In this week:
- That's a lot of tripe
- In Seoul but not a soldier
- 10 ways to eat live octopus
- Home again…
- And much, much more
The flight from Bangkok literally flew by. Each blink would sink me into a deep sleep and I would open my eyes an hour later very disoriented, and, for me, the 6-hour flight to Seoul felt only a few minutes long. Before we landed, a very lengthy video in Korean and English was played explaining the importance of declaring all animal or vegetable matter in your luggage. A very official young woman narrated images of aggressive flora and fauna ravaging the Korean countryside and insisted we must all do our part to keep alien species out of Korea. The whole video ended with a tableau of customs officials smiling under a big quarantine sign.
Finally landed and groggy, I rode the moving walkways of Incheon International Airport to passport control. I walked with the Indian monks I had befriended in Thailand. When we got to passport control they got in line ahead of me. The first monk got his passport stamped only after several minutes of questions and holding his documents up to the light. The second monk stood behind a big yellow line with me. When he was called up he looked back to me and shrugged. Within a minute, he was escorted by boarder officials behind a thick, black metal door.
When I stepped up the officer didn't even look at my picture page. He just gave me a stamp and said, "Thank you very much". The first monk leaned against a wall near the baggage carrousel and waited for his partner. That was the last I saw of them.
It was still early morning and the sunrise shot right into the glass atrium of Incheon, a thoroughly modern and spotless structure of glass and white metal. I tried to negotiate the complicated ATM instructions, but seemed to come up moneyless with every attempt. The on-screen instructions were convoluted and required a series of inputs for foreign card users. I didn't figure this out until days later. So, reluctantly, I exchanged money at a currency office and paid a hefty commission.
But I was finally armed with Korean Won and could take the bus to my hostel. Korea was by far the hardest to navigate without knowing the local language. I never did find anyone who could explain to me in English where the right bus stop was amongst the dozens of stops outside the airport. This is of course not a fault of the Koreans, and I felt guilty about not knowing more Korean before arriving.
I was eventually directed to the right place by a wall map in both English and Korean. Seoul is the home to most of Korea. It is actually several large cities that have over the decades of urban expansion melded into one giant metropolis. The airport was in the city of Incheon, which essentially is Seoul. But to get from there to my hostel in central, or old Seoul, cost 8000 won (about 9 dollars).
The airport itself is on one of the many islands that dot South Korea's western coast, and to get onto the peninsula we had to cross a series of bridges. It was still morning and mist blanketed the waters surface. As we drove over the bridges it looked as though we were above the clouds and islands in the distance had the illusion of being mountain peeks high in the air. The landscape alternated between emerald green hills of lush foliage and white concrete apartment buildings. The green hills were so deeply green and the concrete so very clean.
The apartment buildings often had large authoritarian numbers written on their sides, such as "A-3". The letters themselves were stories high. This is presumably for efficient identification. But it made them look more like industrial warehouses than homes.
The bus driver wore white gloves and had a complicated assortment of computer screens beside him. Change was dispensed by an automatic machine and every seat had a button to release a footrest and to adjust the headrest. There were also seat belts, and the Korean businessman beside me buckled his immediately upon sitting down. I felt compelled to do the same, but I certainly hadn't had a seat belt while taking buses through congested mountain passes in Eastern Europe, and that I now had one in the safe and regulated traffic of Seoul it seemed almost humorous.
At each bus stop a soothing woman's voice would announce the stop in English and a harsh male voice would announce the stop in Korean. The ride through the city took almost 2 and a half hours. I am always amazed by the major cities of the world. I revel in the seeming endlessness of people and buildings. It both baffles and excites me. And the expansiveness of Seoul certainly did both.
