11.24.97

Chatted today with two cousins and G-ma. Was pretty good. G-ma had a little epiphany and says it's amazing that we could all be chatting and even though I'm thousands of miles from them my words pop up in seconds. Yeah Gram, ain't technology great?

Catherine pulled off the party Friday without a hitch. The juxtaposition of audience and performer was weird, like I imagined, but people seemed to have a good time - at least while we were there. We arrived late after having sat in traffic for an hour in a taxi. It was raining and I think that made it worse somehow, even if it made the city look shiny. My favorite thing about the evening was when one of the performers, a young Korean woman with flat stomach and bare belly-button, free from cultural restraint, gyrated into the personal space of a middle-aged white guy. Yesterday we visited Naejongsan National Park via the RAS. It seemed worth it at one point, but by the night’s end we were feeling like we never wanted to board another bus tour in our lives. No lie. It was 10 hours on the bus for a three hour jaunt in some woods. Like a fastidious little journalist, I made notes: Talking cash machine: On the way up from underground, before meeting the bus, we decided to take out some cash just in case. We use the same network all over the city - the only one that takes foreign cards at all locations. But this one, at Shinyongsan station is different than any we’d used before; this one talks. It’s totally unnecessary, and I’m sure that it only talks to make it seem all high tech and futuristic. It wasn’t easy for us to understand what it was saying because it was just like the woman was talking in a fish tank and it was in Korean so it was even more jumbled sounding. We imagined it said things like this: "You have selected a kw100,000 withdrawal from account #333333." "Please take your cash amount of kw100,000." "You have $10,000 remaining in your account #333333 at Such-n-Such bank." I mean who knows right? If you don’t speak the language, it could be saying anything! So we just pictured some poor person getting mugged because the cash machine couldn’t keep secrets. Bobbing and Weaving: We paid a lot of money for this bus ride from hell, so you’d think we’d have a pretty nice bus. Not so. It was just this side of the junk yard with dirty seats and curtains, and busted arm rests. There was a lot of residue from previous passengers, mostly sticky soju splatters and the black dust that adhered to them. And there was something loose in second gear. The driver seemed this side of decrepit too and kept swerving back and forth. Combine that with the serious "air suspension" on those "scenicruisers" and you have bobbing and weaving, which is different from Stodgy White Guy's bobbing and weaving. So, you know, every weekend the news has some kind of bus fatality wrap-up and I’m thinking we might be featured ‘cause this guy was all over the road. It was like he couldn’t see the curve until he was on it, so he wouldn’t slow and we’d all sway heavily to one side while he tried to hold to the turn. As the turn straightened, the lack of pull in the wheel seemed to surprise him so that he steered side to side for a bit and we’d all snap back straight up then jiggle side to side, like little captive jello figurines. We spent ten hours in that thing - nearly as long as a flight to North America! All of us foreigners, bored and cramped from sitting, tried to sleep as we bobbed and weaved past newer, larger super-scenicruisers filled with drunk Koreans partying, singing, and dancing in the aisles - disco lights and all. Monk and the Taxi: After visiting the temple, we hiked up to a hermitage dangling from atop a steep hill. The trail was wide initially, but fairly rocky and crossing several little streams. Near the hermitage, the trail turned straight up the mountain and we climbed a couple hundred feet of stairs made from large stones. The hermitage was still in use and while we were there someone was living inside. On the outside of the door, a sign told us that the person was meditating for 100 days. But the sounds coming through the walls told us the person inside was listening to the radio. A few steps back also revealed a TV antenna attached to the tile roof. On the way down, about halfway out, we saw a taxi slowly bouncing over rocks toward us. There was a stream on one side, a steep hill on the other. We had to squeeze to the very edge of the stream bed to let the car pass. We were wondering, "How’d that thing get up here? And who paid that guy to drive?" Looking in as the car lumbered by, we saw a monk with several sacks of groceries.

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