10.19.97

Mary left last night. It was a long hot trip on the train and quite a wait in the airport, but we finally saw her off and now it’s back to being lonely again. At least I can get back into my old routine (read: comfortable rut). Let’s see, where’d I leave off? Day 11 There is too early and then there is TOO EARLY. We had to leave the house at 6 am to arrive at the USO by 6:40 to catch the bus for Kangwha Island. It was still dark outside! Well, it’s never dark in Seoul, but you know what I mean. Coulda been 8pm for all I knew, with all the lights and traffic. Made it in time and then had to listen to the tour guide babble for an hour on the bus PA system. No sleep for the wicked - sounds like something my g-ma would say. I tuned her out with Olive but felt I should change the CD since I listened to them all the way down to South Cholla last weekend. Cranked up Prodigy, but kinda regretted it because it just exacerbated the uneasiness motivated by the double razor wire fences skirting the road to the island. Kangwha Island is really close to the DMZ and so the road out there is lined with high ferocious fences and pill boxes with young men toting M-16s. On the other side of the road, little old ladies sporting towels on their heads harvest everything from rice to green onions. It was during this drive that I had kind of an epiphany about things that interest me. I suddenly thought: "I’m interested in disintegration." See, the soldiers and the fences that keep them separated from me are so fascinating. I just can’t get over the idea of growing up in the shadow of such military presence. I mean, here’s these little old ladies farming in the shadow of lookout towers filled with armed men. What’s it like to grow up in a place like this? Here’s the disintegration part: Across the border are the brothers and sisters of these old ladies. They are separated by polarized ideologies, yet they are identical culturally. How does this happen; how did this disintegrate? And then to extrapolate to my other interests: I love thinking about how it is that people fail to maintain control over their tendency toward violence. That is, control over violence as an ideal like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ghandhi practiced it. The rest of us all have a harder time living up to that standard, but I think most of us do a pretty good job and most of us believe that violence is not a good thing and that universally "wholeness of being" is associated with peacefulness. So, I believe we are all capable of violence; like we are all capable of learning any language at birth, we are similarly equipped to destroy or to defend. We learn it is not constructive to be violent for a variety of reasons; however, some of us disintegrate from working toward an ideal to a level where we use violence to gain something, even if that something is just an "outlet". Think of domestic violence and how it is that a violent guy will submit that he loses control - that he has no control over his actions and that is why he hits his wife. If you ask him if he ever gets angry at his boss he’ll say that he does. If you ask him if he ever loses control with his boss and hits him or her, he says doesn’t. So, there. It really isn’t about losing control is it? It’s about choosing. OK. So we finally get to the island and drive to the other side where we get on a ferry for a seven minute ride across a shallow bay with a seriously muddy bottom. The ferry looked weird, so I asked one of the military guys on the tour what those boats were called that just beached themselves and unloaded troops. He said, "amphibious landing craft." Yep, that’s what those ferries were. I’m certain they were surplus from the war and modified for civilian use. It was a trip. So now we’re on a smaller island and we drive about 10 minutes more to where we get off and start climbing. First was the steep hill up to Bomun temple, then the 380 stairs up to the big carved Buddha at the top. The view woulda been cool if it hadn’t been facing east toward the Yellow Sea, which is always hazy. I think that if I was a discoverer in the "world is flat" days, I’d be really freaked out by the Yellow Sea because it’s always got this ominous haze that makes it look like evil things are lurking out there. Can't tell if it's pollution, fabled dust from the deserts of China, or just bad karma. There were only about 10 people on this tour so we all had a chance to chat. We met one guy from Japan who had been picking fruit in Australia for a year. His English was pretty good, but he had this funky Australian accent and he tended to swear a lot. I asked him what kind of farm work he did and he said, "Picking apples, shit lot like that." What? Another woman was originally from North Korea, but her family fled to the South before the war, then left for the States after the war. She’s lived in DC since and her son was an Olympian rower in Barcelona. I told her that was an amazing American tale, but she didn’t think of herself as an American and said, "Well, I’m married to an American." Day 12 Slept in again in an attempt to recover from the previous day’s early rise. Mary and I met with Lee Byong Yoon for lunch. We ate Chicken Kalbi. Mmmm. Afterward we met Dave and headed to Itaewon for another suit fitting for Mary. This time it was nearly complete and there were only a few modifications necessary. I was impressed. This tailor does nice work - rather, his sweatshop immigrants do nice work. I decided I’ll ask him to make a coat for me. Stopped by the black market for refried beans then headed home early so we could change and get to the Hard Rock Café before the rest of Seoul decided to eat there too. Came home way too full only to discover that Mary had gotten her itinerary mixed up and she was actually leaving a day earlier than we all thought. Oops. Day 13 Up early and out to meet Lee Byong Yoon so she could help Mary purchase a custom-made silk hanbok (traditional Korean clothing). She was a big help, as none of us knew anything about hanbok and it would’ve been a nightmare trying to figure out what we needed to purchase. Mary dropped a lot of money at the hanbok store, then we went for lunch at Jessica’s Kitchen again. One last fling before she left, I guess. Back to Itaewon to pick up the now completed suit. Very nice. I picked out a cashmere, in dark brown, for my coat. Will go back next week to order it; I won’t have the money until then. Back home, Mary squeezed all of her purchases into her unwieldy luggage and we headed out to the airport. Saturday afternoons are totally the worst time to ride the train. No one is working and everyone is on their way to party for the night. It was crowded and stuffy and we had to stand most of the hour and fifteen minutes it takes to get to Kimpo from here. Such a miserable pain in the ass. Made it though. Waved to Mary as she passed through the door to Immigration, came home, and crashed. Today, neither Dave nor I have changed out of our pj’s and neither one of us is being anything but sloth.

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