The bus dropped me off across from the gates of a feudal Korean palace and around the corner from my hostel. I rolled in around 9 am. A skinny young man with trendy glasses was at reception. I gave him my reservation, and he looked very intently at his ledger. He stood and looked at a calendar behind the desk. He scrunched his face and handed me a key. All this was done without exchanging a word. The key was for a room right next to reception. Reception and this room shared a wall. I went in and found an en suite single with cable TV. I took the two steps back out the door to see if this was right, as I had reserved a room in a 10-person dorm. The skinny young man said, "ok ok ok ok." And for some reason unknown to me (since I lacked the Korean to even ask) I was upgraded from dorm bed to a lovely single for no extra charge.
I spent the rest of the day sleeping off my travel on the three thin mats laid on the floor for me. I woke up in the late afternoon and was fiercely hungry. Admittedly Korean food has always been a favorite of mine, and I looked forward to eating Korea's food as well as seeing Korea's cartoons. Bulgogi (marinated and barbequed beef strips) has always been my favorite. So I headed out on a quest for bulgogi.
Although the hostel was near a large road (where the bus dropped me off) it itself was on a narrow street only wide enough for a few pedestrians. But this is not uncommon for this part of Seoul, which is called Insadong. It one of the oldest parts of the city and still has a lot of 19 th century buildings which are linked by vast networks of little nameless roads, making it an easy and fun place to get lost. On one of these nameless roads, not much wider than my shoulders, I found a little restaurant. I asked if they had bulgogi. By ask I mean I said bulgogi over and over with big animated gestures. They responded with great shakings of the head and "bulgogi anio" (no bulgogi). They then looked at me and said something in Korean. I just nodded and sat down. Apparently in the exchange I had ordered tripe dumplings. Although not bulgogi it was very good.
Like any Korean meal, it came with several small plates of spiced, seasoned, and pickled side dishes, with one of the side dishes always being kimchi. Kimchi is salted and preserved cabbage. A museum exhibit I would see later explained that kimchi was an essential source of sodium and other nutrients in feudal Korea. Rural populations survived during the winter on the preserved cabbage. Modern kimchi is a little more elaborate. It is heavily spiced and rather tasty. However these spices didn't arrive until Portuguese traders brought chili and pepper in the 16th century. But over this history from being an essential staple to a tasty morsel, kimchi has remained a part of every Korean meal.
Food was to be a recurrent theme throughout my time in Korea. And on my way back to the hostel I passed the "food museum of Korea". I had to go in. It was small but interesting -- mostly mannequins in tableaus with plastic food. There was a lot of written information but it was all in Korean. One exhibit was in English and explained that the coming weekend was the fall festival for Korea and traditionally families make a food called tteok, a sort of sweet, rice flour candy. The exhibit went on forever showing how to make boiled, grilled, stewed, pickled, and anything else tteok. Just below the museum was a café which for the upcoming holiday was selling "gourmet tteok" at its counter. Of course I needed to try it. I got a little round ball with a green tea leaf delicately placed on it. I sat outside and took a bite. Sweet is not the right word to describe it. Perhaps starchy is better. The exhibit opened with a proverb translated into curious English. It read: "Oh what a lucky boy you are you have many tteok". After my taste of tteok I didn't feel so lucky. It wasn't bad but it certainly didn't rank as a delicious candy.
From the museum I somehow found my way back and slept again for hours. I woke sometime after the sun had set. I decided to go back towards the palace and see the city by night. Armed with my camera I walked the quiet moon-drenched alleys. To the north lay a large but gently sloping mountain range. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of a moonlit peak between buildings. I sat on the stoop of a church for a bit. Korean children played just down the street in the bright yellow aura of a street light on the otherwise blue darkness of the road. It was almost 11 and I thought it great that children could play in the streets of Seoul safely until late.
I continued walking. At many intersections groups of men gathered around steaming carts and ate rice cakes in pepper broth from plastic bowls. Skinny boys in shorts gathered around televisions set up on the street and played video games in the brisk evening air. I eventually broke through the labyrinth of little roads and emerged near the Grand Palace and the National Museum. I followed the palace's massive walls until I was at a vast intersection of several multilane roads. Opposite me stood a row of hulking skyscrapers crowned with giant video screens silently playing commercials on loops. I crossed the intersection in one of the many labyrinthine underground passages.
