Transitional period

There's still quite a while before my contract here finishes, but psychologically I'm already starting to wind down. (Actually, I started winding down pretty much the day I came back from my trip to Southeast Asia and realized I was far more interested in doing that sort of thing than in hanging out in the English room for eight hours a day, but up until lately that was just sort of a low-level background feeling.) Recently I've been preparing in various ways for the next phase of my life, the one that involves me traveling constantly for an unfixed but long amount of time.
   To start with, I figured out my schedule in probably as much detail as I'll ever have it planned, so why don't I just post it here so you can see what I'll be doing?

• 8/25 Sat— My contract finishes. I go to Incheon in the morning in time to catch the 19:00 ferry for Weihai, China. 
• 8/26 Sun— I arrive in Weihai in the morning and take a train to Beijing, find my hostel, and wander around.
• 8/27–29—Time for exploring Beijing. I wish I could allot more time, but my four months of travel in Eurasia, which originally seemed to me like a practically endless stretch of time, became alarmingly fast and cramped when it actually came time to cram them into a calendar, and I have to hurry somewhere.
• 8/30–31— In transit to Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia. 
• 9/01–18—Time to explore all over Mongolia and try to learn how to be the best nomad I can be.
• 9/19 Wed— Board the Trans-Siberian in Ulaanbaatar. 
• 9/24 Mon— Arrive in Moscow in the afternoon. Look around.
• 9/25 Tue— Another day in Moscow.
• 9/26–29— Stick that thumb out and start hitching, allowing four days to get through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany, to arrive in München in the evening on the 29th.
• 9/30 Sun— Watch the brass band concert at Oktoberfest. Drink beer and eat sausages and pretzels.
• 10/01–03— Continue drinking beer and eating sausages and pretzels, but with a focus on seeing München and the places around it. 
• 10/04–16— See as much of the rest of Germany as I can in thirteen days, and possibly spend a day or two in Prague.
• 10/17–19— Hitch (and/or take a train, since research suggests Spain is lousy for hitching) to Lisbon, and meet Grandma and Grandpa there. 
• 10/20–21— See Lisbon with Grandma and Grandpa.
• 10/22 Mon— Set out to see the rest of Iberia, mainly Spain, probably starting with the Way of St James. 
• 2 weeks later?— Move on to Italy.
• 2 weeks later?— Move on to France.
• 2 weeks later?— Move on to England. Meet Sean's friend who does parkour, and spend some time in Southampton doing that. Also see Stonehenge and such, and eat British Christmas food, which apparently is delicious.
• Late December— Fly out of London and go home. Christmastime. Tell everyone story after story until they wish they hadn't asked me about the trip. 

   Anything further than that is far too cloudy to assign numbers to it. But after I've caught up with the family and with the few friends I still keep in touch with in town—mainly Aaron and Keith—I'll probably head down Florida way to start my grand tour of America. I get more questions about this. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but maybe not very comprehensively. Basically, the plan is that after Christmas, I'll just start traveling full-time so I can see all the parts of America that I haven't visited yet or don't remember very well from those road trips my dad took me on when I was twelve. It's a big continent, so this could take a year or more.
   The instinct upon hearing about a period of travel that long is to wonder, What about me getting a job and becoming a responsible part of society? There are a couple different ways to respond to that. One is the predictable rebel response that I don't believe in becoming a productive part of our society, since that would mean that I'm complicit in American culture's continuing destruction of the planet and of healthy communities and minds, and since I think that selling off half of your waking day for most of the year, year in year out until old age, is basically tantamount to taking your one absolutely irreplaceable allotment of life-force and burning it up.
   That's an answer that I do believe in. But the other one is this: This year of traveling isn't just going to be a year of marking time and putting off the beginning of the rest of my life. I'm going to be spending it actively thinking about what I want to do afterwards. Visiting so many places in America—I have a growing list that so far has a dozen cities on it, plus living in the wilderness and working on farms—will allow me to figure out which one I could be happiest in, and what I could do there if I decided to live there. A year is long, and I'll have a lot of time to think about what kind of work I'd like to do in order to have the money to live in whatever kind of place I'd like to live in. I expect I'll learn about a lot of things I don't know about right now. To me it makes much more sense to look for an American job by traveling around America and meeting people who can tell me about their interesting jobs than by sitting here in Korea looking at Craigslist or LinkedIn or whatever and hoping I stumble upon something that interests me and is obtainable through submitting my résumé online and maybe doing a Skype interview. It's not what you know, it's who you know, they say, and as I travel I'll come to know so many more people.
