nothing to do with the people who dedicated their life to peace, especially those who did survive The Bomb. Or The BombS, for the nijū hibakusha (even if only one is officialy recognized to be it, Tsutomu Yamaguchi)
After all this time and all my rantings you may wonder about my position about the bomb or the Japanese.. just keep wondering, that's what I do all the time. I wrote that I'm an idiot, it wasn't just to make a joke. Long ago it passed the time when I was so proud of "being crazty, yes, but stupid, never". Life proved me wrong so many times.
There's gonna be an A performing here, dunno exactly when, the day just skipped me. And there's gonna be a K and a B with her, all 48 of them, if I understood the posters well.
No sleep, third night in row. No wonder I see ghosts on the street.

Another busy weekend

2011-07-31T11:34:00.006+02:00

The second avalanche of cutness wasn't here for one afternoon! In the evening we had a "kempu pire" and we baked potatoes... well, we carbonized them, but who cares, they were delicious the same. When the kids went to sleep I was drinking beer on the porch of my bungalow, smiling to myself, feeling almost happy, at least as happy as I wasn't for a long long time. You know, at ease, satisfied, all worries forgotten and so on. And then I heard the children crying, their place is quite close to mine, it was sleeping time and I imagined the hard time the teachers are having. But it went on and on, too long, far too long. What the hell is going on? I waited a few minutes more, but no, it didn't seem to stop. Ah, my temper! Don't get me wrong - I believe that spoiled kids sometimes need a good slapping (if you find me cruel, ask His Holliness the Dalai Lama about this), but here we are talking about children from six to eight that go to sleep in a completely foreign environment, without parents and you have to do something to confort them! I headed for the guesthouse, blind with fury, having in mind some slapping for the teachers (I swear I would have done it!), when half the way I stopped like a complete idiot. Moron. Asshole. Jerk. Luckily I was only blind with fury, not deaf. They were laughing. They were having fun. They enjoyed it. Of course I had to be sure of it so I reached the guesthouse softly and slowly, peeked through the window and hoped I will dream of them.
In the morning they woke me up at 5.30 - their teachers were still sleeping so they found that playing (and shouting) in front of my door is safer. They were right. It's just that since they left I have no more choko pies in the fridge.

And we spent all the morning together and I was their archery instructor and we had so much fun that when they left I really shed a tear. No, I'm not getting soft, it was all because of the pain, the kiddies just wanted to pull my beard for goodbye! How could I say no?
The really most amazing and sweetest thing I saw was the lunch. The boys serving the girls. Without orders, without complains, without stupid jokes. They just did it. Maybe the "true" emancipated women (wymen?) find this disgusting. I dont care, I find it sweet.

Yes, lunch. If I'm given meat, I just eat it. So I wasn't complainig or being picky when with lunch came also a sandwich with fried eggs and ham. But what the hell was strawberry jam doing in it?
Even before the wee cuties left, another bus came, with high school students. With them we had some more conversation, mostly about archery. Yeah, I became (un)officially an archery instructor (and my brother and my nephew are ROFLing at this). And I'm a good one. You know the Italian saying "Chi sa, fa - chi non sa, insegna"? Translation: He who knows, does -the one who doesn't know, teaches.

In the evening I applied for a teaching job in Seoul. Whish me luck, don't pray!

Let's waste some time together

2011-07-29T13:19:00.013+02:00

This is the best description of Asian way of working. I'm not talking about Chinese - Philippino - You Name A Poor Country - slavery work, I've done it and it's same as anywhere around the world. I'm talking about normal daily farm work as I experienced it in Japan and here. To an outsider it may look as highly organized and extremely efficient. Dream on.
I will not repeat myself with stories from Japan, the last few days here are enough. Not that I complain, I'm still at a loss with this way of doing things where the time needed to do something is much more appreciated than the result. Few days ago I had to move from my lovely traditional house in the orchard to another bungalow and before leaving I had to clean it. Easy, it's not a really big house and I'm not your ordinary dirty male; clean the dust, sweep and wash the floor, done in maybe 15 minutes. Wrong! When I reported that the mission is completed I got only amazed looks. No, no, you have to clean it well, guests are coming in the afternoon! Yes, yes, I cleaned it well, guests are coming in the afternoon! A whole committee went to check the house and to recheck and willing or not they had to admit that the house is clean. But their faces were telling another story. They were not happy at all. I did it too fast thus it's not really clean, maybe it just looks clean and even if it is really clean I did it so fast thus... I was just waiting to see the CRC message appear in their eyes. And even more important than that was the fact that I completely messed the daily schedule. They had to find (make up) any job for me for the next few hours (which I was supposed to spend cleaning the house). Yes, I know, I should have gone to sleep and make it look like a work of hours, but it's not really my style. And it's not even Asian style. They really seem to do something all the time.
Today this stuff reached such epic proportions that at the end of the day I literally ROFLed. It was to laugh my lungs out or to cry in despair.
It's time for persimmon census. Yes, we count the fruits. For the insurance. Clearly we don't count all the fruits, but for an average figure we do 16 trees in bigger orchards and 12 in the smaller ones. Here they have a whole philosophy and a very complicated way to choose which trees are suitable for the census that takes a very long time to be explained in every single orchard. At the end everybody just picks random trees and does the counting. We have to do something like 50 orchards because the farmers have a collective insurance and it seems that here Kang is the Master of Persimmons. The average number of fruits is around 250 (I bumped into a tree with more than 500 fruits). You would never believe how fast we do it. We swarm the orchard, six of us, so we do two or three trees each and in less than five minutes we are done. We start after breakfast, 8.30 AM and before lunch we do something like five orchards. No, we don't have lunch at 9 AM but at 1 PM so there must be something really really wrong, don't you agree? OK, the orchards are quite far from each other, true - but some are very close. You think we do them one after other? How naive you are! That would be a very bad way of doing things! You see, we got a list, compiled by the insurance company and I guess it's by alphabetical order (because since now we were doing only orchards that belongs to different Kims) and we go by the list. Yesterday we were two times in three places just to do the orchard near the one already done. But today we were three times in a place where we were two times yesterday! It would actually be possible to do all the work in two days - in this way it will take us a week. When I saw where we were parking I felt rising a tide of despair but decided that actually there is a funny side in all this and lied down in the shade of a tree (persimmon, what else) and started laughing. Folks were amazed why this crazy foreigner is so happy so I tried to explain that I always find madness funny. We were here two times yesterday and two times today - why we didn't do the counting in all the five orchards the first time? They showed me the list and explained to the uneducated barbarian that we work by the mighty document with many seals and signatures. I stopped laughing and wanted to cry again.
My ninja coworker

Another day, another way
Even if I don't post every day on this blog I write almost every day, when something is to be mentioned. What I wrote yesterday would be softened today, so now the contrast will be more clear. Because in the morning I had a really hard time to control myself when we were sorting the lovely pink ribbons we use for marking the persimmon trees. Everything is on them, the name of the owner, number of the tree, date, name of the censor and the number of fruits. Guess what? We were sorting them by locations, not by names. I bit my tongue not to say something nasty. And we did something even better, we worked in two smaller crews in different areas so tomorrow we'll finish the work. Now I'm only afraid that everyone will hate me because they'll have to redo the weekly schedule.
I was planning to leave in a few days to go back to slavery work, cabbage season is due to start in Gangwon do, but during breakfast Kang told me that in the beginning of August we'll have another school here, for two days. You noticed that "we"? But as soon as the kids will leave I'll jump to Japan for the visa extension and then picking cabbage.

This morning I woke up at six and looked through the window. For a moment I was sure I had taken some illegal substances without knowing it. The rice fields around me were glittering like a sea of emeralds. When my sight wasn't so blurred anymore I noticed it was not a sea of emeralds, but that there are milions of diamonds on the rice plants. I grabbed my camera and ran out before the sun changes the angle that makes the dew drops so shiny. It really was an amazing sight and also a beautiful way to start a new day.

We had two rainy days so we were doing small works near the office building with the roof always at hand. And today in the morning we finally finished the counting of persimmons. Three days and half and in the last day and half we did more than two thirds of the work. We left the hardest two orchards for last.

It took us almost half an hour to climb the top of the hill, covered with persimmon trees, and we slowly descended, marking the trees.
Finished!

Before lunch we had to do the most boring part, paperwork. Copy all the figures , recheck the numbers and so on.

And after lunch - an unexpected (for me) joy.

I noticed that Koreans are very paranoid about their persimmon orchards. Gates everywhere!

But no gates around lotus fields. It's blossoming time. They do have something mystic, but not on my pictures...

And another mystic one, a light in the middle of the rice fields, have no idea why is there but I see it every time I go back from the store with beers...

A teacher forever

2011-07-24T13:14:00.012+02:00

New miracles happening here. When more than two years ago I tried for the first time sesame (or perilla, I still don't know the difference) leaves I almost puked. Seasoned, pickled, cooked or raw - it was all the same shit. I tried to describe the taste as something between soap, shampoo and toothpaste. Incredibly the taste is just the same after two years - and I love it. Sometimes I eat more sesame leaves than kimchi during a meal and that says a lot.
Another thing that never changes are the kids. Kang asked me if I am willing to help when children will come for a one day farm experience. Of course I will help, but how? Teaching English. And so it was. And so great it was! My God, in all these years I haven't realized how much I miss teaching. How much I miss kids. Once a teacher, forever a teacher. It really is as I was saying all the time, teaching is not a job, it's a vocation. I have to reconsider my decision that I won't teach again. On the other hand I know how incopatible I was even in the Slovene educational system, let alone how I would look in an Asian one. Surely fired after one week because the kids have too much fun - which is synonim for they are not learning anything. Yeah, Asia has the dumbest education you can imagine. And the sweetest kids you can imagine.
They arrived in the morning with the bus, a few tons of cuteness in all sizes and shapes. They stared at me with open mouths and when they heard that I will be their English teacher for a day they started trembling in terror. When they left it was hard to say who was more sad, them or me. I know for me that I almost cried when they all waved and shouted goodbyes from the bus.
It was not a real English class at all; when they were picking tomatoes I just explained that they are actually picking cherry tomatoes. And some more vegetables and fruits and animals. It was fun for everyone. We were making puffed rice (with persimmon sugar!) together, we had lunch together, we played with Tokki together.
I told you that the farm is huge - an electric mini bus is needed to visit it.

Everyone was posing for the teacher taking a picture - but one sweet smile was only for me.

As hours passed more and more of them were coming spontaneously to me, asking "What name is this?" for different things. I bet another teacher would be correcting them, but the idea was far from me. As many linguists say, the point of communication is the correct interpretation of the message. My point was the pronunciation - Koreans have an awful one. Korean language lacks certain sounds, like "v" or "f" or to end a word with a consonant and a mission impossible is to make them say "si" - it will always sound like "shi". My usual joke with kids is to ask them, while they are sitting, what are they doing. Nine times out of ten their answer is "I'm shitting."
This time I didn't make this stupid joke, mostly because they were never sitting (shitting?) for more than ten seconds.
Playing Korean traditional games.

I was green with envy when a girl fell and bruised her knee because she ran crying to Min Ho (the student) for comfort (not to her teacher!) and then he was carrying her around. Yes, I know I would have been of no use to her - I have to learn Korean and do it fast!
The greatest fun for the kids came in the afternoon when they played at catch the eel. It's not metaphorically speaking. They were actually catching eels with their hands in a muddy pond. For them it was what a mud festival is for rockers. The joy, the fun, the laughter!