I didn't see another person until I emerged and walked near a central government office building. Outside a few hundred women sat quietly in the shadows of the office gate. They had banners and placards propped up against the curb and they seemed prepared to be camped out for the night. It was some form of sit-in or protest, but I was unable to tell the cause. I stood and watched the sleepy protesting women from behind a garbage pile of food wrappers and drink bottles that had accumulated. From the size of the garbage pile they had been there a while. I continued my walk along the now skyscraper lined streets. At one point I stopped to watch a vendor press a ginger root the size of my arm and extract a juice he then mixed with seltzer. Eventually I turned homeward again. It was very late and I stole past the skinny young man at reception as he dozed on his ledger.
The guesthouse provided breakfast. By breakfast I mean white bread with jam and a sweet yogurt drink served in vessel the size of a shot glass. A hand-written sign declared in militant print: "One yogurt per person". In the small breakfast nook I met a Singaporean woman and two Vietnamese sisters who had all just arrived in Korea for sightseeing. I had an appointment at a cartoon museum that day, but we all agreed to meet later in the night to get Korean barbeque and, we hoped, bulgogi.
I then set off to the Korean Cartoon Museum and Archive. I jumped on the subway for what I thought might be a short ride. But after the 2nd hour on the train I realized this was a bigger mission, showing just how vast Seoul is and how expansive is its public transportation. The subway eventually emerged from underground and raced along through residential blocks.
Korea has a negative birth rate and has had one for many years. It was explained to me that it is just too expensive to have children, so young couples prefer not to. I don't think that is the complete answer. In any case, Korea has an aging population. Walking the streets you can see this. The elderly are a sizable and visible population in the city. And parks are full of old men sitting on benches in the warm sun. On this ride I rarely got to sit because there was always someone older than me in need of my seat. I had flashes of America as the baby boomers really hit retirement. In a few years perhaps it will be impossibly impolite to sit on New York subways. Others stood with me and watched movies on their cell phones.
After a few hours I got off at Bucheon station. I had e-mail from the museum outlining directions in questionable English. It instructed me to exit the station and find bus #3. Unfortunately this station had six exits onto different streets. After finding no bus stops at the first three I went into a post office. The man behind the counter spoke no English but a man in line instructed me to once again cross into the station and take the 17 bus to the station.
Just then my stomach got the best of me and I slid into a little restaurant next to the post office. As far as I can tell, all Korean restaurants are very similar. Silverware is kept at the table. There are always metal chopsticks and spoons. Water is kept in a cooler at the front of the restaurant with metal cups stored along side. There is always a man who seats you and takes your order from the photo images of the food. Then there are two women in aprons behind a counter preparing the food. Always one man and two women. I witnessed this more often than not.
It was just after the lunch hour and before dinner so I was the only one in the shop and as I ate my dumplings the man who seated me sat at an adjacent table intently watching me eat. When I took a bite and gave a thumbs up in approval, he proudly smiled and returned with a plate of small salted fish for me.
After lunch I made my way to bus 17 but couldn't find it. I tried to ask people on the street but no one would or could understand my questions. Eventually I just followed a stream of buses none of which were 3 or 17 until they pulled into a largish terminal about a mile walk from where I had started. There a bunch of smoking bus drivers were crowded around. I showed them the address I wanted to get to, and they put me on yet another bus all together.
I rode this bus for almost half an hour before being told to get off at a construction site. I wandered aimlessly for another 20 minutes until I found a police station. I went inside and a kind female officer who didn't speak any English took me to a large aerial map of the area. It was here I realized I wasn't in Seoul anymore. I had ridden the train to another city all together. Bucheon to be exact.
Together we hunted on the map for my destination and found it to be only a few blocks away from the police station. I thanked the policewoman with much bowing of my head and waving. I walked the rest of the way in high spirits.
I was eventually greeted by an archway dotted with large fiberglass cartoon characters. This gateway let unto a sports arena, and I came to realize the museum was in the basement of a soccer stadium. Not sure what to make of it, I made my way into a little dark glass door behind the entrance for grounds crew. Inside a young woman was seated behind a desk and in a frightened voice said, "English?!?" I nodded and she handed me a manila folder with a walking guide to the museum in English.