   That, by the way, is important to me for another reason as well: I'm not going to be looking just for people who can give me jobs, which would be a pretty depressing and mechanical way of thinking about people during a trip all around the continent. I'm going to be looking for friendships that will last and last. Friendships like that are what make life enjoyable, basically what make life life. And if I travel the way I want to, the gregarious vagabond's way, I'll be meeting a lot of people who think along the same lines, who I can learn a lot from and who I can have incredibly enjoyable times with. So I think I have ample defense for a year or so in which I won't be strictly economically productive.
   Anyhow, I was ostensibly writing about preparing mentally and physically for all this travel I'm talking about. On the physical side, I've been getting my things ready. There are a surprising number of them to take care of. Visas are one of them. China and Russia, our old Red rivals, both apparently really don't want Americans entering them, so they make it as inconvenient as possible. As of now, my passport is in New York waiting for a company called VisaHQ to receive it so they can take it to the Chinese embassy. VisaHQ is doing this for the sum of $49.95, and for the privilege of having my documents glanced at by the Chinese embassy, I'm paying that country $140. I had to send the documents home because just within the last year China has decided to enact a new, inconvenient, byzantine rule that stipulates that foreigners living in Korea can't get a Chinese visa from the Chinese embassy in Seoul if their Korean visas will expire within the next six months. Basically this ensures that no one can finish their time in Korea and then go straight to China. Why China wants to prevent this is a mystery. But apparently I can get around this by sending my passport and visa application to New York and keeping quiet about the fact that I live in South Korea at the moment. Once I get my passport back, I'll have to get the Russian visa, which is annoying in totally different ways. I have to get an invitation to the country from a citizen (travel agencies will do this, of course for a fee), and get official documentation that I'm invited to Russia. Only then can I take that to the Russian embassy in Seoul and pay a fee a extortionate as China's to get my visa. You may not be surprised to find out that I think national borders are a stupid concept.
   I've also been amassing the gear I need for traveling, and at the same time paring down my collection of other belongings. Recently I dumped a bunch of clothes in a donation bin here. (Where they go from there, I have no idea. There's basically no such thing as Goodwill or used clothes shopping in this entire country. The best guess I can come up with based on internet research is that they get shipped off to the third world.) I'm throwing other stuff away, anything that I can do without, and as I get closer to leaving, I'll have fewer and fewer things. Meanwhile I've gotten a new backpack, a big one made for carrying heavy stuff comfortably for long periods, and which has a compartment in the bottom that's perfectly sized to fit my sleeping bag. I've bought a tiny, lightweight tent from eBay, and it's on its way to me. I've made my journals: in a departure from the 500- to 600-page journals I've used since Volume II, I'm splitting Volume VIII into four (possibly five) subjournals of 100 pages each (except VIII-A, which is 160 pages to fit in all the time between when the current VII fills up in early August until when I get home around Christmas). That way they won't take up so much room in my backpack, and if I lose one of them I'll lose at most 160 pages of life history, rather than possibly hundreds. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be practicing using campfires and homemade camp stoves, and cooking road food that won't debilitate me. The idea is that by the time August rolls around, I'll have most things pretty much figured out and won't have to learn by annoying or dangerous or expensive trials and errors while I'm out on the road. I'm bombproofing myself, basically.
   I sort of started the cooking part yesterday. We had a big barbecue by the river with all the foreigners in Sachangni and even a couple from Hwacheon, the next town over. I made myself a hobo pack. This is something I learned about from my friend Molly. The recipe is this: take some potatoes, onion, carrots, and meat. Cut them up and plop them on a sheet of foil. Put some butter and salt and stuff on top. Then wrap it up so it's waterproof and stick it in the coals of a fire for like 40 minutes so it can turn into stew. Pretty simple, but I'm glad I'm getting practice with it, because mine was pretty underdone. Instead of the coals of a fire I substituted the inside of the barbecue where the charcoal was. But the charcoal apparently wasn't very hot or didn't stay hot long enough. Lesson learned for next time. Even underdone it was pretty good, though.
   But that wasn't even close to the coolest thing that happened yesterday. Obviously another great part was how we all hung out together and swam in the river and had a smashing time. I could write all about that, but really, you can probably imagine it pretty well with just the basics. Just picture a barbecue on warm sand next to a rocky stream with a bunch of friendly people, and we'll both have saved some time. More significantly for my transition to travelerhood was what happened just afterwards. There were too many people to fit in one car—some of us had taken a taxi to get there—so Sean, Amanda, and I walked back along the little rural road. I decided it was high time that I tried hitchhiking for the first time. So I flew the Asian version of an upraised thumb (one palm flat toward the ground, waving slowly). And the very second car to come by stopped for us. A grinning guy invited us into his car and I pushed his badminton equipment to one side and thanked him a bunch and told him we'd like to go to Sachangni, please. He took us the few minutes into town and we all got out and thanked him again several times, and he turned around and went on his way—which caused us to realize he'd actually gone out of his way for us. We all thought that was pretty splendid. And it gave me a huge boost of confidence for my upcoming hitchhiking-heavy travel plans. It seems it's not nearly as hard as I imagined. Now I can actually picture myself doing it. I love it when things become real like that.