To me the cutest was the girl in the pink... err... in the brown dress.

Later they had a shower that didn't change much the colours.

They changed in the classroom and this came out. Sweet as chocolate, don't tell me you wouldn't eat her!

Goodbye kids, I love you and who knows, maybe we will meet again, if not in this life in one of the next.

Sometimes I may write to much about pretty Asian women, risking to be considered a tipical male pig. Be it. But for this time I'll do the opposite, I'll entartain the female readers. If I remeber well which picture from Iwanuma was one of the most "clicked" something simalar awaits this one. Here's your average Korean farmboy.

More about the farm. This is the education center.

One of the rest areas.

The mini store. You can buy persimmon wine, persimmon ice wine, persimmon juice, persimmon leaves tea and noodles. I haven't figured out the last yet.

The wine tastes good. It really tastes like wine and it has 12% of alcohol.
I'm afraid I'm falling in love... what a fool I am.

Surrounded by persimmon trees

2011-07-21T12:33:00.005+02:00

Wwoofing is saving my ass again. Sure, I make no money, but at least I don't spend any. And there's a chance to come back here in few months to make some money harvesting persimmon. We'll see when the time comes.
I'm situated in the Sweet Persimmon Village in the south of Korea, halfway between Daegu in Busan. It's a place with the lowest precipitation in all Korea, which is a refreshing change (read that "refreshing" as strongly ironic, the temperatures are going crazy and with high humidity is a challenge even to breath). Working can be a madness, but you'll never believe that every day I can't wait to go to work. The alternative is to lie on the floor in the room and try not to move a single muscle (with all available fans on). But the work... OK, the first 30 seconds are painful because I have to walk under the killing sun from my room to the orchard, where's always shadow and a soft breeze. I tried to sleep there one afternoon, but no way - you must be standing to feel the breeze. We work slowly and never in the hottest hours of the day. I think this is the first place in Korea that I find to be really organic (for the most part, a few orchards aren't) and not just a wannabe eco farm. All the weeding is done by hand, no herbicides used and for pesticides they use mostly hot pepper based homemade liquid. Nice, but the sceptic in me is always alert so I do have a problem with an organic fruit farm, that is surrounded by acres of rice fields. When the rice is sprayed with all possible chemicals it really doesn't affect your trees? Crap, you may well fuck me, but the rice is grown organically, too. I just can't believe I've found such a place in this country. The farm is huge, it actually deserves the name "village". It has it's own packing facility, a persimmon wine production center, restaurant, office building, education center, few warehouses, lodging facilities (one traditional and two less traditional houses), archery field and you name it. The owner (or owners, I have no idea) lives with an extended family, usually they are ten at mealtime, add one employed worker, a student of agriculture who is doing here his internship and me and you have a picture of a communal meal. Oh yes, for lunch we are joined by two hired ajuma that also do farmwork (but luckily at lunchtime the daughters, sons, nieces or nephews are not home).

Here's one of the smaller orchards in which is situated the traditional Korean house or hwantobang.

A zoomed look at the house, which is my temporary home, complete with ondol - I surely don't need in these days.

Pavlov's rabbit

The chap is my next door neighbour. Since he has no name I called him simply Tokki (which means rabbit in Korean). Tokki and I are now friends. He's a very clever rabbit because he knows the Slovene language. Cleraly he cant speak, he's not a fairy tale rabbit, but he understands me. He really does what I tell him to do.
Well, this is the story I sold to the guys here. Of course they were laughing when I told it, but when I proved it to be true... it was my turn to laugh. The fact is that if I call Tokki he comes to me. The others can't catch him even if they try in group, Tokki is fast as a flash (and clever also, as I already said). A fistfull of fresh grass every time I pass by does the trick since I pass there twenty or thirty times a day. So when he sees me approaching his nose is alreday stuck in the fence, waiting. If I go in I have to be very careful not to step on him so today I really had to kick him a few times so I could finish my work - I dug a new house for him, since the one he did for himself was all the time flooded.

Archery
It was my day off when I dug Tokki's house, I finished it very fast and then I went with Kang (the boss) to learn something about Korean traditional archery. I suppose that me with a Korean bow was the funniest thing the folks here have ever seen. So far I have never tried any archery, let alone some Korean traditional (kids playing as Indians really doesn't count), so the arrows were flying in all directions and everybody was running in panic for shelter. I'm really surprised that I didn't manage to shoot myself in the back. With my skills it would be perfectly possible. The worst part was finding the arrows. Some were in the nearby sweet potato filed. One was in the rice field. Lots of them were at my feet. When Kang patiently repeated and showed me the technique for the third time I managed to hit the target with one arrow out of thirty (here I use the term target very widely since I hit only the frame). When Kang realized that I actually can send the arrows approximately in the target's direction, continued with explanations. That here is no point in aiming in a straight line, since Korean bows are used to give to the arrow a ballistic curve so you aim at a certain degree over the target. Ah, that's the trick! Not really, since I had to collect my arrows on the other side of the house. They didn't believe me that I was aiming at enemy helicopters landing on the roof. At that point I had it enough and the fingers started aching but Kang decided that it was time for an archery contest, internetional of course, Korea vs Slovenia. I wished my brother or my nephew were here to be in my place, but maybe they would find the Korean traditional bow a sort of a toy, simply a piece of wood (so finely polished that at first I tought it's plastic), a synthetic string and fiberglass arrows with steel tip.
To make me feel at ease he told me that Koreans are known as best archers and that the Korean women are invincible since they practice fourteen hours a day. Of course Korea won in this contest, too, but not so smoothly as Kang was expecting. I remembered a book, Zen and Archery, that I didn't read, but the title gave me an idea. Why should I care so much about what I'm doing? The arrow is supposed to know where to go, I'm just helping it! Now don't think that I suddenly became some archery master by a zen miracle, not at all, but the improvement really looked as a sort of miracle. In the first round I managed to hit the target with thirteen out of fourteen arrows making one single point (against Kangs' 32). We did the second round with thirteen arrows because I couldn't find the one that missed the target. This time I made two points, all arrows in the target (or the frame). In the third round Kang almost had a heart attack when with the first arrow I hit directly the center (5 points) and ended with 10 points in all. When he managed to make "only" 27 points, he declared that my 10 are worth much more and proclaimed me winner (of one round).

Oleg, The Lord of the Smell
Oleg is a well known myth among visitors of SF/F conventions. He's a myth because he attends almost every Con in Europe, he's been even on the Slovene Confusion. He travels hitchiking and he never washes. Usually organizers of a Con know one day in advance if Oleg is coming, because his smell comes one day before him (and it also leaves one day after him). His smell is something tangible and it's hard - when it hits your nose you start bleeding. With his perseverance he became a sort of an icon - you can hardly call your Con a success if Oleg wasn't there.
Why this introduction? Because in this village I heard a story of a similar legendary smelly being. A guy who was here for one month, worked every day and didn't take a single shower. According to the folks he smelled as rotten cabbage. He's somewhere from East Europe. You can bet that Oleg was the first person I tought of. And dismissed the idea. Not because of the hitchhiking, if there is a person who could do it, Oleg is your man. Just because here we don't have Cons. Sad, but true.

Enough of radish

2011-07-12T10:03:00.004+02:00

July 3rd
Last week we moved again. Same story again, fridge, TV and so on loaded on the pickups, drinking beer and shouting (the boss did the shouting part, we did the drinking one) and cover everything because of the rain.

Till there, nothing special. We locked the door and hit the road but stopped after maybe twenty minutes. In a spot I learned to hate that same day, it's a wet and muddy working story, will not annoy you with it. I started to being really worried because it was almost midnight and there was an empty five toner truck waiting and I started to fear that my joke about a night shift might become true. Luckily it didn't. But to my great amazement we loaded the pickups on the big truck. Crazy stuff.

And we had a hell of a ride way north in the van and now we're settled in a guesthouse in a lost village that goes by the name of Gobuk. Of course the first thing that went in the room was the fridge and the first thing to go in it was the kimchi. Good thing, the fridge is in our room (I share it with two other guys) so we have anju and cold beer all the time for us.

Rainy season really started. It rains almost every day. We mostly don't work and when we do we're in mud to the knees. Following the weather we also changed the work routine, we do not load anymore cardboard boxes (we did it only once and it was an experience I do not want to repeat, half of the time running to cover the boxes, the other half running to load them) but huge plastic bags that can hold around half tone of radish. And also the radish now reached sort of biblical size, pieces of three or four kg are average and impossible to pack in the box. So we had to learn quickly the new way of picking and I was proud like hell when I found a new, better and faster, way of doing it just by myself. Here the point is to pull the radish (two radishes actually, one with each hand) and with a whipping movement of the wrist break all the leaves so the loader picks just the radish root and throws it in the bag. I added to the wrist movement also a quick twist that helps the snapping of the leaves and - lo and behold! - sends the radish root flying into the bag. Or somewhere very close to it, which is the same a good job because it speeds up the work. Or it could speed it, at least. It just doesn't. It's pretty dangerous, too. It hurts when you're hit by a huge radish. After I managed to hit a Chinese guy for the third time he got really angry and started throwing radishes at me. So I stopped inventing nonsense and kept doing it the way I was taught.
When we work I'm going crazy all the time because my boots keep being stuck in the deep mud and on days when we don't work I'm going crazy because it's boring and we don't make any money. At least when it's raining really heavily the boss is so nice that he wakes us at 4:30AM to drink coffee and tell us that we can keep sleeping on because we won't work. And we sleep till breakfast, somewhere around nine or ten, we go back to sleep till early afternoon, we start drinking beer and we sleep some more. We're so bored that we make silly juvenile jokes to the boss, like the one on the following picture...

No free wifi nowhere around. I will wait till we go somewhere with a PCbang to use the internet...

July 12th, Seoul
Call me softy, but I quit with radish. Sixteen hours shifts are just too much for me if they are the rule and not the exception. I hope to find soon another crew with more human working hours.

Blood, sweat and tears

2011-06-24T08:34:00.002+02:00

I admit it, I'm being sort of "drama queen" giving the post such a title (or posting it on FB) and leaving up to your imagination what could have happened. But isn't such misleading the most interesting way of using FB?
And in the end it was all true, just like I wrote, blood, sweat and tears. We had some fighting here. Ko, a young Chinese, is the first Asian I met that actually fits the stereotype about weak drinkers. All the others I've been drinking with are normal or heavy drinkers that would put to shame many proud western drunkards (like it happened to me). To Ko is enough a pair of glasses of soju and he goes crazy. Not that he becomes drunk - like I wrote, he goes just crazy. I suppose that was the main reason for whatever happened. I can only suppose because at the time I was with Matthieu in our private cyber cafe in the nearby village.