I had had correspondence with someone from the museum and had planned to meet him or her. All I had though was a name on the e-mail. I had hoped to show up and have a chat. I showed the scared young woman the name and she just looked at me blankly. She retrieved an older man and he gave me an even blanker look. We didn't share enough language for me to even explain that I was looking for a particular person. After a long awkward silence I just gave up and entered into the museum.
This was really something. It was expansive and had a section on cartoon history in Korea tracing its origins back to early cave paintings and later screen painting. It then went through a detailed time line of the 20 th century outlining changes and trends in comics, animation, and political cartoons. I was in heaven. The displays were new and I was so impressed that there was demand for such a place in Korea. I wasn't alone either. A few families and a few older men walked though the halls with me.
At the end of the exhibits was a mock up of a 19th century Korean newsstand with reproductions of graphic media art from the period and alongside this was a large room of comfy chairs book shelves full of comics. A few white-capped old men dozed in the seats with comics opened on their tummies.
As I left I tried one last time to find my contact. The man running the gift shop was called over by a young guard and all of us just stood awkwardly until I thanked them and left. I was impressed to see how well archived everything was, how well designed it all was, and how there was a clear popularity for cartoons in broader Korean society. Even though it was harder to find than Atlantis, I'm glad I went.
On the way back to Seoul, just before I jumped onto the train, I ducked into a grocery store. Just my luck -- it was sample day! I spent the next 30 minutes going from stall to stall tasting different types of kimchi and Korean ice cream and coffee and a large variety of fruit I've never seen before. All the sample servers were young women in gogo boots and mini skirts. It was an odd visual juxtaposition to see Korean grandmothers being handed kimchi by these done-up young women.
I bought a new notebook and then jumped on the train. Again it took 2 hours and I arrived back at the hostel right about dinnertime. The Vietnamese girls had just returned from sightseeing and we were all hungry (despite my many samples tasted). I convinced them we needed to find bulgogi, as it was already three days into my Korea visit and I still hadn't found it.
We headed out into the dim narrow streets of Insadong. We eventually settled on a brightly lit diner with glass tables. We sat down and as usual my request for bulgogi was met with confusion and refusal by the server. The server then suggested something else in Korean and we all shrugged and said OK. Soon we were brought two bubbling stone pots of seafood and spicy tofu, a sizzling platter of spiced ground beef and an entire grilled fish studded with garlic. Not what we were looking for but absolutely delicious, and quite the feast.
The two girls are sisters whose family had moved to Canada when they were teenagers. Now one works as a nurse and the other works for Exxon. "It's not exciting work but it pays for travel." She explained. They were touring Korea, China, Japan, and Thailand. They had spent last summer backpacking in Vietnam and got me excited about the possibility of visiting. They had some very interesting things to say about returning to Vietnam after so many years and how they felt like absolute outsiders and were treated as such by the local Vietnamese.
After dinner we somehow still had room for more food and as we wandered back towards the guesthouse we stopped in a little convenience store. We wanted ice cream but found in their freezer only two types of deserts. One was called "Lots of Red Beans!" and one called "Sweet Cheese". Of course we tried both. They were exactly as they advertised themselves: A bean and a cheese frozen novelty. We couldn't stop laughing, as again Korean sweets were a little less than sweet. There really is nothing like biting into a frozen clump of lightly sweetened beans.
They were leaving early in the morning for Beijing and we said goodbye in the lobby, which incidentally was also my doorstep. I drifted off to sleep with a full stomach of too many things to even remember.