The Ginseng Men

One day last week I took a walk to get out of the house after staying inside all morning. I went down a different road than usual and found myself in a part of town that I'd never seen before. It was unfamiliar, strange; I want to say foreign, but of course I'm living in a foreign country, so I could call everything that. It's just that I've gotten used to Korea, but this seemed unlike what I'd gotten used to—doubly foreign. It wasn't actually that drastically different. The streets were narrower, and the houses were closer to them. One house had flowers growing inside the concrete barrier between it and the street. There were some tiny cinder-block stores with no English on the signs out front. I walked up a hill and passed a mushroom farm—a series of greenhouses each with a few cables strung from one end to the other and, leaning on the cables, logs with holes drilled in them and inoculated with spores. Across from it was a very old man walking out of a blue tin building, and hand farm equipment that looked generations old was lying around. At a crest in the hill I looked out and I could see the rice paddy that's down the hill from where I live, which I've never really seen before because it's obscured by buildings—this paddy is where the multitudes of frogs live that I hear chorusing in high voices every night through my window.
   I suddenly felt a deep sense of the profoundness of this place, simultaneous with a realization that I was only connected to it in the very shallowest of ways, not even knowing well a single person who lives here. I've come to this town and lived on the very surface, interacting with the people here barely any more than absolutely necessary to let me buy groceries to survive. But people have been living here and doing things for longer than I have any idea of, maybe only for a few decades, but maybe for centuries. There's a war memorial just outside town on the road to Chuncheon that's dedicated to the soldiers who retook this place from the Chinese army in 1951. However old this particular town is, there have been people living near here since time immemorial, surely back through all the dynasties that warred for power over the Korean peninsula starting when there was no writing to record the victories and losses. With something akin to a panic, borne of the knowledge that I have less than three months left here, I decided I needed to hurry and start understanding more about this place than just the places where it's possible to find food. It felt like if I didn't do that, I would look back later and think I'd wasted a whole year that was made entirely of the opportunity to learn, but if I did, all the stuff I'd observed over the course of the year would finally solidify into actual knowledge.
   Ways to fulfill my resolution started materializing with an almost magical speed. This Friday, I went out jogging with Sean to the disused bridge over the Jichon Stream that we tend to go to. It's right next to a bridge that's in use; I'm guessing that it was deemed unsafe and replaced, but then never torn down. When we got there, there were a few trucks parked on it and a tent set up among them. A middle-aged guy was hanging clothes in the dilapidated gazebo that stands at one end of the bridge, next to the modern road that we'd just arrived on. I jumped over the guardrail and said hello, and asked if he was camping (which was a bit of a stupid question because, well, obviously, but my command of Korean wasn't up to asking more intelligent questions). Through much repetition and simplification, he eventually managed to explain to me that he and his friends were a group of guys who climb mountains to hunt for wild ginseng. It's a highly prized medicine, much more esteemed than the farmed kind, and can sell for a lot of money. I immediately asked if I could come along. He told me to come back at 8 in the morning, and they'd be going up soon after. So I commenced getting excited, and said goodbye, and Sean and I jogged back home.
   I showed up bright and early the next morning. Before I even got to the ginseng men, I came to a couple guys in a little blue flatbed truck, the kind that you see everywhere here. The guys were in beekeeping suits and after I noticed that I realized that the wooden boxes in the back of their truck were hives, with bees flying in and out. I watched them lay a white tray on top of a few white honeycombs on the ground by the wildflowers and weeds that grow along the old length of road that leads to the old bridge. I didn't manage to strike up a conversation with them, but it was pretty clear what they were doing, anyhow. After they laid the tray down, they drove off.
   The ginseng men were unpacking various stuff from their trucks to make breakfast. There were some mats laid on the concrete, and a giant, dented old pot boiling over a gas burner. We all sat down on the mats and someone brought out a pot of rice, and the giant pot was brought over. It turned out to be full of broth made of chicken and deodeok (a root that they might have found in the forest or might have bought in a store, I'm not sure). We talked, though mostly they talked and I didn't quite understand what was going on. Then breakfast finished and everyone started getting ready to climb the mountain. Only, I discovered then that they hadn't actually invited me to go hunting ginseng with them, they'd only invited me for breakfast. They told me that I needed boots and long pants, because there are snakes on the mountain. This smelled like an excuse to me, but I didn't press the issue, because when I stepped back to consider it, this was an obviously pretty tight-knit group of guys who were having a good time together and also knew what they were doing, and I was some foreign yutz who barely understood them and had invited himself along. They all suited up in long pants and boots, but they did tell me that I should come back at five and we'd have dinner. I was disappointed, but I understood, so I biked off back home.
