World Cup and My Neighborhood

There are a lot of things I love about this country--and partially about being abroad in general. It's always amazing to watch soccer with people who really, really care about soccer. When Korea played Argentina on Thursday, it was a wild mess. Classes were canceled. (Not mine, though.) The streets were empty, and the game could be heard or seen from every television in the entire city. In the bar, everyone wore red--the Korean team's color--and howled and cheered with a kind of fanaticism that only comes from doing things in crowds. It was truly amazing--even though they lost.

And they didn't just loose. They REALLY lost. Soccer is a low scoring game, and to loose 4-1 is something that takes skill. In fact, the Korean players actually scored two goals in the game--one of them was Argentina's first. Bad luck, guys.

Anyway, next they're playing Nigeria, and Nigeria's not been having a good season. They lost to Argentina and to Greece. (Which the Koreans beat.) I am secretly rooting for all the African teams (but Ghana the most--duh.) Lucky for me, I have like 3 teams that I want to win, so I've got a great chance of being pretty excited with the final outcome.

In other news, I'm spending a much deserved and much wanted weekend being lazy at home. It's great. I am cleaning, fiddling with my decor, and finally getting my kitchen into shape. My neighborhood mystifies me for the contracts that I see here. I live in a non-descript, typical Korean small-size apartment building. An elderly woman owns it, collects money for bills, and maintains general order. On the other side of the street, there are the megolith blocks of 25-story buildings, all identital to each other, with their numbers painted on their sides, but here on this side of the street, strange things sit next to each other.

The trash dump across the street from me has been cleaned up. The lot used to be blocked off with aluminum siding, gated, and full of garbage. The lot across from me used to be a cabbage feild. Now it's an expensive looking duplex--the exterior is finished and now they're starting on the interior. There are men skirting around the skeleton structure on the outside. Next to me is the little mart, filled with all sorts of household items and food. It's family owned and the owners are excited to hear every new Korean phrase I learn.

But in addition to that, there are enormous houses, suburban enormities that for most Korean families are not the things they, themselves dream of owning, but the things they would buy for their parents if they suddenly won the lottery. One house looks as though it was designed by a rockstar architect in the sixties--it's all square and sharp lines, and Frank Loyd Wrighty--f-the Victorians. Though the expensive windows of that house don't look out onto a open feild, a forest, or even another house. They look into a cabbage patch the size of another suburban lot, and next to that there's another new apartment structure going up, and there are tanned men, covered head to toe, jumping around on scaffolding on its edges. There's a Chinese delivery restaurant that always has two or three moto drivers speeding food around town. One of them always waves at me when he sees me driving by. He invited me to drink coffee with him once, and I was really disappointed that I couldn't do it. He speaks no English. I have no idea what we would have talked about.

And in all these expensive houses, little plots of farmland, and construction projects, old women walk around with bent backs, picking up good cardboard and putting it on carts. There are no dumpsters even in rich suburbia, and piles of garbage sit outside in bright green bags--the color prescribed by Yuseong's garbage collection agency. One of these tan, ancient women recognizes me as she goes through the houses looking for boxes. She smiles sometimes, if I give her a little bow.

It doesn't seem to make sense--all this richness living right beside the farms, and the trash-picking grandmothers, and the little corner mart that would be in a poor but successful small town. This is one of the reasons that I really do enjoy Korea.

Mokpo! (And Daejeon loses something feirce to FC Seoul.)

Last weekend was Korea's independence day (March 1, 1945--from the Japanese), and it's a national holiday--which means that I had a very exciting day off.

To pass the time, I went to a soccer game with Tom, Kristen, and Kristen's friend from Suwon. Daejeon was playing FC Seoul, and we lost terribly--a whopping 5/2. But the first goal of the game was scored by a Weiguk, so I was a little bit excited about that.

Soccer fans are pretty nutty, which is good for some quality entertainment. I think maybe the reason Daejeon lost is because our side didn't look like THIS. (This is FC Seoul.) They were dancing and throwing these banners around the entire game. And there were Weiguks in their traveling crowd! Whaaat? Our team's supporters looked a little dismal. Sad.

The next day, I headed out to Mokpo, feeling a little frazzled by the idea of traveling alone. So far I haven't actually done it--I went to Seoul alone a couple times, but Mokpo is DEFINITELY not Seoul. It's a whole different world, and for that I was quite grateful--when I finally arrived.

When I got to the Daejeon Station, I was promptly told that I was at the wrong place, as the Daejeon Station does not sit on the Mokpo line, and thus I needed to go to the SeoDaejeon Station. (Which prior to this day I did not even know existed--but a quick check in the guidebook could have fixed that.) On the way to SeoDaejeon station, my cabbie almost got in an accident, but I wasn't paying attention (because I was NOW reading the aforementioned guidebook.)

I arrived at around 1:30, which was quite late for a day trip, so I had already decided that I was staying the night, regardless of whether or not there would be anything to do in Mokpo, which was described as having "coastal grimy charm". (Just my kind of city.) However upon arrival at the station, I misinterpreted the posted times and thought that the 'arrival' time for the train was actually the 'departure' time from Daejeon, so I thought that the next train to Mokpo ran at 4:30. So instead of waiting around for three hours, I bought a ticket to Gwangju, which seemed interesting.