The next day I felt I needed to see the proper touristy sights of Seoul. So I made my way towards the royal palace of the last dynasty. On the way, I had to pass by what to all appearances was Seoul's Soho. I kept passing gallery after gallery and inevitably I got drawn in. I'm too much of a sucker for art. There was a lot of forgettable abstract painting but some lovely resin sculptures. The most interesting was perhaps a gallery doing an exhibit of 20 th century American Art. There were quite a few big names including Robert Rauchenberg, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel. I had no idea that Seoul was such a hub for art and for high-quality, highbrow art. It was Saturday morning and lots of Korean students my age seemed to be wandering the galleries. It would rain off and on and I ended up having to hide from a downpour in a café that itself looked straight out of Soho, complete with student art on the walls and lots of mismatched overstuffed chairs. I got a coffee and it cost about six dollars. I had been warned that coffee in Korea costs more than a full meal. The warning was right. But stuck between rain and café décor, I thought it would be OK to get a cup of joe.
Eventually the sun returned, however bashfully, but for the rest of the day would often duck behind clouds. I made my way to the vast grounds of the royal palace. I passed the guards done up in 18 th century costume. I got a close look and saw their false Fu Manchu mustaches falling off just a bit. One could clearly see the strings of gum attaching the false hair to their upper lip. Japanese tourist snapped pictures of the costumed guards as I passed. I rarely saw any western tourists. They seemed to be exclusively Japanese or Singaporeans, with the exception of the Vietnamese girls.
The palace was everything it should be. There were refined pagodas behind lovely ponds. Each building was an exercise in refinement and design, a sort of antithesis to the ostentation of the Thai palaces, but equally impressive.
Attached to the palace were several museums. The most interesting to me was a museum housing the archives of the last dynasty. There has been for centuries a government ministry to record history and to document the lives of the royal family. Granted, it serves a political historical function to write your own history, but when I compare it to East Africa where there is no history written at all and where archives are non-existent, it was fascinating to come to a culture where they have been meticulously recording, saving, archiving, and sorting information since the dark ages in Europe.
Just to walk the grounds and take in the exhibits took all day. I didn't get back to the hostel until it was dark. It was quite late and I couldn't find anyone my age in the common areas. So I just took advantage of the time to read and do laundry.
I had been intrigued by the comics museum and wanted to see how modern cartoon art intersected with modern high art in Korea. So after rising late I jumped back on the train and made my way to the Modern Art Museum of Korea. Like the cartoon museum it was far out of town and in a strange special context. This time it wasn't a stadium but an amusement park. The museum, as well as a planetarium and children's amusement park, are on the outskirts of Seoul in a large green park stretching into the mountain.
I had to walk past roller coasters and swinging pirate ships to arrive at the museum. I couldn't have arrived at a better time. The whole ground floor of the expansive museum was being dedicated to a special exhibit of a survey of Korean art of the last 50 years. I didn't need to search through catalogues and print rooms. It was all already hung on the wall for me. I was so impressed by Korean art.
This exhibit blew me away. There were abstract expressionist artists who rivaled any of the big names in the west like Rothko, Pollack, or Dekooning. You name it, it was done in Korea and possibly better. I was baffled that I had never seen any of this stuff, and the artist's names were completely new to me. Work of the last 20 years really spoke to me: Fantastic institutional critique, great identity politics pieces, and then just amazingly simple and brilliant conceptual pieces. I just walked around shaking my head in disbelief. If anything, this exhibit made more palpable the cultural hegemony of the west. How it smothers the possibility of other centers for art. This work is reactionary. It is always referring to the west and the west never refers to it. My ignorance of this art just is one more example of this. I spent all day filling a notebook with names and notes about the use of cartoons or cartoon elements, which is a very present visual trope in contemporary Korean art.
Happy and thinking, I went for a stroll through the park. I circuited a lovely little lake and then made my way to the train again. On the paths, families strolled together. Vendors were everywhere selling all sorts of fun food. I was amused to see a row of cotton candy sellers and a grilled squid seller at the end, and the Korean children lined up in front of the squid seller.