   To assuage the disappointment a little, I went and climbed Chang'an Mountain with Sean—the same mountain we always climb, but this time we climbed it from a different direction. At five I biked down to the bridge again and met the ginseng men. "Good luck?" I asked them. "No," they said. They'd only found four ginseng plants. One of the guys showed me the plants, kept tenderly in a plastic bag for the time being. They'd explained to me before that the older the plant, the more it sells for. It's possible to find plants that are as much as a hundred years old, though these are of course quite rare, the find of a lifetime. Such a plant could sell for ten million won ($8500). These, he told me, were nowhere near that league; they were mostly five or six years old. I didn't catch the price he expected to get for them.
   We settled down and they brought out the burners to start getting dinner ready. The menu tonight was chicken cooked baeksuk style—just a plain chicken dunked in a lot of water and boiled for a long time with a few roots and wood chips. I'm not sure if they even used the roots and wood chips. While that was boiling, we had some banchan (side dishes) and some pork-kimchi stir-fry. It wasn't gourmet fare, but it was pretty well suited to the occasion: a bunch of mountain men camping out in one of the most middle-of-nowhere parts of Korea.
   In addition to all this, there was of course a profusion of liquor. They gave it to me liberally and before long I was pretty well smashed. This happens when you eat dinner with Koreans, especially men—pretty much every time. We talked a lot, but regrettably, the thing where you can talk in a foreign language more fluently when you're drunk doesn't work on me, at least not with Korean—I have yet to try it with any other languages. We did manage to sustain a few conversations about America, and how I liked Korea. They also told me that another reason they didn't invite me up the mountain was because I haven't had training, and I'm not old enough. I don't see where age has anything to do with it, (it's probably the traditional Korean hierarchical system shining through), but it was true that I didn't really know what to look for, and I'd probably be telling them all to come over and check out some weeds that I was convinced were a jackpot. Or more likely just wasting their time by needing lots of explanations. At some point, the guy sitting next to me, Cha U-jin, invited me to have dinner with him where he lives in Seoul next time I go there, and gave me his business card (it was for his mountain ginseng business, but it seems he also does some exporting of various items). And we had a merry old time. We all ate and ate, and talked and laughed and enjoyed being out under the stars next to a mountain where they'd just found a bounty, albeit small. It felt like longer, but when I staggered over to my bike to go home, it turned out to be only about ten o'clock. I managed to bike home and then collapsed.
   The next day (today), they were off at a different mountain some thirty minutes' drive distant, but they told me before I left the first dinner that I should come back and bring them some of the American food that I was planning on making for dinner. There's really only one American food that I make anymore, and that's 5-ways. My bi-weekly 5-way is sort of precious to me, but they had given me tons of food last night, and even if it weren't for wanting to repay them, there was also the fact that I was pretty well stuffed and probably had no business eating an entire 5-way. So I compartmentalized the ingredients and brought them over to the bridge.
   At five o'clock they were still cleaning stuff and putting stuff away from the day's hike. This included themselves—one guy was down under the bridge right next to ours, bathing himself in the Jichon Stream, naked and unconcerned. One of the other guys on the bridge warned him that someone was liable to take a picture of him. They were sort of talking among themselves, probably about logistics and boring stuff, so I stood around and watched things happening. Cranes were flying overhead—they've gotten to be plentiful around here. One crane was standing in the stream.

While I took a picture of it, some people came wading up the stream behind it, toward the bridge, one of them carrying a bucket. I went down to ask them what they were gathering, and they told me, "Meat." If I recall right, there was a woman in her thirties or so, an any-man, and a shriveled, white-haired, but very nimble old guy. Two of them were carrying heavy metal spud bars, for reasons I couldn't fathom. They brought their bucket up and I discovered that "meat" meant fish, lots of little ones about four inches long. (Later I figured that maybe the spud bars were poles they had used to secure fish traps.) The Korean word for fish is mulgogi, and I'd always wondered if it was just a coincidence that it's the same as if you joined the words mul (water) and gogi (meat). I guess it's not. The ginseng men gathered around to look at the fish and then wished them a tasty meal.
   It was raining a little today, so we had dinner in the old gazebo instead of on the bridge. While the more time-consuming dinners were cooking, I assembled the 5-way in a pot they got out, and we ate it with chopsticks.

