2.15.98

Saw Andy Allen (a guy I went to high school with, now stationed in Korea with the Army) at the resort Sunday at lunch time. He was there skiing for the whole weekend too, in the same area we were most of the time, he said. We never saw each other. Small world, big resort.

Back from skiing. I’m resting. I’ve never skied three days in a row before and I'm totally wiped out! Well, it’s more than that: I crashed big time Saturday morning and banged myself up pretty bad. Nothing is broken and I skied the rest of the day and Sunday morning too but I’m stiff, sore, and bruised. I guess the better I get on skis, the worse my crashes are too. There I was, tearin’ ass down this intermediate, almost advanced slope when my binding released. I felt the boot slide free and thought for a split second, "Oh no." My cheek pounded into the snow and the next thing I knew I was 25 yards from my last memory. I got up, but felt pain in my legs and that weird jarring w/disorientation in my head that happens when your body thumps hard against the ground. I had just whizzed by a ski patrol person, so she stopped and asked if I was OK before moving on. How embarrassing. My glasses were smashed a little (but easily repaired) and I spent a few minutes trying to dry them off. I was skiing alone and had my CD player going. It was silent after it helped to cushion my fall. At first it wouldn’t work and I panicked wondering what the hell I was going to do on the bus all the way home, but after opening and closing the lid a few times, it worked. Whew. Nevermind my pain, it’s the music that counts. So I started off down the rest of the hill, a little shaky and noticing a loss of confidence. An hour later, at lunch, I took a look at my legs and found big black, swollen bruises around both my knees and a bigass bruise the size of football tattooed on my right thigh. Pretty nightmarish actually, I don’t think I’ve ever been this banged up in my life. And there’s something, like, powerful in a crash like that and walking away. It’s a weird feeling and I’m a little surprised by it. Like, I totally slammed into a hard surface at high speed and I didn’t break. I feel strong and durable. That was the only time I crashed during the whole trip. There are no moguls to speak of at Yongpyong resort; the lack of them makes everything seem easier. It’s a good boost for my confidence level as I can just practice doing smooth parallel curves going as fast as I can handle. There was one run that really challenged me and oddly no one else took it. Every single time I skied it, I was the only one. It was steep, starting to bud moguls, but mostly just icy. The ice was the challenge. You know, turn perpendicular to the slope and slide down that way a yard or so before the edges catch. That kind of ice. Fun run though and nice to have the hill to myself. Can’t figure out why no one else wanted to try it. Dave was a serious newbie trooper. I’ve never seen anyone ski for the first time and maintain such a positive attitude; not to mention catch on so quickly. Sunday morning he tried his first advanced run. Though slow, and wedged into a serious snowplow for much of the run, he maintained good control and only fell once or twice. Unbelievable. Because he is a Type 1, the control part is especially important to him and he works very hard to perfect his technique before worrying about speed. He already has much more control than so many other people I saw there who were just barely hanging on while zooming down the hill; there were a lot of people who were accidents just waiting to happen. He’ll be a good skier one day. He already wants to try and go again before the season ends. Yeaaay! The worst part of the trip was the service. I really got frustrated (once again) at this whole culture’s misunderstanding of "service". Somehow I thought we’d have a lot of choices at the resort, that there would be a little town or something - like at Whistler/Blackcomb. But the only places we could eat were at hotel restaurants, which serve inferior food at astronomical prices + 10% luxury tax. Our hotel was a 5-star place but it didn’t have hot cocoa, it was out of some types of other food, the food available was seriously mediocre, and when I asked for shampoo the guy behind the desk told a transparent lie to get me to go away. It just gets so fucking old and tired being lied to and being denied things that should be available when you’re paying out the nose for supposed quality. I hate that about this place. I get so mad at the people and then I feel sorry for them because it’s not the workers fault. They are just doing what they’re told. Other foreigners were upset too. We saw one guy leave a restaurant without paying for his beer because he had waited a half an hour for it. The waitress was chasing after him trying to get him to pay but he was just yelling back at her, pissed at the crappy service at this "5-star" establishment. There was nothing she could do. I guess what makes it worse is that after we exerted ourselves skiing, we wanted to have a good meal to refuel with. Every meal was lacking in some way and it was frustrating not having that most basic need fulfilled well. To compensate, we went to a little mini mart and filled up on processed snacks, which just made us ill. Thing is, the country is in the middle of a depression and the company that owns the resort is in serious trouble. I imagine that the hotels are not well stocked but the prices are kept really high to maximize profit. The strategy totally shoots