When we came back first I heard a Chinese woman crying, then saw the Korean guy with cuts on his hands. Maybe they had an argument while playing cards, maybe some old issues, maybe just soju but Ko grabbed a knife and started being an asshole. Even if he had a large knife he was drunk and one against many so he had no chance. And his head ended shaped slightly different that it was, he packed his stuff and left. Seemingly with not much hard feelings from both sides since if I understood well they sent him away just for one week, to cool down a little bit and the guy who was assaulted was the one who drove him to the bus station in Yeong Am.
Oh, I forgot about the sweat. Since summer started also here, I was sweating like a pig after walking under the sun from the open air cyber cafe.
Second day of summer and it seems the rainy season knows the calendar. It rained all night long and it still didn't stop, it's almost lunch time. No work with radish. Cabbage yes, because they are packed in nylon nets, but radish goes in cardboard boxes. So we're not making money and we're bored insanely. With the pouring rain I can't even go to my wifi spot. But again something funny happened even if we're staying at home watching TV. Korean dramas or the Chinese channel. It was dramas this morning so at the amazement of all the crew in one moment Matthieu appeared on TV. Few weeks ago he got a chance for a well paid short shooting for a somehow popular drama and that episode was aired more than a week ago, but today was re-aired. In a second everybody was shouting "mechu, mechu" and we tought they all want beer. They just can't pronounce his name so they call like beer is called in Korean. So now Mekchu is a sort of celebrity for them - hell, he was on TV! And he was payed for it! The major puzzle is for them to figure out why he is picking radish now. Maybe the boss will start advertising that in his crew a TV star is picking radish...
This radish business is may harder than the cabagge one. For ten tons we work something like 14 hours with breaks just to eat breakfast and lunch and immediately back to work. And I move something like 25 tons of radish or so. First we do the picking and since I'm slow with it I pull out maybe two or three tons of radish while the others do it double. Almost half of the radish remains on the field for not being the right quality. Then we start packing and there I move again a ton or two in the boxes and here I'm the slow one again. When less than half is packed the loading starts. First I load the pickup on the field and we move to the road where the truck waits. So all the radish goes through my hands twice and a part of it four times.
Next day. No rain but cloudy and windy and too muddy to work. Tried to connect from my usual spot, but no luck. The wind was too strong. I know it doesn't make no sense what I just wrote, but that's what it is. I remember that when I was in Oban, Scotland, I could get a good free wifi connection only on days with wind from the east, otherwise not. Go figure why. Maybe it's the same thing here, sitting on the same bench, computer oriented in the same way, but the signal too weak to make any useful connection. So with Matthieu we just bought a few beers and that was it. And a bottle of soju to drink after dinner like a sleeping pill, we never know if next day we work or not so it's better to fall asleep early and be ready to wake up at four.
More about stereotypes. If you didn't know, Koreans spit everywhere all the time. If you say for a Chinese that he spits everywhere all the time you're limiting him in space and time.

Gipsy Caravan

2011-06-19T06:33:00.002+02:00

I changed the crew and the vegetables, now it's radish that we pick. We look just like a Gipsy caravan when we move. Few days ago we finished in Jindo and moved a little bit to the north, somewhere near Gwangju or so. It doesn't really matter to me. In the evening we started loading the two pickups and a van with just everything that was in the previous (rented) house, including the fridge, kitchenware and TV. And working gear and food (mostly kimchi, of course) and blankets and so on - we left the house totally empty. And we hit the road and I couldn't stop laughing while looking at the huge fridge on the pickup in front of us. Now we're settled in an empty restaurant that by the looks probably closed a long time ago. With this radish team the accomodation is spartan and in no way crappy. And I sort of like my team mates. Again, mostly Chinese (two of them of the female persuasion), but also Koreans and a French. The boss is a tipical boss, shouting all the time and noone really cares about him. And after he spent all the day shouting and nagging and complaining how slow we are and that he will fire all of us on the way back to base he stops in a store and happily buys beers for all the crew. I started to imitate the Chinese guys, when the boss is complaining about something they just look blankly at him and smile and sometimes start speaking in Chinese. When he realizes that all his shouting is vane, he goes away. I have the feeling that the guys also like me (not the boss, he doesn't like anyone). When the Chilean guy gave up because the work was to hard for him, the Chinese came worried to me and asked if I'm going away with him. We had to drink a bottle of soju celebrating my will to stay.
And I learned some scarry facts about this vegetables picking. About safety. Clearly we wear gloves, that's absolutely usual everywhere in Asia, no matter what work you do. Just wearing gloves meaans you're working. But everyone also wears long sleeves or the working sleeves. I needed an interpreter to realize why the boss was first to firmly insist that I must - not should - wear them, too. Because when cutting the cabbages or pulling the radish (same shit everywhere) you slightly and slowly bruise the skin on your arms, which is not a problem in itself. I bet no boss gives a shit about your beauty skin treatments, the problem are the chemicals that are sprayed on the plants. Tons of them. Yeah, this is no organic farming, it's a mass production and I don't do it for fun.
To make the time pass away the guys play cards for money. Actually the women too. And the TV is always on, even by night. I try to do nothing, just rest. I found a spot with some free wireless in twenty minutes walking distance so I try to go there as often as possible, to the great amazement of my coworkers who just can't get why I'm doing it. Well, they're from another planet. One Chinese guy saw a Coke for the first time in his life only two days ago. I was surprised that actually still exist places on this globe that are safe from such shit products. Maybe I should learn Chinese, ask the guy where is he from and permanently move there.

Jindo

2011-06-11T10:06:00.003+02:00

And my true hobo experience started. If everything will turn out like now is beng told it could possibly be the best job ever. A hard one, but well worth the effort you put in. In theory we get paid 50K won (each) for a loaded five-ton truck in a crew of four; if the crew is of five, we get 40K won. Simple mathematics. And two trucks daily is a required minimum and the average. Here and there you're required to do the third truck or the trucks are seven to tentoners and the mathematics is quite different then.
We're talking cabbages here. Picking them, stuffing them in nets and loading. First all the cutters attack the cabbage field with sharp knives and when half of the field is done, usually one cutter remains to finish it and all the others start stuffing the cabbages in the nets, three in each, so even loading isn't a heavy work. And there's the fun part, too. We have almost all the day free to do whatever we want. Because we start working at 5 AM, have breakfast at 7 and with two trucks to do we're over just before the real heat starts, we're back at the base for lunch. Yesterday we were back at 1.30 PM but it was a really slow day because it was raining. And when it wasn't raining it was pouring. But the market doesn't stop because of rain so neither we can.
Another good thing in this work is that you can work all year round. It's a moving job, we're supposed to finish in Jindo in a month, then we move to Gangwon-do and later to Jeju island and in winter we do polytunnels. I say "we" in the hope that everything will go smoothly (talking about money) and that I'll be good enough for the boss to keep me. It should be no problem if I disappear for a week or two to Japan or any other country and upon return I can continue the work.
As I said, that's the theory. For now I did just the training, the second day I'm here we're already off. So in the afternoon we're going to meet in Jindo with folks from other crews to have some beers and I'll grab the chance for free wifi, I found some spots the moment I arrived in Jindo. Crew members are mostly Chinese and the boss is Korean. In every crew there is a nuna that does the cooking, but with my luck I ended possibly in the only crew without a woman so the food is plain boring. I got spoiled in one day, the first day I was with another crew with a nuna that was a great cook and she mainly uses stuff she picks near the working fields. Yep, vegetarian diet. And it's hard to imagine in how many different (delicious!) ways you can cook cabbage!
The accomodation is more than spartan. It's crappy. But I don't mind and I don't complain. As Felipe, a Chilean coworker pointed out, now we're street dogs and our only goal is to survive. But even street dogs can bite. Luckily we're supposed to be paid every two weeks so this is the time to wait and find out how do they run this business. Eventually I can crash some heads with absolutely no remorse. I will pretend that I'm a reincarnation of some ancient Korean buddhist warrior monk (which is an oximoron in itself) that proudly slaughtered Japanese invaders in the name of the loving Lord Buddha. Or the reincarnation of Admiral Yi (which I already mentioned in a previous entry), that is watching the straight between the mainland and the Jindo island.

In this straight he defeated the vast Japanese fleet with just a few vessels in a masterpiece of strategy. My strategy will be to wait patiently for two weeks to see the outcome and then continue working or kick some ass and walk away. Maybe not only kick, they trained me to use a large sharp knife... Hope for the first option, sounds much better.

A step closer to the south

2011-06-07T16:19:00.004+02:00

June 7th, evening
Finally I managed to sleep under the stars, after longing for it so long. The nights spent in the tent in the Iwanuma park just don't count.
In the late afternoon I was walking through a small village and was stopped by the elders of the village, three of them, a woman and two men. They were sitting on the ground near the road and they waved me to stop. Even after finding out that I don't speak nor understand Korean, I had to sit with them for a while and engage in twenty or so minutes conversation, of which I just have no clue what was it about. But it was fun. The only fact of which I'm sure is their age because they wrote it on my palm with their fingers. The oldest is 98, the lady 88 and the youngster is 72. As it is they were first attracted y my beard. Of course they had to touch it. The next amazing thing were my hairy hands and the next moment they wanted to check my chest. Funny guys. I left them and they were bye-byeing me for almost a kilometer, every few steps I turned just to see them still waving their hands so I waved back and so it went for a time. Almost until I disappeared in the woods. And found myself a nice graveyard on a hill and started coking my dinner. Since I'm almost pennyless I was ready for a sort of ascetic trip to the south, but this country surprised me again. With prices. Yes, I do know how Seoul is expensive, compared to the countryside. But this much? In Seoul an onion is some 1000 won average. Yesterday I saw it for 300 won. The cheapest ramyon? 370 won. Batteries? Four AA pieces for 900 won, I just had to buy them. A small pot for cooking ramyon? 1700 won. Ridiculous. So I also bought kimchi, seaweed, fresh hot peppers and some other stuff for almost no money and had a Gargantuan dinner (same goes for the breakfast).

Oh yes, and a bottle of soju. It's a must if you sleep on a graveyard, I always live small offerings of soju to the dead. And I lied down on the sleeping bag, just breathing and just looking up in the darkening sky. Very shy, the first star became visible, the others followed in their millenary performance, just like every night, careless about me, about you and about just everything. That's why I love them, they are there just to shine, to be admired. Then... the first falling star. And another. And two more. Frogs in the valley, a soft wind through the branches of pines. Then the mosquitos came. Also ants. It became pretty cold and dew wetted my sleeping bag. At six in the morning I woke up and felt like a truck ran over me and the truck driver burried my corpse in the ice to hide it. But you should see the smile on my face. Again a small fire, breakfast, coffee, backpack packed, sun is shining and I'm sweating and let's hit the road, that's what it's all about!

Korea, the hitchikers paradise! Just don't dare to come here, once they will start see hichikers at every corner it will probably become a hell like England. In few hours I came to Gwangju and I really had to refuse to have the third lunch with the third driver. How rude of me, I know, but I was just about to explode from food!
Luckily from Gwangju I called my friend to tell him I'm arriving in the evening - he was not at home but in Gwangju! Yeah, let's go around, visit here and there and so evening came and the beers also. Go to drink another one on the porch. The stars are again on.

Running out

2011-06-04T14:56:00.007+02:00

Running out of time, that's it. And have to run, to move, to do. Leaving Seoul tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. I'm just waiting for a call - no, for a mail - to see when it will be. Should start working pretty soon, if not this Monday then next weekend, but I'm hitting the road in any case. Ramon is flying tomorrow for Helsinki so I suppose we'll meet again sometime near the end of this year, hopefully. He's already packed, I can be in 15 minutes if I'll be in a hurry. Heading south, towards my work destination.
Today another afternoon out, first a ride to 명동 (Myeongdong), a crowded shopping district of Seoul.