The temperature was all wrong because it had had too much time to cool down, but we still all ate it with gusto and they asked why I hadn't brought more. A couple of them took to eating it with kimchi, and convinced me to try the same. (It was not good.) We drank a little, but they were aware that I had to work tomorrow in the morning, so they didn't give me a lot. They didn't drink much either, but they didn't have to worry about being in an office; it was around this time that I thought to ask how often they do this, and the round-faced guy who'd taken a shine to me told me that this is every day for them, at least during the season, which runs from May to October. Here I'd been thinking that they were just a group of old army friends who liked to take a yearly vacation together, looking for mountain ginseng and drinking. It seemed like it couldn't be lucrative enough for them to break even, so I asked again about the rewards they could expect to reap. They had a twelve-year-old plant out so I could take a picture of it, and they told me they could expect to sell it for about 700,000 won, or $600. That was way more than I'd been thinking. It got me to considering that I should probably keep an eye out for mountain ginseng too when I'm out walking. Not that I'm likely to find any, if a party of six men who do this for a living (or at least part of a living) can come down from eight hours of searching with only four plants. But all the same, it's something to keep an eye out for.

This is the guy who sort of became my sponsor, inviting me to dinner and  answering all my questions so other people wouldn't get tired of me. He also told me my hair is handsome. He's holding a young plant, maybe five or six years old. Price unknown. The guy on the right is the one who had all the luck—I think he found all four plants yesterday.

They let me hold the twelve-year-old plant.

   For the rest of dinner we had Korean-style chicken noodle soup, and we talked a bit, but it seemed like we'd exhausted the number of things I could talk about with my limited vocabulary, and we ended up repeating stuff we'd already talked about. One of the guys, who I guess was drinking a lot more than I noticed, started talking about how much sex he was having when he was about my age. (The rest of them smiled stoically and bore it.) Dinner tapered off and everyone got up. I took a few pictures and then called it a night, and promised to come see them if they were ever around here again. Tomorrow they're driving to mountains in other parts. But it's okay, because I have a date to make cucumber and radish kimchis with the the women from downstairs tomorrow. The country is starting to reveal itself to me, finally.

Things have happened here and there

You've probably noticed that I haven't written anything in a month. If you were in the right place at the right time, you may have seen the Facebook thread where I said that I was putting off all work on the blog in favor of getting my font completely done. Well, I'm done with the font—for practical purposes. It took me almost a week longer than I thought it would, which is no small margin of error considering that from the time I set my deadline until the deadline I planned to hit was only a little over three weeks. And when I say I'm done I can't say that in all capital letters like I'd like to, because what I really mean is that I'm done with all major work on it. I've kerned and I've gotten all the OpenType features working right. Those probably mean nothing to you, but they're useful and actually not all that hard to understand if you can see them visualized, as I happen to have done on page 16 of my big sample booklet. All I have left to do is to fix the kerning and nudge a few shapes here and there. I don't need to spend any more time compiling huge databases of characters. I'm guessing that the total actual amount of time I'll need to spend with FontLab open working on these fonts is less than 10 hours between now and when I can send the files off to be bought and downloaded by happy end-users.
   Due to the font, there's really not a whole heck of a lot that you've missed from my not blogging for a month. Instead of going on adventures, I've mostly sat at my computer, looking more and more like the definition of a pasty-skinned hacker shut-in, or maybe a vampire. I've listened to a lot of podcasts and learned some interesting things. But the month of May hasn't been completely devoid of interesting events, so I guess I should mention what some of them were.
   Bob came. Bob is an original hippie, now in his sixties. He went to Woodstock back in the day, and he narrowly avoided being drafted and having to decide whether to run away or to decide that he wasn't up to trying to evade the US government. He's vegetarian. Sean met him while he was working at a camp in Cape Cod; Bob lives in a trailer park near the camp and is always affable with the people working at the camp, so he ends up hanging out with them all the time. After putting in a few decades of work herding engineers for the government, he got a pension that's nice enough that he can spend his golden years traveling around the world and coming back to enjoy summer at home. Korea was his last stop on this year's world trip, and Sean invited him to use Sachangni as a staging ground for his adventures to the rest of the country. He arrived on a Thursday without having to be picked up at the airport as all of Sean's other visitors have. (Sean is the only person here who's had any visitors this year, but he's had tons: Natalie several times, his parents, his friends Kieran and Naoko who were on their way to Japan, and finally Bob.) He and Sean and I went up to the roof and we all ate dinner together and Bob told some stories. He has lots of stories and an urge to tell every one of them. But he's done so many different things that they're almost all interesting stories, so it's okay. We listened to his stories and then later he took my guitar and started singing old songs that made me wish I'd been around back when they were new.