them in the foot. Koreans want foreign visitors big time, but when they pull shit like that no one wants to come to Korea. Hotels, on average, are among the highest priced in the world, but the cleanliness, service, and food quality our always substandard. There are one or two exceptions, of course, but those particular hotels cost the most. Our hotel room was nice and we were happy with it, but there were still the cigarette burns in the carpet that I will always associate with Korean hotels. I told Dave that I didn’t think eating meat was inherently wrong. He disagreed saying he believed eating meat IS just that. I can respect his belief, and I think I feel that sentiment, only about smoking. Korean men smoke like chimneys and I feel such disgust and hatred that I hope every single one of them suffers a long time from smoking-related illnesses. It’s just disgusting how they smoke everywhere, dump their lit cigarettes wherever and whenever. They were dropping them from ski lifts. I hate skiing over cigarette butts. I hate being out in the fresh air and smelling the smoke of a cigarette coming from some asshole taking a smoke break on the lift. The European guys up there were just as bad (though I didn’t see any smoking while skiing). Gawd, I was pissed at them too for being such idiot addicts. And I was mad on the way home when our crazy bus driver decided to avoid the traffic jam by taking a detour up a deserted and icy mountain road. I feel like such a wimp for being afraid, but then I don’t really have any reason to believe that people are taking adequate safety precautions. This guy was all over the road, always slamming on the breaks before rounding the corner. If he approached a car from behind, he honked that blaring horn only found on large buses and semi trucks until the car pulled over and let him pass. Man, you know I’m sitting on one of those things getting jerked around, the curtains swinging away from the window and back again, and I start looking around wondering if I’d live if the bus flipped over. I doubt the thin metal roof could hold all the weight. Probably, we’d all get squished. And I don’t know why he took the mountain road anyway. It seemed to go way out of the way and it was an hour before we got back on the freeway. Did it really save time? When we finally stopped at a rest stop, the guy bought a bottle of windshield cleaner, emptied it into the container for it below the windshield, then tossed the bottle onto the ground. A gas station guy came by and picked it up and I just felt bad for him. Here’s this guy, out in the middle of nowhere, tending gas and having to pick up litter from all these tourists from the city. Thing is, it’s much deeper than that. It’s a class thing and it’s so fucking blatant how lower class people are treated like crap. I mean, it’s all about looks and your job and status and it just made me sick to see the bus driver (who is low on the ladder himself) treat the gas station guy (who is lower than the bus driver) with such disrespect. I will always hate that. Oh yeah. The bus driver was a chain smoker. It’s amazing the damage one little toxic cig can do to air quality. There is a freeway being built between Seoul and Kangnung (where the resort it) on the East Sea. It’s not totally finished so that much of the route is still a two lane mess. Mountainous terrain impedes the route and I see that the strategy is to ignore the mountains and just build over them. Huge elevated freeway segments overpass whole valleys containing villages and cropland. The country is so small that the land eaten up by expanding freeways is a real loss to the people living in the construction paths. I guess the elevated freeway concept might not be so bad. Along the way, I saw little islands of graves that had not been leveled for the future pavement. The construction people will wait until the remains are re-located. I wonder where the occupants of the graves are moved to and how the families deal with that? The whole basis of Confucianism is filial piety and ancestor worship. In fact, where the ancestors are buried determines the relative luck or well-being future generations will have. So each grave site is picked by a geomancer who determines which geological site is auspicious for the burial. If you move the grave, what will that mean for the future of the family? These days the government is trying to convince the citizens to bury their dead in - what are those called? - those little mini vaults for ashes or even bodies that are stacked on one another. The deal is that there simply is not enough land for all the dead people to be buried in auspicious places. But, if everything is predicated on ancestor worship, and if this concept is continually being reinforced in other social ways, how can you expect people to change their beliefs around one fundamental aspect of it? I don’t know. Wandering thoughts on a long, noisy bus ride. When I read back over this, I see a lot of anger. That’s not at all what I want to convey about the trip. I was pissed about the service and the bus driver jerked my chain, but overall I had so much fun skiing and after converting won to dollars the cost was unbeatable. Dave had such a good time learning and I’m excited that he’s excited about one of my favorite things. That’s just so cool. And cooler still is feeling good about practicing the skill and feeling the speed. It’s just too fun. We're already trying to figure out how we can go again in March.

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