On the way back we stopped again on the banks of the river Han for a beer in the shade of one of the many bridges and enjoyed the view of floating dead fish in the brownish water.

Can you imagine how crowded is Seoul on a Saturday? If you can, then double the people in your imaginationa and you're half of the way to the real stuff. But... there are some quiet quiet corners, like a ghost station... not to mention that it's situated near the seoul Cemetery...

Is there anybody alive? Hallo?

Oh yes, there is someone!

The crowd makes me nervous, but the huge and empty halls of the subway give me the creeps.
Have no idea when I'll come online next time. Maybe in few days, maybe in weeks. Maybe with some good story to tell, finally!

A blog about my blog

2011-06-01T17:12:00.003+02:00

Funny thing indeed. I just checked at statcounter.com some statistics about the access to this blog. And here is the statistics by country for the last 500 entries.
44.80% Slovenia
43.00% Japan
7.00% Korea, Republic Of
1.80% United States
0.80% Finland
0.60% Germany
0.40% Macedonia
0.40% Romania
0.40% United Kingdom
0.20% Czech Republic
0.20% Croatia
0.20% France
0.20% Sweden
Since I know that many "clicks" counted on my blog are results of weird searches on google, I took a look on the Recent Keyword Activity that showed this:
31 May 22:52:08 www.google.hr dag kleva blog
31 May 22:00:19 www.google.si azijski spisi 2
31 May 20:20:00 www.google.si spis ura je prekratka
31 May 17:55:06 www.google.si spisi o življenju
31 May 14:09:50 www.google.com azijski spisi
31 May 12:50:17 www.bing.com Co je to kimči ?
31 May 11:51:47 www.google.si dag kleva
30 May 20:21:31 www.google.com Lama Shenpen Rinpoche
29 May 13:59:53 www.google.si presenečenje je uspelo spis
27 May 22:58:22 www.google.si skice aziske sobe
27 May 09:17:41 www.google.com iwanuma onsen
26 May 23:19:31 www.google.com gojenje ingver
OK, some of you knew exactly what you were looking for. Others... well, some want to grow ginger. Others want to know what kimchi is. Someone needs a sketch of an Asian (misspelled) room. Most are lazy students that are looking for templates for their essays (Azijski spisi in Slovene means Asian essays). How disappointed must have they been!
But there has been a search that gave this blog as a result and of that I'm fu***ng PROUD:
24 May 16:01:23 search.yahoo.co.jp 岩沼テント村村長
And now, the really funny part which made me write this entry. It's the statistics of downloads. Not real downloads (probably there were some), it counts as a download even when you click on a picture to enlarge it. I wasn't at all surprised (and again very proud of this, too) when I saw that the most viewed picture in the last month was this:

BUT... THE SECOND WAS THIS!

Go figure about the folks who read (look at?) my blog...

Hanging Out In Seoul, pt. 2

2011-05-29T14:45:00.012+02:00

Part 1 was published on Facebook, to see it click here.
We woke up early in the morning, like every day - around 2 PM - and had some great food, homemade this time. Fish kimchi stew, tofu, fried green onions and zucchini, tofu.

And then a ride on the subway to the Traditional Village.

Lix, here you can learn how to tie loudspekar's cables - see, it' so easy, a knot solves everything!

Then coffee time at Starbucks

For someone it was nappy time in the Namsan Park.

And let's go to the top... but not with the cable, not follow the road... let's cut through the woods! Funny and fast. The funniest part was when we arrived on the top and we had to climb the fence with a crowd looking at us. And almost everybody was laughing when they saw me. Well, my tee shirt.

The story about my shirt is an interesting one. It says 나 미국사람아니에요. I'm not American, that is. And I think it's funny. That's why I made it in the first place. And also it's true. But in Korea people find it not funny - it's something extremely hilarious! They burst into laughter the moment they read it. Some almost choke if they drink or eat at the moment I appear. I love making people happy but I really really wonder why this is so much fun? One possibility is that they think I do not know the meaning and that I am American. So it would be a good joke some their korean pals played on a stoopid American. That's cool even for me, even if it makes me the retard. But actually nobody is making fun of me - they laugh at some stoopid American! And that's ultra cool!

Busan by day

2011-05-22T03:52:00.009+02:00

First a stroll through the Jagalchi fish market

Not so interesting as I tought it would be. But if you have time it's worth to take a look.
Next spot for pretending to be a tourist was at the Lotte Aqua Mall.

Impressive tecnology!
Next, Busan Tower.

And Busan Tower with the Korean hero of all times, Admiral 이순신, one of the few commanders all over the world and through history that never lost a single battle.

In the park was held a religious ceremony. Don't know exactly what kind of, but for sure it was a mix between a Buddhist and a shamanist one. And a beautiful one, for sure.

And then it was the same again, like all the time on my travels... spotted by the local TV, just a short interview, please, thank you. I wonder if this happened because of my shirt which says 나 미국사람아니에요. Many people found it extremely funny. A shop assistant in a supermarket almost chocked on herself laughing.

And then another Iwanuma Volunteer came from japan and in the evening we had to meet a friend from Busan. We were waiting her at the Starbucks near the Lotte in Seomyeon for 30 minutes, then decided to call her. Where are you? At the Starbucks. Which Starbucks? Near Lotte in Seomyeon. No way, I'm there and you're not. Oh no, it sure goes the other way!
Guess what? There are two Starbucks near Lotte in Seonmyeon.

A piece of my heart stayed in Iwanuma

2011-05-19T18:10:00.001+02:00

Even if I'm already in Korea, in the country where I really feel at home and belong to, I can't stop thinking about Japan. But not Japan generally, just about a place I learned to love and a bunch of people I started to respect, admire and love.
Fair is fair and now that I know that my blog is being read also in Iwanuma, where a piece of my heart remained, I must admit a thing of which I'm ashamed. I never liked Japanese people. I liked Japan, of course, it's such a beautiful country that is breathtaking, but I never liked the people. On Tokunoshima yes, they are way different, but on the main islands I found them so.. weird. But that was no problem when I decided to go to do volunteering. I didn't care. A person in need needs help, it doesn't matter I like him or not. As I said many times, I do not pray, I just do.
I can never be grateful enough to Saito san, the young man who literally picked Ramon and me on the Sendai station, without knowing us or our purpose. We just painfully copied the kanji for Iwanuma and tried to find the train to there, when this smiling guy approached us and asked where are we going. And he helped us to buy the tickets and showed us the way and said don't worry to miss the station, I go there to, I live in Iwanuma. And how amazed he was when he heard that we are looking for the Iwanuma Volunteer Center, his smile became even broader when he explained that he is working there and he called his mother so she picked us at the station and drove us first to the Center and then to the park where volunteers are camping. And we met the next morning and for the rest of my life I will never stop to be grateful to him. I know that folks from Iwanuma were and are grateful to Ramon and me because we were long term volunteers and we did lots of hard work, but I'm even more grateful to them and the volunteers from all over Japan, because they helped my change my mind and gave me a chance to make a new opinion about Japanese people. There I met a man that I respect way more than my father. Sorry dad, but it's true. And I suspect that the same goes for my son. And if it's true that even he respects Tanaka san more than he respects me - well, than I'm even more proud of my son!
I have loads of heartwarming memories of Iwanuma, but the highlight was one day when in the afternoon I was going back from the Volunteer Center, I was alone, I don't know where the rest of the crew was, I was limping, drained of almost all energy, the street was absolutely empty, only blooming trees and me, I just wanted to quit everything that same moment when I met an old lady going the opposite way. By my outfit she instantly recognized me as a volunteer and she greeted me with a warm "Otsukare sama deshta". Instantly I straightened up, forgot the pain in my leg, smiled and loudly and proudly replied "Otsukare sama deshta!" And I kept going on with that smile, working and drinking, working and drinking, day by day and I never felt better in my life.
And there I found Jinen san, with his poor English but a heart bigger than Japan itself. Jinen san, I'm sorry I was drunk all the time so I really don't remember you procalimed me your second father and Ramon your brother. Only when you cried at our farewell Ramon told me about it. But even if I was drunk I loved you and I still love you like my son.
And there I met Hiroto san, so full of energy and will, so nice and ready to help.
And there I met Okano san, so strong and so gentle.
And there I met Oohashi san, so funny but so serious.
And there I met Takeno san, who shared his loneliness with everyone feeling lonely.
And there I met Imai san, Takahashi san, Niwa san, Kazuki san, Yamaguchi san and so many of you that I just don't remeber your names, of some just nicknames like Green Man, The Firefighter, Chainsaw Man, Shitty Glasses, Manga Man, Zero Alcohol, Dynosaur, The Snack, Photographer, Little Neighbour. And of so many of you I remember just the faces but it doesn't stop me from loving you all. I know you all remember Baka Otosan from Sveronia, but I was one and you were plenty.
This morning when I was boarding the ferry in Hakata a man started a conversation with me because of all the crazy stickers I had on my jacket. And when I showed him my back that says "Iwanuma Volunteer 4/21 - 5/15" he bowed and thanked me for helping Japan. He was a Korean.
I bow to Iwanuma Volunteers.

The End

2011-05-16T10:35:00.011+02:00

Day 23

Eight earthquakes so far, hurricane wind during the Golden Week, yesterday evening a typhoon. I'm tired like I have never been in my life. I walk like a cripple since I tore my leg muscles and my back is nothing more than a collection of pains. No problems with that. But today was the day of the Graveyard Shift.We requested it because we tought that it was involving moving tombstones. It wasn't. You think that all Japanese are cremated? I thought so, too. Luckily there were no fresh bodies, they were removed long ago. Our job was the usual, mud shoveling and rice straw removal. But no forks or shovels this time. Do it with hands. And do separation of straw, glass, wood, metal and... bones. Probably you think that for work like this there are special teams. I bet there are, but here is just so much work to do that it looks like a neverending story. My story will end in two days. We go togheter, five members of the Hard Cocks Team. All three of them have been here longer than Ramon and me.

It's party time every evening, not the usual drinking but we started with farewells early. Have you ever been proclaimed unanimously a Japanese by a bunch of Japanese people? I was, yesterday. And it broke my heart that I had to correct them. I'm Korean. It looks that even Asian people can't really tell the difference between them.

I go to drink now. Again someone brought sushi and beers for the volunteers. Maybe tomorrow I will be in better mood. Just no Graveyard Shifts anymore, please.

Day 24

Ninth earthquake in the morning, when we were waiting in the Volunteer Center. A long one this time, the tension among the people was palpable, if only one had started running out everybody would have moved like one. It was just a short break between laughter, shouting, cheering and similar retarded behaviour. We - The Team Hard Cocks - started in the morning with a competition who will have the team sign in a more stupid place. Now we have signs on boots, shirts, jackets and facemasks, on arms, fingers, fronts and asses.

This Team Hard Cocks stuff is like a snowball. It started as a stupid joke one drunken night and next day six of us were the founding members. We were nine same day in the afternoon. When folks from the Volunteer center saw the moral of our group - we always requested the hardest jobs and we were laughing all the time - they started joining us in the evening drinks in the park and one by one became members of the team.