   Some of his earliest experience of Korea came in the form of my school's Sports Day, which happened that Friday. I think he only watched from the window, actually, but I was right there being a part of it. It was basically identical to the Sports Day that the school held last semester, but I appear not to have ever mentioned that one either, so that does you no good as a description. Sports Day is a big deal. At my school  when I was growing up we had Track & Field Day, where the school took a day off from normal classes and set up a series of events for everyone to compete in outside on our big green field and blacktop playground, but I don't remember any preparation for it happening outside of maybe some special stuff in gym class. Here, they had weeks of practice in order to get Sports Day to go off just right. Every morning for maybe the fortnight leading up to the day of the event, before regular classes started, I would hear music coming in from the playground, which the English classroom overlooks (and now that I think about it, so does every classroom in the entire school). I mainly remember one song that was played on bells, bass drums, and flute, and had a simple but extremely compelling rhythm in 3/4 time; it was almost perfectly composed for getting up and moving around. Over this song was a voiceover of a woman counting, and while it played every morning, the students would stand in a giant grid formation and stretch, using almost the same series of stretches I did in hapkido. Afterwards various different grades of the students would practice highly coordinated dances. When you see videos of the Mass Games in North Korea (if you're not familiar: here's one), what you don't know about them is that these aren't just a tradition that the Kim dynasty came up with out of nowhere. These are apparently a pan-Korean thing; the tradition of having kids show off their ability to execute a carefully choreographed routine seems to be very highly thought of. It seems very much in keeping with the character of Korea to me, and here I mean Korea the way Koreans mean it when they say Korea—the two countries taken as a whole. They have more in common than many people probably realize. (Though of course a huge number of people in America probably don't even know there's a difference between North and South Korea.)
   On the actual morning of Sports Day, parents spread out all over the steps at the edge of the playground and stretched out picnic blankets to sit and watch. The day started out with synchronized stretching, and then they got into the events. The dancing was one of the main two things that they did. The other was races. I was a crucial component in the races, in my capacity as ribbon-holder. What this meant was that I stood at the end of the racetrack (marked off by paint on the sand floor of the playground, running the playground's length) and held one end of the ribbon. Throughout the day the other end of the ribbon was held up by various students, teachers, and the leg of a desk. When competitors came close to the end, I would stoop down and bring the ribbon to the ground so they could step over it. This was exactly as pointless as it sounds, maybe more so. The people determining who was in first, second, and third could have told equally as well if the ribbon hadn't been there; in fact, they probably could've seen better if there had been only the white paint line that marked the end of the racecourse and no confusion from the ribbon (also white). Nonetheless, there I stood, offering that psychological goal for the racers to work toward. There were footraces, three-legged races, sack races, obstacle races, and hurdle races. They really did make the most of a simple theme. After a few race events, there would be a break, and two grades of students (5th and 6th, say) would go out to the middle of the field and dance together. Then there would be more races. So passed Sports Day. There were a few other games toward the end, one of them having to do with throwing balls at two big metal contraptions on poles that swung open when they'd been hit enough times and let out banners saying Congratulations. At the end there was another session of synchronized stretching, and then the students all stood in their grid formation and were addressed by the principal and the vice principal in a closing ceremony, and prizes were awarded (mostly notebooks and pencils and such). And that was Sports Day.
   Then Bob, Sean, and I all took a trip to Seoul. Sean was giving the grand tour of Seoul for the last time; he'd already shown the city to Natalie, his parents, and Kieran and Naoko. I, however, had really never done a whole lot of seeing the sights there. I'd gone to Seoul Tower and seen the locked gates to some palaces while just walking along, and that was about it. So I thought it'd be good to check out what there was.
   We got there at night and talked with some travelers at the hostel and drank makkeolli. The next morning we hit the city. We didn't really have a firm idea of what we wanted to do; we planned to just kind of go with the flow. We went to Gwangjang Market first, mainly because I thought Bob might want to have some lunch there where it'd be easy to get vegetarian bibimbap, but it was too early for lunch so the trip ended up being just kind of an aimless diversion where we looked at weird foodstuffs and had snacks. We also checked out the fashion district for no particular reason except the spectacle of it, of which there was plenty. The crowds in Myeongdong bring to mind a beehive or a stampede. We were highly amused.