I got home after dusk and didn't feel like going too far away. Just around the corner was a little restaurant. I popped in and asked for bulgogi again. The man who seated me smiled and said OK. I did a double take. Bulgogi I asked in disbelief? Ok he said. Finally, but inadvertently I had found it! As all hope was almost lost, bulgogi fell into my lap. That seems like the wrong turn of phrase. In any case, they grilled it up for me and I ate almost an entire cows worth. The man who seated me chuckled as he saw me happily clean a huge plate of bulgogi. After I was done he brought me a bowl of sweet tea. It was the best meal I had had in a country of terrific meals. I took the restaurant's business card, but it's all in Korean. I hope I can find it again in the future.
As I had been traveling so light, with only a single carry-on bag, I had not purchased any souvenirs for friends and family along the way. But as Korea was my last stop I thought I should pick up a few things. So early in the following morning I set out for the markets. I thought Bangkok had big markets. Seoul has bigger ones and every day of the week. I spent the whole day walking in crowds and negotiating carts full of junk. Sections of the markets were selling expensive clothes and housewares but if you walked long enough you would find rows of army surplus gear. There were rows of women tailoring garments on the street with pedal sewing machines, bins full of scrap metal and rips of fabric, and old men selling just a few army medals and packs of tissues. Hip flasks and flack jackets were everywhere. Every few hundred meters food sellers would clump together, and I made a point of eating lots of dumplings.
It was fascinating. I don't like shopping at malls but I loved shopping in Korean markets. You name it you can get it. If I really needed 20lbs of false eyelashes I now know where to get them. There was even a guy selling just phonographs -- big coned phonographs with wax cylinders. I spent all day buying just a few trinkets, but as the sun was setting I was feeling very accomplished. I had easily walked more than in any previous day from early morning to dusk just soaking in the crowds and the junk. Back at the guesthouse I collapsed in a contented sweaty heap.
The next day I woke early and called a contact I had made through a backpacker I met in South Africa. This guy promised to show me the graffiti of Seoul. We met at a subway stop in the early afternoon. Bill is a Korean American now living in Seoul and working as a radio DJ. He had originally come after college to teach English but hated that work and stayed on to do translation and DJ'ing at a radio station.
We rode the subway to an area he said was thick with graffiti. We talked a lot about his coming back to Korea to live. He said it was a closed culture in a lot of ways. He is even Korean and speaks the language but doesn't totally belong. He spends all his time with other American-born Koreans. Throughout our conversations he would stress that his view of Korea is very narrow, that of a particular upper-middle-class English speaking life and perspective. So he felt uncomfortable speaking about Korea as a whole.
We got off the subway and boarded a bus that took us into one of the ritziest areas of Seoul. There were little boutiques and big condos. We walked these streets until we approached the river and a network of tunnels. Inside was indeed a lot of graffiti. There were the usual visual references to American hip hop. But here there were also blatant advertisements for Korean businesses that had hired graffiti artists to tag their logos.
In short, graffiti in Korea, as in much of the world, follows wealth. When graffiti in an out-of-the-way tunnel is advertising a shoe brand in one of the most expensive areas of Seoul, you know the audience that is seeing this graffiti is at least middle class. The kids doing this art climbing those tunnels have the time and money to do it, and generally the confidence that if caught they will not be hurt or killed by the police.
This time, this money, and this confidence doesn't exist for blacks in South Africa, the poor of India, or Kurds in turkey. I don't want to definitively say graffiti is one thing or another but there seems to be a correlation between economic affluence and its production for reasons even more numerous than I have listed.
We hung out in the tunnels and talked about media in Korea. A suspicion of mine was corroborated, he agreed with me that the only foreign news that Korea reports is about China, Japan and North Korea. He went so far as to say people didn't even really know what happened in Lebanon. No one really cares. He said that the papers are generally rightist but there is a growing number of leftist-based periodicals on the web and perhaps more Koreans go to the web now for their news anyway.
We jumped back on a bus and went to his neighborhood were he said we could find anti-Japanese graffiti.
Korea and Japan have a curios relationship to say the least. There is still a lot of animosity left over from the war. The Japanese essentially raped and pillaged the Korean peninsula and left it war-torn and impoverished. This was after centuries of minor and not-so-minor conquests in various dynasties. The two cultures are historically intertwined, culturally similar, yet so profoundly different. This difference the Koreans declare proudly.