Today we hit the jackpot. We got the hardest job possible, assigned to us by our Hard Cocks infiltrators in the Center. We had to move 15 tons of rice back in the cleaned warehouse. And there was no queue for us. When job assignments started The Dynosaur (our member at the Center) simply shouted "Team Hard Cocks!" and our bunch of morons moved forward. Other volunteers (hundreds of them, it's Saturday, mostly new faces) looked at us in astonishment. The briefing was memorable. Saito kun (another member from the center) started the orientation but The Octopus stopped him and started like all orientations start, asking if someone is here for the first time. Fifteen hands up. Laughter. Shouting. People waiting becoming more and more puzzled. Saito kun explains about the 15 tons of rice. More laughter, more shouting. Team leader Ramon. More and more laughter. We're so pumped up that we could stop the tsunami in that moment. We do our job so fast and so cheerily that the farmer is shocked. He starts asking about our stickers (and writings on the skin) and after hearing the story he wants to become a member. And he's fucking proud when he gets the sign on his arm.

Day 25

Tokyo. Waiting for the night bus for Hakata. Tired, sleepy, hangovered. And sad. It's the end of a beautiful story, a story of challenge, rage, fight, laughter, romance and tears. So many tears yesterday evening and this morning. Tanaka san cried when Ramon and I thanked him bowing on our knees. Okano san cried when I gave him a leaf from the Boddhi tree. Jinen san cried when I hugged him. A lot of people came yesterday evening for our farewell party. People I've never seen but they heard stories about the Team Hard Cocks and read a story about two gaijins on the Iwanuma Volunteer Center blog. They brought food and beers. An older man - never saw him - brought two sixpacks, specially for Ramon and me. And I was crowned as King of Japanese Beer, this time by a Japanese. Yes, the old guy did it. It was great. Because I knew that there are still a few hours to spend with the best people on this planet.

I laughed loudly when the farmer (of the 15 tons of rice) came with a box of beers to say goodbye.

This morning again lots of people came to say goodbye. Haruka chan came to Sendai to hug Hiroto san for the last time. And Ramon, Hiroto san and I hopped on the shinkansen for Tokyo. With beers. Since it was my third beer in the morning I managed to spill it on the train. Hiroto tried to catch my can and he spilled his beer. And drinking our last beer together in Tokyo, on Shinjuku Station, we coined a new slogan: Give your beers to the volunteers!
In Nagasaki. May 16th. I received a mail from Iwanuma today.
アッコです！今日で最後の皆さん、本当にお疲れ様でした。それから村長さんはじめ、テント村で暮らしながら私の故郷、岩沼を助けてくださっている皆さん、本当にありがとうございます。私は２３日に岩沼を発つまで、ボランティアセンターでお世話になっている予定です。見かけたらぜひ声かけてください。それからFacebookをやっている方が居ましたら、AkikoSchaetzle で検索していただいて、ぜひお友達にしてやってくださいね。
アッコ
Dag & Ramon,
Thanks again for helping my hometown Iwanuma! You guys are our legend at Iwanuma disaster volunteer center!!! We will miss you guys and hope you both come back sometime in the future to find stronger Iwanuma residents, and beautiful land scape. Have a safe trip to Korea. If you do Facebook, please find me and friend me and keep in touch. I will stay in Iwanuma until 23rd, and will go back to Alaska where my husband and kids wait for me to come back home.

Cracks on roads

Takeno san posing

Oohashi san admiring

Rahman san and Ramon kun

Free hugs from Haruka chan

Okano san very happy

The Graveyard Shift

Helping local kids

The oyabun cooking

Part of the Team Hard Cocks

THC FOREVER!

AND EVERYWHERE!

Last day of work

The farmer wants team signs

After the last charge

Playing with kids in the park

Iwanuma Volunteers 4/21 - 5/15

The last party

Crowned as King of Japanese Beer

Last time for "team sign" in Iwanuma

Beer on the shinkansen

Iwanuma Volunteers!

2011-05-08T10:44:00.005+02:00

Day Seven
So far, so good.
In the last post I wrote that you may pray if you feel so. Now I have the opposite request. Please, please stop praying. So far you've earned us five earthquakes in the last seven days. Even we're all (it's a great bunch this "we") brave volunteers that start laughing when the ground shakes, we laugh too loud and too long. To hide how nervous we are. And when we work near the coastline we listen to the waves all the time. Because we heard stories from people who were chased by the tsunami and survived. And we heard stories about people who did not. So many stories. I could tell you stories about legendary men like Tanaka san, the oyabun. Or funny stories about Ohashi san I-Am-A-Bitch or Okano san, The Octopus. I could tell you stories about grateful people or about the life in the volunteer camp in the town park. Or the incredible story how we managed to get the Japanese insurance to start working. I could tell more. And maybe one day I will. On the other hand, all these stories are stories of wonders and miracles that you'll probably never believe.
The work is not hard and not so depressive as I feared. And there's nothing better for the moral than a smiling eight years old girl coming to our camp with her parents and shouting "Please come and take my onigiri!" When we pass by, all covered with mud, local people stand up and bow deeply. Old women bowing on their knees. I don't really like that but all in all I feel good doing good.

Day Thirteen
Update: seven earthquakes so far. The last was pretty bad, we had our free dinner at Coco Ichibanya when the earth started shaking. And we started laughing. And the earth didn't stop shaking after 10 or 20 seconds so we stopped laughing and ran out when the waitress ordered everyone to do so. Once out we had another good laugh when I pointed out that we were pretty lucky that the earthquake didn't happen one hour earlier because at the time we were enjoying in hot water in an onsen. Running out naked would have been a bit embarassing.
No luck with internet. Not that Iwanuma was hit so hard, actually we saw only a few cracks in the roads, it was the eastern suburbs, on the coast line where we mostly work, that were destroyed by the tsunami. Plenty of wireless everywhere, but all secured. This is not Korea, I know. Today another day off, we tried to find some netto kaffue, but no luck.
Instead of the above mentioned amazing stories I will write about our daily routine, that in these days is affected by the Golden Week and hordes of volunteers (and too many wannabe volunteers). Wake up between 6 and 7 (AM, of course), wait in queue for the toilet, grab free coffee and hardboiled eggs that are given to us by a mythological being. Nobody is awake when they appear on the table in the camp so we decided it must be some sort of god or demon. Before 8 we go to the Volunteer Center, some 200 metres away and we wait in the queue for the doors to open. Then we wait in the queue to sign up for volunteer work and we make a queue waiting for assignments. Teams from six up to fifteen members are made, we have a short briefing and other volunteers drive us in cars, vans or microbuses to the assigned house. And once there sometimes I want to cry. Not that the scenery is that bad but I want to cry out of despair when I see what work we're given. One day we were cleaning flowers in a garden. Yes, we were removing mud from leaves with hands to not damage the plants. And the neighbour's house was half destroyed but no, we have to clean the fucking garden. So we did it. It was our assignment and even if everybody agreed with me that it's a stupid work and a complete waste of our energy and time, nobody complained. We do what we are told. Me too. These are crazy times. At the Volunteer Center I can see young students briefing old men and they listen very carefully. Everyone wants to be part of it and this is why the work is done so slowly. We had a granny in our team for a few days. She was in the way all the time so you couldn't use your shovel safely (for her), she was in the way of my wheelbarrow and she was trying to fill it with mud - with bare hands. And all the Japnese guys admired her because she was so busy all the time. Pretending to do something. Moving all the time. I was looking the effects of her work - none. Zero. Nada. Even worse - she was slowing me down. In another team they had a limping cripple. As I said, everyone wants to be part of it and everyone is given the chance to be.
We work two hours in the morning shift, go back to the Center, have a quick lunch with instant ramen or just grab some snacks and again in the queue (no, we actually eat in the queue) for the afternoon assignement, another two hours. All in all we spend about four hours in the Center, waiting, and four hours working.
But four days ago the Golden Week started. In the morning something around 400 people were waiting in front of the Center and there was work for only 150. The oyabun suggested us (there's no need for him to order, he always suggests) to leave the queue and give a chance to people that came volunteering for just one day. Our team, The Hardcock Team, a bunch of crazy guys and gals, was not happy with that - but the oyabun said so. And then there was the happy news: he just called somebody and we had work. So now we don't even go to the Center in the morning, no queues and more work done. Usually we do from five to six hours shifts, all the time in the same house, even for few days in row. And we do a complete job. When we leave you can really see the difference before and after. And then we start drinking. We're a bunch of alcoholics, perverts, maniacs and nuts - and the hardest working team. Last night also the oyabun was so drunk that first he fell from his seat in front of the tent and next he overturned the table. But it was a special occasion, we - The Hardcock Team - were invited to a sushi dinner (with LOTS of beer and sake). Because we cleaned the polytunnels of a rich farmer so he could afford it. Others can't so they give us coffee. Others don't have even that and give us just gratitude. We're fine with that. Really. But the most amazing are the people from Iwanuma that were in no way affected by the earthquake or the tsunami. It's them who come in the camp with gifts for volunteers. Food. Toilet paper. And BEERS! SAKE! SHOCHU! UMESHU! WHISKY! VODKA! Ah, the hard life of volunteers. We get free tickets for the onsen twice a week. We can eat for 1000 yen daily in the Coco Ichibanya, the curry house (unfortunately is much far away from the camp so we go there rarely). And the respect we get - priceless. Especially for us, gaijins. Ramon and I became sort of legend here. Not only because of the drinking, mostly because of our hard work. And because we're among the long term volunteers. There are plenty of other gaijins, but only for a day or two. Yesterday I forgot for a moment where I am and started with the story how two years ago in Nagasaki I was forbidden to enter in a bar because I'm a gaijin. The lady I was talking with almost fell on her knees asking forgivnes. We must be very very careful what we say. One day The Octopus asked Ramon if he prefers meat or fish. Next day we had pork steaks for dinner, his present.
I know it will sound like a lame excuse, but we - the long term volunteers - really need a lot of alcohol. It helps us forget the day and helps us not to think about the next day. When you find a picture in the mud you can't help yourslef but to think if the persons from it are still alive. Same when you fill the wheelbarrow with toys or school books. So we drink. Laugh. Make jokes. Talk shimoneta. And the next day we go on. Ramon and I slowly became the seventh in rank of seniority - just six of them have a longer volunteer status. And slowly we are making friends. I mean real friends. Like Hiroto san, the flower artist. Takeno san, The Cock aka Hentai Emperor. Okano san, The French aka The Octopus. Jinen san, The Wizard, the goofiest man in Japan. Ohashi san, the pachinkoholic erojiji. Imai san, who left yestarday and was the careing mother for everyone. People from all over Japan. One day I'm gonna visit them all.

Day... whatever, I have lost the count
Finally found internet!

Wastelands

Thank You, Sveronia!

Hard Cock Team

Hard Ccok Team during break

Hard Cock Team

Sushi dinner

Please take my onigiri!

Chainsaw Man

Crazy Team

The Myth

The Octopus

Imai san

The legend, The Oyabun

Iwanuma

2011-04-19T13:29:00.003+02:00

To boldly go where no man has.... errr.. where no man won't... Ah well, who cares. We go. Probably because we're no men at all, just baka gaijin and proud of it.

Just yesterday I was friendly scolded by a dear friend that reading my blog or FB posts really doesn't look like we're going to do nothing but drink beer all the time and have fun. Till now it was like that, but from today on a little voice in my head stopped whispering and started shouting. It's the tiny voice that I keep hearing and for the last month it was saying the same things: Don't you dare to go there! You don't want to go there! You don't want to do that!