    We moved on to the Korean War Memorial. I'd never been here before, but it was probably my favorite thing of the day. Out front are several very well done monuments, most of them sculpted with a split down the middle. Inside there are busts and drums and artifacts, but the main thing is a long path that shows you the chronology of the war through some actually rather good multimedia that really brought some power and life to the history. Some of the best were the places where they had brush set up to look like the sort of place you'd be hiding in if you were a soldier fighting for the South, and projected onto the wall in front of the brush was a scene showing what happened at some certain battle in the war. There were also tanks and humvees and guns, plus journals and diplomatic notes that I wished I could read. It was of course intensely nationalistic, as you'd expect from a museum about defending your country against invaders, but in that special way that Korea is nationalistic. At some point I'm going to write in full about Korean nationalism. It's a weird thing.
   When we finished, and got out front, there was, unexpectedly, a ceremony going on that looked like it could have been taking place in the 1400s, with bright banners everywhere, people in elaborate costumes and tall complex hats, a red carpet and a stage, and a man periodically shouting and banging on a drum so big that he and two friends could have comfortably sat inside it. What luck to have stumbled upon a traditional ceremony taking place! But then I asked a Korean spectator what this was, and he told me it was a royal wedding, and since there is no royalty in present-day Korea I connected the dots and determined that we were watching a reenactment. This disappointed Bob greatly. He immediately wanted to just move on, so we did.
   The last stop for the day was the royal palace, 경복궁 (Gyeongbokgung), which offered even more reenactments to disappoint Bob, though he didn't seem to be quite as disappointed when he knew from the outset that it was all fake. As we were entering through the main gate, so was a procession of men towing drums on carts, all the men wearing royal-style old clothing, each one with a beard and a mustache, most of which were painted on with mascara or something because facial hair is considered such an oddity in Korea that even if you make your living as a historical reenactor you still don't want to be seen in day-to-day life not being clean-shaven. (I have seen some Koreans with facial hair, but very few. Many of my students still haven't gotten over the presence of my beard and like to reach out and touch it whenever they get a chance and are feeling brazen enough.) We didn't go into the palace itself because it was crowded and we were feeling tired of walking and thrifty, so we sat next to the inner gate and watched things happen. Eventually we had seen pretty much all the happenings that appeared to be on the docket of happenings for the day, so we called it a day and went to relax at the hostel with some makkeolli and a guitar. We watched the supermoon (one day late) and decided that it did seem a little bit bigger than usual. And since then I consider myself to have seen the sights in Seoul.
   Bob took off for other parts of Korea and I got back to my font from the welcome distraction he had been. That week we had Teacher's Day, which was kind of nice because there was a ceremony and I got a boutonniere and Amanda got a little bouquet in a basket. And one kid gave me a note in Korean about how he likes my teaching and thinks English class is fun. I couldn't quite interpret all of it, and also, to my enormous shame, I was looking at the note when he handed it to me instead of at his face, and when I looked up and thanked him I forgot to memorize who he was and he just blended right back in with the rest of the class. Koreans don't all look the same to me anymore, but a lot of them do. In my after-school class there are two girls, Shi-eun and Seo-won, and they still look practically identical to me. They even have the same pink glasses frames. What am I supposed to do? I feel so bad that I don't know anyone's names, but they just don't stick, and I suspect they never will in the little time I have left.
   Some evenings, I've been taking short breaks away from FontLab by jogging with Sean. I said I would, and I have, and it's been pretty refreshing. We don't get out quite every other day, but we do end up getting out at least twice a week and some weeks three times. The last time we did it, on Thursday, I went barefoot, and the world didn't end and I think no one even noticed, so I'm going to keep that up. Next time I climb a mountain I plan to have my soles toughened enough that I can make it all the way up and down without my shoes. In fact I might even be able to carry this out during some of my travels. I've been looking for a backpack, and on a recent trip to Seoul I found one that looks good, and it has a shoe compartment in the bottom, so that would be pretty handy. Most people would wear say a pair of tennis shoes and use the compartment to store their hiking boots, but I'd enjoy just going barefoot and using it to store the shoes that I'd wear if I ever needed to wear shoes.
   The trip when I found that backpack was the same trip when Sean and I climbed 도봉단 (Dobongsan), just this last weekend. By now you've heard report after report of the mountains we've climbed, so I'll try to distill this to just the things that were new and hopefully interesting. First of which is that Dobongsan is actually located physically within the city of Seoul. Russell expected that this meant it was really just sort of a hill that the Seoulites have decided should be preserved and made famous. Sean and I found out through experience that it is a completely legitimate mountain. It's one of a couple of mountains, the other named Bukhansan, that have traditionally marked the northern limits of the city. Certainly there's been basically no development on it aside from trails and the odd temple or shelter here and there, which is surprising enough given the absolute frenzy with which the city around it has been developed. I guess it's sort of Seoul's version of Central Park, except it's far less central, and also it hasn't undergone the manicuring of every inch that Olmsted and Vaux did with Central Park.
