Surrounded by persimmon trees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!