And the voice is right, the voices in your head are always right (except when the voice tells you that God is speaking and commanding you to kill all your neighbors). I don't want to do it. I'm even scared - not of radiation, not of anything of that sort, I'm scared of what we'll see there.

But I just have to do it. Not because I said I will do it but because a month ago I was very close and now I'm here.

I keep thinking about the words of Lama Shenpen Rinpoche when I told him that a Korean shaman helped me find my past. He told that now I have to think why in this life I was born where I was born. That I have things to do there that wait for me. I can't argue with wise men like him, I can't tell he's wrong. But I have a much more important question: why then I was shown the way to Asia where I found home and helped my son to find one?

If on this trip to north I will be of any use to those who suffered so much... I will know why I came here first two years ago. It will be worth. I won't be pathetic saying that it will give a meaning to my life because it will not. But maybe... there's always a maybe... it will give a meaning to someone up north.

It was a long and exhausting day in front of the computer - I spent 10 hours searching for informations since all of the relief organisations, involving foreigners, keep posting that nobody wants volunteers there, especially gaijins. But we don't give up so easily, we've come to Tokyo not for fun, it was just a stop on this long journey across Japan. After finding some promising phone numbers we asked at the reception of the Khaosan Samurai if they can help us contacting them and after three calls (they didn't even charge us for long distance calls) we knew everything. Yes, come, anyone is welcome, the more the better, foreigners welcome, just tell us when so there will be someone that speaks English. You can sleep in the park in front of the volunteer center, shops are open. But we had to prove our will. The last message was find how to find us and when you have your travel schedule call us back to confirm. They could easily tell the way there - it's not that we will have to travel on horseback or climb mountains - but it was a sort of test. We (well, the guy at the reception desk) called back in an hour with all bus and train schedules - and yes, THAT I found by myself, without any help. I found also the exact dates when public transport between Tokyo and Sendai was resumed. And the train departures from there to Iwanuma. Once there we'll just have to find a park full of tents ;-)

Maybe there will be no posts for a long time, I just have no idea how bad is still there. So just be cool, you know that no harm can come to me. And you know that I will not let any harm to come to my Japanese friend.

If you think that praying is helpful, please, do it. It will help YOU, not anyone of us there.

Sayonara Nagasaki!

2011-04-18T07:35:00.009+02:00

It's been a long week, made of long nights. Even the night when we left for Tokyo was long, it was 14 hours by bus.
Nagasaki was great as ever. It's just a place where you keep coming back. I don't know who's to "blame" for this, maybe great folks at Akari hostel, maybe Kentaro-san and his bar, maybe the liquor shop next door to the hostel, the red light district... Maybe even the guy who every morning at 4AM started his van and we were laughing from the bridge. Maybe Matsumoto-san who just asked if it's us that keep drinking all night long on the mentioned bridge. Maybe all of them, working together and keeping Nagasaki such a nice place.
And yes, OK; I have to admit it, it's also all the pretty, beautiful and extremely beautiful girls we've met.

Yes, we found the heart-shaped stone near the Spectacles bridge.

First some blossoms...

... and later some SAKE-BON! Even for Kentaro-san was the first time to see it.

That's how Kentaro-san hopes to see you soon.

Snowwhite and the seven dwarfs...

More blossoms, in a temple.

The WHAT????

Matsumoto-san: Are you the guys who spend all the time drinking in front of Akari?

Kentaro-san and his assistant performing on keg guitars.

In the next door liquor shop. They nearly started to cry when we came to buy the last beer and said our goodbyes.

At Akari they didn't cry, they were just laughing when they saw us with beer... again.

Night bus from Hakata to Shinjuku, Tokyo. 14 hours.

Tokyo, finally. Cocoon Tower in Shinjuku.

SAKE BON! SAKE BON! SAKE BON!

2011-04-17T04:11:00.003+02:00

NAGASAKI RULES!

Baka gaijin N.2 comes to Japan

2011-04-12T13:39:00.002+02:00

It's been another long journey by the sea, but I survived and landed in Hakata. Looks like I'm a lucky guy with ferries. I always get the ticket just when I walk in the Busan Ferry Terminal. Others, with whom I spoke to, all make reservations since at it happened to all of them that they were stuck in Busan for a day or two, waiting. It happened also to my Japanese friend a month ago.
At the end I wasn't alone on the ferry. There were maybe 50 people and, lucky as I am, I was the only gaijin. That's good, you know. Nobody's telling you how great are the States and how shitty are Japan, Korea and Asia in general. And most of the passengers were retards.. em, sorry, it was a typo... were retired. And that in Asia can be pretty bad because, you know, respect the elders, elders first and all that stuff. Well, I can be also polite and respectful to elders, but when they are so bossy and arrogant I just want to kick their ass. I'm not mean, I won't do it, but I would like to watch your face when you will be pushed away all the time by tiny grannies. And let me tell this: they do it for fun. There was more than enough place on the ship, it's made for 500 passengers. So at first I thought that this is maybe some pushing game but noticed that they do it with a wicked grin, not with a smile. Maybe is payack time for them, for being pushed all their lives.. but WHY ME???
I ate my cup ramyon for breakfast and changed my clothes. I now that travelling with a backpack is huge drawback for sneaking easy through Immigration and Customs, but I found sort of antidote for that. A nice clean shirt will do miracles. It worked when I came to Korea in February and for the first time nobody discussed my right to stay there for three months. It helped this morning, too, Im sure of it. They wanted to search my backpack, no mistake. You know, a backpack is stil a... backpack. Sort of suspicious item. But the way it was searched was more on the funny side. I could have been smuggling just *anything*, except a dead horse. And when I said that my travel purpose is hanami, the search was over. Have a nice time in Japan! Arigatou gozaimas!
Confident in my memory, knowing exactly where and how to go I almost died in my first minute in Japan. OK, I'm beeing a bit of a drama queen... but it could have happened. Yes, I was confident about returning to Japan, so confident, that I forgot where I am. How to cross the street. Looked left and proceeded, just to jump back in terror on the sound of breaks. I bowed, looking like a guilty sheep, to the driver, who wasn't leaning on the horn and cursing but just bowed back and waved me to just go on. Thanks man, you saved my life today!
I messed up again going to the bus terminal. My Japanese friend told me that The Hakata Bus Terminal is way closer to the port than the Tenjin Bus Terminal. So I decided for the closer and went there with a map of Hakata in my mind, but with memories of Fukuoka in the memory. So at one point I found myself lost, more or less somewhere between the two terminals. And I tried my luck asking for directions. I didn't specify which bus terminal I was looking for, in hope that I'll be shown the way to the nearest. And I was shown. I suppose the guy speaks no English, but he understood my question and just waved in one directions. Thta's gonna be crap. Asking at every corner and look where will be they pointing. I made maybe 100 meters in the way he showed me and I was in front of the Hakata JR Station. The bus terminal is just behind it, so much for my sense of orientation!
Yesterday evening on the ferry I saw in the Japanese news that *another* 7 M hit in Tohoku. Just hours after sirens and tears marked one month from the first hit. Now here's my request for all you out there that believe in gods, angels and stuff. Please tell them that doing this is flogging a dead horse. This is kicking the beaten guy lying on the ground. Tell your God that he is an evil bastard. And don't try to go on with some bullshit like bad karma or negative vibes. If you believe in gods and angels... well, it's THEM to blame for this. And more to it, it's YOU to blame for believing in such wicked creatures that come comfy just when you want them to.
As I said it was a long night, but Japan welcomed me with a warm smile this time. And this time it's the rest of the world that makes me pissed. So I will just forget everything and enjoy in the cherry blossoms.

Hit the road...

2011-04-08T07:50:00.001+02:00

Time to hit the road. Today left Eomsa for Seoul, tomorrow Jinbu, Monday Busan, Tuesday Nagasaki. Yep, Japan. And Nagasaki is the right place to meet a man that was born in the year of Chernobyl and then go together to Fukushima. Somewhere near, anyway, in the Tohoku area and try our best to help there. And please, for fuck's sake, do NOT leave any comments (or even worse: mail me) about the dangers of radiation. I've got enough of it. Mainly from folks that have absolutely no clue what a Sievert is and never heard that we actually all live in a radioactive environment (Natural radiation? What are you talking about? Radiation is only in bombs and nuclear plants! Period!).

I am concerned only about the moronic Japanese laws. To volunteer there you need a working visa. UK and US citizens must have a special volunteer work visa. Two weeks ago tons of material couldn't be delivered to the damaged area because foreign volunteers were not allowed to use fork lifts in Japan. You need a special habilitation, Japanese of course. Japanese workers were too busy somwhere else. An international team of medical doctors was not allowed to give help, because they didn't have Japanese medical licenses and they could perform only basical stuff, less than nurses (no offence meant for nurses, to be sure!). Little things that just drive you insane.

Why do I go there if it pisses me of so much? I don't go there to help the government. I don't go there because I love the Japan with the false smile and the pretty lie and the bureaucracy from another galaxy. I hate that shit. But there are not so many smiling faces in Tohoku these days. I know that a fucking smiling sararyman, working for the government in his nice office, can be so stupidly and stubbornly proud of his country, that he can forbid foreigners to help. But a man, that has lost his smile with his home and maybe with his beloved ones, will he refuse the help given? I go there because of this man. And that woman, too. There's many of them. I can help some. And even if I can help just one... well, even that will be enough.

Oh yes, there was sort of funny episode with WWOOF Japan... that pissed me of. As all current and ex members of WWOOF Japan I received their mail, concerning the earthquake with a call for help. Anybody near, please help and blah blah many hosts have their homes in ruins so they cant accept nobody and so on but they are all alive and on our website there is a list of hosts that can still accept willing workers and need your help blah blah. I tought That's so great and it comes in the right time! so I mailed to WWOOF Japan, asking for the list of the folks in need of help - their website is accesible only to members that paid the annual 5000 yen fee. Next day I received their answer, that my warm mail made them happy and for this they will give me a 500 yen discount for the annual membership. My reply was polite as ever: Go fuck yourself.

Back to the present, on some lighter note. In the last two days we did some blueberry planting. So I was mixing the peat moss with rice husk (ten shovels of moss, three shovels of husk) and the three years old bushes were planted in that mixture. Not exactly, as I found later. The first day my job was just mixing the stuff, but the second day I started to carry it all across the farm to help with the actual planting. And there I had just to mix the mixture, already done, with rice husk (ten shovels of mixture, three shovels of husk). Huh? Ehm, may I ask why is it mixed two times? Because it is easier so. Could be (in fact, it's not), but it's time consuming! I bit my tongue before saying it. Damn, did you forget you're in Asia? It doesnt matter the ammount of work done, but the time it takes you to do it. The longer, the better. Even so I started doing it my way, but without saying a word and only when nobody saw me. We finished too early. So I could learn some hanja characters. Chae Hak asked me if I know any. I started laughing and he laughed too, because he guessed which one I already now: one, two and three. Respectively 一 (일), 二 (이) and 三(삼). Then he told me that the Chinese letter for mountain literally means three peaks (the day before we were talking about Slovene mountains and Triglav) and it looks like 山 (산). And we started a guessing game. What is this? 木 (나무) Man? No, it's wood, don't you see that it looks like a tree! And this? 林 (임) Maybe two trees? No, it's a forest! And also my family name, even if now is pronounced differently. OK, next, what resembles this? 水 (물) Hmm... I have no idea. It's water, it looks just like a stream! The hard part was finding out how to write it on the computer. I found out. No copy/paste from the web involved, just hit F9 and hangul blocks will be converted to hanja.