   At the bottom, just outside the limits of Bukhansan National Park (which encompasses both of the mountains), is where you find the things that are inevitable at the nexus of a national park and a city full of ten million Koreans: food stands, and outdoor gear stores. The breeding grounds at this particular place are incredibly rich for both of these niche organisms, and there is a tremendous profusion of both. You can find any Korean food that exists at the bottom of this mountain, and if a brand of outdoor gear exists in Korea, you will find an outlet for it here, one of the dozens upon dozens of stores lining the roads at the entrance. Buying some kimbap to eat on top of the mountain, we passed these and entered the park, where a park ranger with crooked teeth and boundless charisma explained to us in detail our various options for routes up the mountain, and made sure we knew that we were not to slip off any of the steep rocks into the deep valleys and make him call a helicopter for us. And so we ascended. The ascent was mostly like any of our other mountain ascents until we got pretty close to the top. Then the greenery became much sparser and gave way to rocks. While at Seoraksan last fall there were staircases sunk into the stone, here we walked directly on the rocks, which were at some points nearly vertical, with our support consisting of a series of poles driven into the stone with sturdy ropes strung between them. A lot of Koreans were ahead of us and keeping us from going any faster, but we probably couldn't have sped up a whole lot even if we'd wanted. It was some tough terrain. But the views were worth it. As we approached the first of the three peaks, we would stop here and there to catch our breath while sitting on some huge boulder looking out over side of the mountain. Unlike all the other mountains we'd climbed, here, the views weren't of wilderness but rather, of course, of the city of Seoul. And what a strange sight it was. The corner of it that we could see from atop Dobongsan was just a vast plain of apartment buildings, spread out for mile after mile, every single one of them the same color, most of them the same height, looking from this distance like a growth of bizarre lichen.  There was lots of smog, too, of course. But I was struck more by the uniformity. Closer to the center there's more variety, and what I was looking at was basically the analog to suburbs that exists in a country that's too small to have sprawling subdivisions. Still, it was strange.
   We got to the first, somewhat shorter, peak, and a helicopter was flying around at one of the other peaks, maybe half a mile away from us. I thought it must be rescuing someone—our lively guide had told us that two days ago a woman had fallen and was airlifted out, and that this was by no means uncommon—but it didn't stop, just kind of buzzed randomly around. It went below the level of our peak, so for the first time I saw the blades of a helicopter from above. I've probably seen the back of a flying bird before at some point, but I really don't remember when; that day I saw that too. We were fairly seriously high up.
   To get to the next peak we held on tight to the ropes and inched down a tenuous path that was more suited for mountain goats than for throngs of people. Envision two peaks of a mountain, both of them above the treeline and practically vertical. There's a ridge between the two peaks, but that ridge isn't traversible. Instead envision a little ledge that stretches between the two peaks, going down along the steep wall and then horizontal briefly and then back up to join the other peak. I thought it was tremendous fun. Sean fears descending anything and every word he spoke was suffused with worry until we started going back up, and then he was overjoyed. We got to the top peak but unfortunately there was a giant unclimbable rock in the way of our view of the city, so we had already seen our best view of the day. There was another peak, but we got confused and didn't find our way to it, so that was that for Dobongsan. We climbed back down and ate fish and porkburgers, and then we went home well exhausted.
   That was this last weekend. It was a three-day weekend here, too, so we had time to recover. In the US it was Memorial Day, and here it was Buddha's 2,556th birthday. So I went, with Sean, up to the temple in town around lunchtime. Having done some cursory reading, we'd found that we would probably be served a free lunch of bibimbap. And it was so. We came up the stairs to the courtyard and there were chairs set up facing toward the bell in its shelter on the hill, and the five-color banners strung up overhead. Soldiers were walking around everywhere and there were musical instruments on the chairs at the back. The soldier at the greeting booth told us to go in and have lunch. The bibimbap wasn't the best bibimbap ever, but it was free so I'm not going to whine. After we ate we waited around to see the orchestra play and the ceremony start, but then it turned out that we had gotten there at pretty much the very end of the party, and everyone was starting to go home. The musicians grabbed all their instruments and left, and the bowls of bibimbap all disappeared from inside the temple. We talked briefly to a Korean woman from down the road, which was kind of nice, and then we were given snacks to take home and bracelets of beads and we left. So I guess we mostly missed that holiday. Oh well, I suppose.
   There have been a few other things that happened, but I'll talk about them in some other post. This one has already gotten long and scraggly and anyhow I'm due to go downstairs and hang out. I'll write again in much less than a month.