And then I sat down to wait for the train, and I was flipping through the guidebook, and realized that there was nothing to see in Gwangju, and at that time I also realized that I had read the sign wrong, and so I waited in line AGAIN behind this adorable baby so that I could switch out the tickets. The whole time I kept thinking "everybody is watching me be an idiot right now."

But I exchanged my ticket and ended up getting on the MOKPO train as planned (at 2:10, not 4:30, which was actually sooner than the Gwangju train. Haha.)

The train ride was fantastic. Once we passed a certain point, the Korean countryside just changed. It became something else. Square rice fields lay flat and then mountains just exploded out of the earth for miles and miles--they piled up on each other forever. And the farther south we went, the farther away from Seoul we got, and I felt like I was farther away from whatever it is that makes this place look all the same.

Once in Mokpo, I was also in love with the difference that seemed to be prevalent in the city. Mokpo was at one time the seat of the main opposition party in Korea. Development funding was deliberately cut to stifle the political activity here--but the result was that Mokpo looks distinct from other Korean cities. It has 'grimy coastal charm' and a kind of liveliness that other cities didn't have. I smiled at people, and they smiled back.

Actually, within five minutes of my arriving at the Mokpo train station, I was invited to drink with the best native-Korean English speaker I have ever met. And although I didn't take him up on the offer, I was pretty excited, and I felt welcomed.

Other than being an intriguing place, Mokpo is on the ocean, and it is on the mainland overlooking a spectacular cluster of islands. I was planning on taking a cruise around some of them, but the rain on Monday prevented me. How sad. However, Sunday evening was sunny and I headed straight from the train station to Yudalsan, a park in the middle of the city, from which there are spectacular views.

(Note the lack of identical high rise apartments in this photograph.) Yudal park was spectacular, and I climbed higher and higher, even as the sun was getting lower and lower. (Though I took note of the street lamps, placed even on the most precarious of stone steps.)

Pavilions like these stood at the various ledge points so that the ajummas and ajoshis could rest. Or drink--whichever was more logical, but these men decided to drink not on a pavilion, but on a big rock that was sticking out of the mountain.

(Also possibly someone's grave.) Anyway as I climbed higher up the mountain, the path began to snake up around the large rocks that sat at the top of the mountain--a kind of rock formation that seems to me to be quite Asian--bare, white slabs with almost no features. Like enormous boulders that just happened to fall from the sky.

I sneakily took a picture of two young gentlemen sitting on one such outcropping, but this is not the one at the top of the mountain. As I moved farther up the mountain, the stairs became more precarious, and the path more like a real trail, and below me I kept seeing more and more of Mokpo--and farther out into the ocean. It was simply a photography paradise, so I took all the pictures I could.

As you see, just because Mokpo was once undercut for development funding, it is not so now. A number of large projects are under works, like this strange diamond shaped land bridge. Who knows what it is designed for. One of the 'nicer' sides of town is built on 'reclaimed' land (who decided "building" land where there was ocean before should be termed "reclaiming"--that makes it sound like it was ours to begin with!). It is an odd metaphor for how I see most of Korea these days. The 'nice' things, the new Korean 'good life' is built on a fake foundation. A man made, tangible--earthy, real, yet fake foundation. The grimy, swarthy, saline world is the undesirable world, but it is the world that is built on real soil.

Anyway I reached the very peak of the mountain, a perch on top of some enormous bald boulders, and sat with about twenty Koreans who were just minding their own business. The sun ducked behind a cloud and refused to give a good sunset, but I was content with being at the top of the world for a little while.

On my way down I captured this spectacular shot of the city lights starting to come on. I am not sure who the statue is of, but I am assuming that it is Admiral Yi, man of the naval hour, who saved the Koreans from the Japanese with Turtle Ships.

Heading back around the city, I got something to eat, and then I sat in a coffee shop and drew for a couple of hours--something that felt good to do, even if I could do it at home. It felt nice to do it somewhere else. Then I searched for a super cheap motel and found one. I paid 15,000 for a room--with it's own bathroom facilities, which is something like 12/13$. However, when you pay that little for a room, you should expect facilities of about the same quality.  Please, examine the photographs....

The room seemed alright--not too dirty, not too clean, with a working television (and CNN in English!) and a heated bed (since the ondol didn't appear to function.) However it was the bathroom that really did a number on me. Something had melted the bathtub. Like actually corroded the plastic enough to melt it. The shower barely worked and I was actually afraid to flush the toilet because of plumbing reparations. But it wasn't a problem at all. Everything worked out. Until I woke up in the middle of the night to a sound that sounded quite like someone attempting to force my door.

Now this is probably one of the reasons that I know I have been in Korea for WAY TOO LONG. Instead of assuming that someone was breaking into my room in order to steal things from me, I was convinced that the landlady had seen that I had left my bathroom light on, and was attempting to break into my (indoor locking only) room so that she could turn off the light and thus not waste her precious electric bill.

After a few moments of horrible fear passed, I realized that in fact no one was attempting to break into my room, and that the sound was coming from the opposite end of the room, and above me, so the only logical conclusion was that someone was having a VERY good time in the room above mine.

I woke up the next morning, departed the yeogwon (guesthouse, not even a motel) and went on my way--only to find that there wasn't much to do, because it was raining. So I explored, took pictures, ate some delicious bibimbap, and then went on my way. It was a wonderfully relaxing trip, and I got some great photographs and some great stories, and even better, I spent some quality time with my pens and markers.