Yesterday I was cooking again for all the family. Instead of learning how to cook some Korean dishes it always turns out that I teach how to cook spaghetti. Or how to make stuffed mushrooms.

It rained all day long, so no work. Spent most of the afternoon at the library and finally, as if he sensed that it's my last day, the network admin approached me. And asked me what I'm doing. It was hard not to burst laughing out loud, but I controlled myself and said that I'm just checking my mail. Yes, I see that, but how are you doing it? I look at him with an innocent face, pretending that I have no idea what is he talking about.

The story is that to use the computer in the library you have to log in through an interface that requires your ID number and of course I don't have one because I'm not a Korean citizen (yet). So the first time at the library I spent some time finding a way to quit that stupid application and use the computer and found out that just running it in safe mode does the trick. But then in the admin's view there was a computer virtually missing. Virtually yes, but in real life mode he could see that the missing computer is still running and a foreigner is happily surfing the web. Not only that, I installed the Chrome browser and also uTorrent. Next time I came to the library with my usb key with a live session Ubuntu system on it and I ran the computer from the USB (the BIOS was not protected; even if it was, but so was faster). Again, a computer is missing from the network, a happy foreigner is using it and the GUI looks so strange... I noticed the guy kept walking in the room and stopping just behind me, peeking over my shoulder but I pretended not to see him. Few times he wanted to say - or, more probably, ask - me something, but he never did. I started to pity the poor fellow. But what could I say him? Dude, you suck and this protection sucks, I'm no hacker, just a power user and I can do whatever I want with your computers. Does it sound nice? Of course not, so I kept my silence as he kept his. Until yesterday. I finally explained him that I run a live session of Linux and in this way I need no registration. He didn't get it. I pointed at the USB, closed all the windows and tried to show him that I'm using a different OS. He didn't get it. I rebooted the computer without the USB (skipped the safe mode option) and got stuck with that stupid login interface. He got this. Another reboot, with USB in this time (I didn't want to do it the first time to show him that his precious XP were still installed on the PC) and he looked at me in horror as the Linux session was loading itself. He just didn't get it. He kept asking how it was done. I didn't feel any pity more. How can he be pretending to know anything about his job? I almost said him that he sucks. But I felt that something else could be much more appropriate. I looked at him with a very very evil grin and almost whispered It's magic! And shut down the computer with a terminal command. The look on his face - priceless!

Mistaken, again

2011-04-02T06:52:00.007+02:00

Still in Gyeryong, of course. Precisely, in Eomsa - myun. Not that it makes any difference for you who read this, but anyway.
I decided to skip the family ritual. Nobody of the family was giving me strange looks, but I felt I would be an intruder. I just don't feel as a family member. Not that I'm not comfortable with Chae Hak or the others, just the opposite. He is so cooled down that is almost unbelievable. To be polite I will say that he and his wife are not really youngsters - but she is so elegant and charming that for the first time in my life I don't wish her be younger but regret me not being older. And when she dresses all in pink for working in the fields, she doesn't look foolish at all. Just... cool. And she has such a sweet voice that gives me shivers. Today, after lunch, we were talking about food and cooking, my favourite subjects. Upon listening to my recipes, she complained, that her husband never cooked for her. He looked at her with a sweet smile and said: "Dear, but that is because I love your cooking!" So I promised I will cook tomorrow.
Chae Hak is a walking library of knowledge on Korean history and tradition. Yesterday afternoon we went to visit the home - museum of one of the most important Korean Confucian scholars, Kim Something, don't ask me the name.

As a devout Buddhist Chae Hak doesn't really like Confucianism, but since it has been shaping - and still is - Korean history, he knows almost everything about it. The funniest thing he showed me was the Confucian version of dice game. They didn't use real dices, but hexagonal prisms with cuts on the edges, from 1 to 6 and used them just like dices, for moving pawns on the gameboard.

Now, the gameboard is the fun. No, the game in itself is fun, from my point of view. Because they moved their pawns through government offices. The start was at the lowest and the winner was the first who reached the office of Prime Minister!
Probably there were some other rules, like stabbing in the back the opposition, poisoning the current Prime Minister and so on... no, wait, I'm making this on!
Later we went to another Counfucian University, founded by a student of the above mentioned Kim Something. The writing at the entrance proudly states that this school was among the 47 that survived an edict from 1866 which declared abolition of the Confucian schools. I asked why they were abolished... and Chae Hak, of course, had the answer. Because the students (arrogant aristocrat perverts, that is) had such a bad influence on the common people living near the schools, that at one point the king just had enough of it and sweeped the schools away. There were more than 900, just 47 remained.
This is the study hall. I really wonder how they studied in winter.

And this is another famous Confucian scholar, who hardly ever studied (in winter, that is).

As I said, I skipped the ritual for ancestors. I went drinking in a bar instead. It was a good idea. First, some folk invited me to have dinner with them. Then a girl invited herself so I buyed her a beer. Then the waitress engaged in some deep conversation with me, in Korean. The more I was explaining her that "한국어를 못해요" the more she insisted. So I just patiently "listened" to her and kept ordering more and more beer. Then two guys saved me, inviting me to join them in drinking, one was already wasted, the other on the good way. We had some lively discussions and more than some dead ends in which we found the language gap way too big to fill with anything understandable. The only way to fill it is with a loud 건배! and find something else to talk about. Girls, for example. Or girls, to make another example. (These are the Koreans I know, not that morons I met in Daejon. Probably they were some foreigners disguised as Koreans. From the U.S. Or from Slobenia.) At some time - very early, in my opinion - almost everybody left the bar so I had another beer alone and decided that I'll be drinking in this bar again. When I approached my pretty waitress - not the very talkative one but the other, prettier and with some basic knowledge of English - for the bill. One beer. What do you mean, one beer? Yes, you have to pay your last beer, nobody paid it. Again: what do you mean, one beer, last beer, nobody? She finally got what is confusing me. Your friends paid all your beers. All? Even those that I drunk alone and the ones I bought for... hell, can't remember for who it was. Yes, all. I looked at her in total disbelief. She laughed cheerfully, gave me the thumbs up and said: Korean people, good!
I couldn't agree more.
I managed to fall in my bed at three in the morning - so much for the early goers...
And the next day, to add to my misery... I was mistaken for some military crap. What it hurts is that I surely wasn't mistaken for a Korean soldier and there's just one other country that has soldiers here. Made me puke.

The Final Blow

2011-03-29T12:23:00.008+02:00

Friday
Gyeryong.

Another ceiling. It's amazing how comfy can Koreans make a place that was meant to be a mushroom growing tunnel.

I just don't feel as a mushroom in it.

Only a small touch would make this place perfect - some wireless. But I'll survive. Or I'll just take a walk to the Musang sa temple, I can reach it in twenty minutes on foot. I can go there every afternoon. Coincidence? Dont make me laugh.
Sunday
And I went there for the Sunday Dharma Talk in English just to have another surprise. There's no more Sunday Dharma Talk, it became the Saturday Dharma Talk. Sundays are now for Koreans - well, for those who can speak Korean, that is.

So I returned to my books. Chae Hak left some for me, so I won't be bored. One is already done, Understanding Koreans and Their Culture. It's written by Choi Joon Sik, who has a degree in Korean History and in Religious Studies so he mostly explains the Koreans and their culture through religions: Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Shamanism. Nothing really new there, except the floorboards. Yes, floorboards. You must now that Koreans are really sloppy about the appereance of their homes. Mostly they look quite used and as never properly fixed. In the house of Kwan Chol I was surprised to see again floorboards that do not match and with 5 cm cracks between them. Surprised because Kwan Chol is a carpenter and he built himself his home. So why did he such a lousy job? And why doesn't he repair the floor, it would take him less than an hour. Choi explains it with Buddhist tradition: " Moreover, since Buddhism has a more flexible religious doctrine, the process of designing Buddhist architecture is open to imaginative ideas compared to Confucianism." And one of the most prominent elements is spontaneity. Seonwun sa temple is famous for not having a single straight girder in its bulidings - just naturally curved trunks. And Cheongyong sa looks like made by Dali. "The spontaneous expression of the structure has led to an attitude of indifference towards small details." I couldn't agree more.
Tuesday
It's market day today. After lunch I went to stretch my legs and take a look at it. At all the delicious food. But for what I needed I had to go to a supermarket. As always I have to cook for my hosts. And spaghetti with carrots will be. I need olive oil. I found green tea oil. Don't ask, I have no clue. I haven't bought it, never tried it. But there's a bigger mistery for me there, that's why I took a picture of it. Is there any logical way to explain me why should I buy 1 litre of it if two halves are way cheaper?

Tomorrow there will be a memorial service for Chae Hak's mother in his house. I'm invited to witness it but I feel that it could be somehow innapropriate. Of course I'm curious about it, but I believe it's way to personal to be there. I'll take my decision at the last moment, when I'll see the atmosphere in the house, mainly how his relatives will react to my presence.
You still wonder about the title of this entry? It's so... embarassing. The sort of thing that makes you want to hide on a remote island, even if you did nothing wrong. Today I was... argh, it goes out so hardly, it's harder than a confession of a commited sin... Let's try again. Today I was mistaken for a **********. Yes, a **********. A man asked me, very politely and in good English, but my consciousness just went off. I stared blanly at him and he asked me again if I was a **********? In horror I realized what is he asking me and I could just babble a denial, that n-n-n-no, I I I am n-n-not a m-m-m-missionary... and I ran away as fast as I could. To hide my misery.

An Unfamiliar Ceiling

2011-03-24T16:00:00.006+01:00

I'm no otaku. Just a hardcore fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Sometimes too hardcore, since I tend to draw parallels of my life with EVA. It happens that I'm really afraid that I'm just like Ikari Gendo or, at least, that my son feels like Shinji. His battle nickname years ago.
Today I recalled the title of the second episode - An Unfamiliar ceiling. I woke up in the morning and it was the third ceiling this week. Tomorrow I will see the fourth and the day after the fifth. Nothing wrong with that. There's only one ceiling that I really miss - it's the one sprinkled with millions of stars. And is blue grayish when you wake up, with all your stuff wet with dew, you swear because is cold and you have to wake up and go on, sometimes you even have no food for breakfast, but you put your backpack on and go on. Mad at yourself, why do I have to endure all this, but soon you see your only friend, the sun, you find a nice spot and let him warm you up. And you can just smile. Yes, that is so cool. Hopefully you find something to eat for lunch.
There's a small village in southern Istria called Brtonigla. It's a cursed village, cursed by me. I woke one morning, it was like the above mentioned, but I was not walking, I was horse riding. You wake up like crap after riding all the day, many days in row, believe me. But it all turns to something magic after few hours. And the magic is gone, if you're riding in summer through a country with no rivers. And I came to Brtonigla and asked for some water. Not for me, I can have a beer, for the horse. No. Nowhere. I will pay for it. No. No. No. I left the village and cursed it.
Yesterday I found Brtonigla in Korea. Is way way bigger, but gave me the same feeling. I was in no such urge like finding water for my horse, but the feelings are same. I'm used to nice Korean people. Yes, you find morons everywhere, I met many of them here, but they were scattered, not just put together like in Daejon. I may have bad luck, but it can't be that I met twenty cretins in a row. I'm used to Koreans who just shake their head in apology because they don't speak English. Why should they? It's fine with me, I thank them anyway. But I'm not used to be ignored when I ask a question. Neither I'm used to be shouted at just for asking for directions. When the final slap came, I wanted to kill somebody. I never tought, and I mean NEVER, that in Korea I will have a Japanese experience. When in Nagasaki I was forbidden to enter a bar because I'm a gaijin, I didn't really care much. I knew it's part of Japan, so why bother. But in Korea? Thank you, Daejon.