In the neighborhood, stenciled graffiti reading "Fuck Japan!" written in English had been appearing over the past months on sides of buildings, on sign posts, and even on the sidewalk. It took us a while to find them, but once we did we couldn't stop finding them. This type of graffiti can only be understood in the context of the complex relationship between Korea and Japan and is a really fascinating bit of cultural production.
It was about dinnertime and my host suggested we eat seafood. I asked that we eat something really weird. He suggested live octopus. I said awesome. We walked a few more blocks and grabbed seats in an open-air tent restaurant. We sat on stools at a low plastic table. Beside us was the kitchen, which was really nothing more than tanks full of water and seafood and several cutting boards. The place was packed and three men in aprons slung squids and eels with mechanical efficiency and speed, cutting off heads and slicing them down the middle before placing them on plates to be delivered to the low tables.
I let my host do the ordering. For a drink he got soju. This drink is ubiquitous in Korea. It is supposed to be a rice wine. But after the war money and food were scarce so a chemical version of rice wine was developed as a cheaper alternative. This chemical version is soju. It is essentially paint thinner, and often comes in a juice box. Even with a booming economy it has remained part of Korea for the better part of 50 years. I had a Coke.
Soon the live octopus arrived. The aproned men had severed the head from the tentacles and bisected the bunch of tentacles to make it easier to handle. These tentacles wriggled off onto the table. I caught them with my chopsticks and dipped them in a bowl of sesame oil that had been placed in front of me. The best part is the taste, which is really quite delicious. The worse part is having the suckers suction to your teeth. We ended up getting a second plate.
After dinner we walked to a café and chatted over plum tea. I thanked him for the lovely day and headed off to go pack. I was up late trying to stuff everything back into my little carry on bag. I ended up throwing out most of my clothes and all of my toiletries.
My plane was the next day and very early in the morning. I rose well before the sun and caught the same bus back to the airport and watched the same mist roll across the sea. My time in the airport was swift and unmemorable.
I had a short flight to Japan where I switched onto a flight to Chicago. In my short hour in Japan I chatted with an 80-year-old man from northern Japan, who was on his way to climb a glacier in Canada. On the flight from Tokyo to Chicago I was seated next to a young Korean woman. She sparked a conversation when she saw Hhongul characters on my jacket. She was on her way to Columbus, Ohio to finish her final year of a PhD in concert piano. We talked off and on throughout the flight between sleep and movies. I finally got to see Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. It was not as good as I was expecting but better that it could have been.
When we landed many, many blurry hours later in Chicago I stood in a short line to get my passport stamped. The officer took a good look at my passport and said, "Well, you've been a few place haven't you?" A little nervously I explained that I had just been around the world. "Wow, that's a once in a life time experience", he said. I smiled sheepishly. Before he stamped my passport he gave me a big grin and said, "Welcome home."
With that, there I was. I went Chicago to Chicago in just under 100 days by only traveling east. I'd been to four continents and 14 countries. I never got sick, I never got scammed, I never got hurt and I never got (too) lost. This was only possible because of the kindness of the people I met along the way. It's hard to quantify just how momentous this trip was. The fruits of this labor have yet to be picked, but I have a suspicion I'm going to enjoy the harvest as much as the cultivation. Enough with pseudo-romantic metaphors: I had a blast and am still reeling from it. I am writing this from the Northwestern Library after my first full week of classes in my senior year. And even though my life is back to normal I still have flashes of images from the trip, of motor biking in Bangalore and the gates of Auschwitz.
I think the most curios part of the return is that I don't feel like the trip is over. If anything, it feels like I'm biding my time before the next plane or train. This trip didn't stem my wanderlust. It stirred it. My senior year is just one more stop on my loop around the world, or of many loops to come. I don't think of Chicago as my last port of call. It will again be my point of departure.
Sincerely,
Alex Robins
Circumnavigators Club Scholar Summer 2006 |