I put a curse on you, may your doors be closed for ever.
In the morning sun the bad mood was almost gone. I also had a heart warming destination, the place where it all begun two years ago. It's all so fresh in my memory like it was last week. Finding the way was so easy and even when the clouds covered the sky it still seemed a perfect day to me. I recognized every step of the path I was walking. I clearly remember this tombs when they were covered with snow...

They seemed like this.

And I remembered the rain that was pouring on me on that day, I rememberd it so much that I almost felt it again... no, it was not just a feeling. Fuck, it's started to rain! And wet like two years ago I came back to the temple Musang sa.

In a way I wanted to meet some of the monks, in other not. It came out the last. Everybody was busy with something in the buildings, so I was alone to go to the Buddha Hall . When I entered it was such a familiar feeling... almost like coming home. The delicate fragrance of the incense, not the heavy smell of the Indian or Tibetan ones, that are commonly used in the west. In Japan and Korea we use way more refined ones. The warmness of the place, the memories. I took a praying mat and strated to prostrate. It didn't matter that I walked many kilometers and my legs were aching. I just did it. And I left, with no hellos and no goodbyes. Empty as i wasn't for a long time. And on my way back to Gyeryong it started snowing. Like two years ago, when I was leaving the temple.

Some more food

2011-03-19T23:16:00.003+01:00

Last week Kwan Chul wanted to give me a Korean name. I politely refused, sying that I already have a Korean name - 닥. 닥 is actually my real name, written in hangul, but pronounced slightly differently, it sounds like Tak.And it also has a meaning, I dont even have to know how to write it in hanja, the Chinese characters. It means hen. And that's fine with me. It was also fine for Hae In, when we first met, she found me funny immediatly. I love being a funny uncle.
And that is also how I became the main course of a dinner.
The great thing about hanging out with locals in some small and forgotten places - not only forgotten by God, but sometimes also forgotten by the people that just live there - is that in this way you can find many hidden things, small jewels of nature, simple temples and... restaurants. The last one we've been can't be found by chance. You can't just pass by and say "Hey, looks like a nice place to stop, let's eat something". Also the local ajuma had troubles to remember exactly where it is. We did some driving in the hills and at last found it. It was worth. For the banchans. Sixteen (16, yes!) of them. Everything. Kimchi, obviously. Chestnuts. Pineapple. Cabbage root. Raddish. Oak jelly. Hot tofu. Some stuff I have no idea what it was - top right corner, green cubes. And if you look closely you can see some weird cutlery in the bottom right corner.

Yep, it finally happend to me, too. When the waitress spotted a round-eyed foreigner she hurried and brought me a fork. I was offended. Doesn't she know about my chopsticks skills? Of course she doesn't, you arrogant prick! And I just smiled and said komapsumnida!
And then the ajuma and Kwan Chul tried to explain to the poor waitres that they want me for the main dish. She didn't get it even after they explained her several times that I'm 닥 - the hen, you remember? So they gave up and just oredered a 닥 and everything was fine. And we got this huge hen, stuffed with medicinal herbs.

But wait... it's not just herbs... looks like... yes, looks like we're carpenters so they stuffed it also with some wood!

And later a night drive to Soho, searching for a good coffee bar and a good one we found! Good for the coffee, I mean, I really wasn't drooling because of the cute waitress! And the view was also nice.

The work for the ajuma will soon be finished.

How to get wasted with makkoli

2011-03-14T12:35:00.009+01:00

I'll try blogging in English, like my dear Japanese friend from Tokunoshima. For a while, at least
For those who don't know what makkoli is: fermented rice drink, some call it rice wine but it's actually more a beer since it has from 3 to 5% of alcohol, mostly on the less than more. Its refreshing and is used to be drunk during working breaks since is so mildly alcoholic that there is no fear for workers to get drunk. So, how the hell could I manage to get wasted on it? The answer is very very simple. Just take a look at this picture:

Yes, you guessed, it's full of makkoli.
But let's start from the beginning. It was a misty Sunday morning over the bamboo forest somwhere in South Korea. Actually it was in Sunjidong-gil, but you just have no clue where that is.

After the usual morning schnaps before breakfast I went with Mr. Kim to the suburbs of Gwangju where some friends of his rented a piece of land and in their free time they dedicate themselves to organic farming. We were there for our carpenters' skills, but I also helped with fire - we had to boil water and grease in the new pots before they will be used for the first time.

We started drinking makkoli way before lunch.

After lunch we basically didn't stop drinking it. Well, I surely didn't and same goes for my drinking buddy. He can't speak a word in English and my Korean is still awful, but we had great time and communication was perfectly fluent. Fluent as makkoli.

Dude, we drunk it all! No use holding it in your lap!

Well, there was also a pretty lady, maybe I should come here more often.

She was drying raddish leaves, not that I knew it but she asked me if I know what is that. When she told me what it is I took a closer look and almost had a blast. The rope to hang the leaves is a UTP Cat 5 cable in perfect condition! Must be way cheaper here than in EU.

During dinner I was already quite drunk, I wasn't that pissed like I look.

When we got back home I had a few more beers and the next morning was pretty much disastrous. Woke up at 7 with a hangover and than a two hours ride to the working place. Luckily another misty morning, so no freaking sun in the eyes. We stopped for a short break on the sea shore. Yes. the sea is somwhere there, far away...

O hrani in prehranjevanju

2011-03-12T23:23:00.001+01:00

Ko sem drugič jedel mongge (in to v istem tednu), so mi bili še manj všeč. Sklepam, da zato, ker sem jih prvič polagal v ustno votlino, obloženo s šestdeset procentnim šnopcem, drugič pa z bore dvajset procentnim. Kar precejšnja razlika. Sicer pa sem se na to spomnil, ker smo ta drugi mongge zaužili v restavraciji, ke je po mojem okusu. Ne ravno zaradi hrane, ampak zardi izbire. Je ni. Vem, sliši se absurdno, ampak ne vem, kako bi se bolje izrazil. Zato gremo po vrsti, kronološko. V Koreji so restavracije - večinoma - zelo ozko specializirane. Nudijo nekaj inačic iste vrste hrane in tu se konča. Hočeš čačangmjon? Greš v restavracijo, kjer ga delajo. Ssamgjopsal? Greš nekam drugam. In tako dalje. Tudi za nepismene tujce so pripravne, saj so skoraj vse okrašene s fotografijami hrane, ki jo nudijo. Ko sem v Slobeniji omenil, kako je to v redu, so me zatrli z argumentom svobodne izbire. Kakšne svobodne izbire, lepo prosim? Da greš v restavracijo in se ti ne sanja kaj nudijo, da ne veš kaj bi hotel jest in po možnosti vprašaš, kaj imajo danes dobrega. Neumno vprašanje, danes je vedno dobro tisto, česar včeraj niso prodali (ne da je v Koreji kaj drugače, da se razumemo, le da se to tukaj ve, uveljavljeni princip refill = reuse*). Kakorkoli, sedeš za mizo, počakaš, da ti blagovolijo prinest jedilni list, ki ga nato bereš pol ure, ko pride natakar ga seveda vprašaš, če imajo nekaj, česar sploh nisi videl na jedilnem listu in tako dalje. V redu, imaš svobodno izbiro se neumno obnašat, tudi to najbrž nekaj velja, vsakemu svoje. Meni restavracijo, kot tista pred 4 dnevi (mogoče že 6 dnevi, ker pišem v soboto zvečer, ne vem pa, kdaj bom objavil), kjer smo komaj našli prostor za tri in sem bil že zaskrbljen, koliko ur bomo čakali na večerjo. Spet lažem. Ker te misli nisem uspel dokončat, ko smo že bili postreženi. Popolnoma. Od obvezne vode in mokrih brisačk pa do riža, štirih vrst rakov, rakove juhe, kimčija, redkvinega kimčija, mongge in še vsaj pet prilog, ki jim ne vem imena. In to je edina hrana, ki jo v tej restavraciji strežejo. Sploh ne vprašajo, kaj bi želeli in mi nismo vprašali, kaj imajo danes dobrega. No, kasneje smo res kričali (saj ne da bi bili pjani, kje pa, le ostale goste smo morali preglasit), naj nam prinese še kako flašo sojuja pa še kimčija pa še riža pa sojuja in še malo sojuja... Res bi bil bolj vesel kakšne druge hrane, ampak nisem sem prišel, da bi Eskime učil led delat. In soju pomaga. In k dobri volji pripomore, da nismo bili v kaki priljubljeni turistični destinaciji. Kajti, ko sem se najbolj veselo basal z ogromni zeljnimi listi iz kimčija, v eni roki držal kozarček in z drugo lovil rakovico (ne, nimam še treh rok, zelje sem si zabasal v usta in s palčkami hitel po oklepu), me je Kwan Chol sunil pod rebra, da sem skoraj popljuval celo mizo z zeljem. Takoj sem pomislil, da je temu povod moj barbarski način hranjenja, ampak hudirja, saj samo oponašam okolico, prav v ničemer se ne razlikujem od ostalih gostov! No, tudi tu malce pretiravam, saj se dobro zavedam, da če me nekdo res dobro in natančno pogleda, potem vidi, da nisem domačin. Doma sem iz druge province. Na srečo me ni dregnil, ker sem oponašal ostale, ampak da mi pokaže kuharice. Kakšne kuharice? Tu, skoraj tik nad tabo (sedeli smo na tleh, jasno), poglej kako bulijo vate in se hihitajo! Sliko že imate: v levi kozarček sojuja, usta polna kimčija, da mi ličnice plapolajo kot Louisu Armstrongu na koncertu in med palčkami cel oklep rakovice. Dvignem pogled in vidim štiri narežane face na kuhinjskem oknu, res bulijo vame. Mogoče še nikoli niso videle tujca. Sploh pa ne takega, ki bi se obnašal kot Korejec.
Ja, ampak počutim se kot kreten. Pa kaj, res je, uživam v pijači in jedači. In se še jaz, s polnimi usti, zarežim nazaj in izdavim "Mašissojo!" (Odlično!) in nekaj zelja mi konča v bradi, nekaj na mizi, nekaj ga uspem požret. Kuharice postanejo evforične. Kwan Chol razloži, da so zdaj vse zaljubljene vame.

* Za tiste, ki ne poznajo principa refill/reuse: v Koreji so banchan, priloge, vedno zastonj. Tudi če ti petkrat dodajo kimči, še vedno plačaš samo glavno jed, ki si jo naročil (riž se tudi doplača). Trik je v temu, da gredo vsi ostanki banchanov z miz nazaj v lonec in ponovno uporabo. In, lepo vas prosim, ne se zmrdovat. Tu smo v Koreji, kjer hrano spoštujemo in cenimo, samo zahodnjaškim barbarom bi padlo na pamet pljunit v bančan ali ga kako drugače onečedit.