From the Land of the Morning Calm: Day 3 Part 1

Alright, it's been a couple of weeks. Now I have to remember Day 3...ah yes.

Busan.

I'd bought train tickets when I'd come into Seoul station for a train from Pyeongtaek to Busan for Saturday morning, snagging the last seats we could find together and get there by noon-ish. This had us leaving around 8am, so we met up at 7 and took a taxi. Pyeongtaek was foggy/misty, as I've come to know that much of Korea is. At least the country side has this issue.

No wonder it's the land of morning calm. You can't see whatever pissed you off in the morning. There's too much fog.

That's just a joke, and most of the cities have less fog. It was just strange for me.

So we met up early, had Dunkin' Donuts, grabbed some drinks and hit the train.

My brother and I chatted through most of the way there, sleeping occasionally. There was a jerk who stood in the aisle next to my seat with his phone going off in his ass pocket for 5 minutes. I wanted to hurt him.

The train trip lasted 4 hours, but we got to Busan safe and sound and saw a lot of hills and valleys out the window on the way there. I tried to use the bathroom once but it was occupied so I just went back to my seat.

Anyway, so we got to Busan around noon and Bill went about trying to contact his friend from Busan while Mariel and I chatted. I met Mariel through a writing website a few months before this and we've both been living in Asia for 4-5 years. I don't think Bill understood this, but it worked out okay anyway.

We waited there for a little while as Bill tried to contact his friend. Mariel started getting impatient to go, as was I, but I played the middle-ground. Bill finally got his friend on the phone and the guy had just gotten on the train to come out there. What I didn't realize at the time was that Bill's friend wasn't coming to the festival with us--he only wanted to show us around town, which we didn't have a lot of time for after waiting 2 hours. The guy comes back to Busan every weekend to hang with his family, so family stuff comes first. But all of that meant that Bill made his apologies to his friend and we headed to the station.

When we had arrived, we went to have lunch in China town, which was weird but cool. It turns out my friend couldn't read all of the menu on the wall in the tiny place we wound up, but their beef-bowl wasn't bad. She also wouldn't let Bill pay for things, which was a little strange to me. Well I mean of course, he's my brother, I let him pay if he wants to pay and try to pay him back when I can. But in Japan, too, if someone pays for dinner, you cover some later thing. Doling out cash in public just isn't what they do.

But whatever. I guess it was fine. Bill didn't complain much, keeping quiet with tooth pain most of the time. We took the subway, got off, went around, got on another one, got to some strange-sounding station, and went out to get to the bus depot. Once there we had to wait in a long line for bus tickets. Meanwhile, people went through the automated system to get tickets really quickly at computers nearby. Since none of us were really sure about the spelling or pronunciation of Jinju in Korean, we didn't want to risk it.

Nearby, a young woman started scream-whining loudly at some guy, who kept trying to quiet her down. This would never happen in Japan unless the woman was 1) drunk or  2) mentally disabled. It just isn't done in public. It seems like even bleeding to death is done with the utmost concern for disturbing others. Okay, that's a joke. I've never seen someone bleeding to death, and I'm at least going to train my kids to scream their heads off if someone physically assaults them. that's another story, though.

So this woman is screaming and the Korean people are half-looking, half-ignoring her. Of course, none of us knows what she's screaming about. She's just screaming. It wasn't the "He's going to kill me!" screaming from a horror movie; more like the "But I wanted the blue one!" screaming of an infant. that's what the tone said anyway.

Someone needed a spanking.

Anyway, so we got our tickets and got in the big-ass line for Jinju. An old man behind us grabbed Bill's terribly muscular bicep and said something in Korean. We stared for a second, trying to see if this was a happy comment or an angry one. Nothing gave us any info until Mariel said it must me happy--the old guy is proud of his culture and excited for foreigners to come and see something magical. We smiled and thanked him. Nothing happened after that to indicate anything different, so Mariel was probably right.

Not being able to read or speak was driving me nuts. Not so much on this day but throughout the trip.

The great thing about Korean bus travel is when it's busy, they bring in extra buses to take the extra load, so after they filled the first bus, they sent us a bunch of other people to the second one. Then we changed buses to another one. Then we were in business and 2 hours passed while we drove through the countryside and into traffic.

Bill slept a bit and looked pained at other times. Mariel and I talked about a bunch of stuff. then we saw the crowds of people and knew we were in the right place. When the bus stopped at the Jinju bus depot, if was something like 6PM or so. I think. I didn't have a watch. We walked toward the festival and tried to find a hotel. Seeing how much traffic there was, there was no way we were heading back to Busan at 9PM if we actually wanted to see anything. So we wandered near the festival and all the places were booked solid.

A few blocks away, there was a big sign for a love hotel. We walked toward it and through the parking lot, which was enclosed under the building with a dense garland of ropes hanging over the entrances so people couldn't see whose car was where from the street. This is a common thing with Japanese lover hotels, too. The parking lot was packed, though, so we walked onward. A little further down, there were a few smaller hotels. We went into one and asked if there was room for three. They tried really hard to be accomodating, but they weren't sure what we were. Obviously, they couldn't see the family resemblance. Well, whatever they thought, they still brought us an extra bed-roll (Japanese futon style...so the size of one human, roughly) and some sheets.We took it.

Having secured accommodation, we went back out to enjoy the festival.

From the Land of the Morning Calm: Day 2

My second day in Korea, I had the morning free, so I wandered around on my own, then with Easter Island Man taking pictures. Then I met my brother at the base and he escorted me around. We went to a bbq, he introduced me to some folks in his company. They seemed really cool. Really welcoming. One of the commanding guys (seriously, I don't have a mind for rank, so I've no idea...I think he was second in command after the captain) even pulled me and Bill up there and talked about us for a sec, saying it was awesome to have family visit. You could tell who actually talks to my brother, and that he's mentioned me before but half of the weren't really listening. One of my brother's friends actually saw the family resemblance, which was cool since we spent the previous evening convincing the hotel staff that we're not romantically inclined. Weirdoes.

Anyway...so the bbq was a great time, and the atmosphere on base at the time was nice. Comfortable. It really feels like mini-America. I also met my brother's friend Wong, who has been mentioned many times. He looks a lot like Grimm's Reggie Lee (aka Sgt. Wu) which was interesting. My brother's current platoon leader smiles so much. She seems really supportive and awesome. She was one of the ones who knew who I was and where I lived. I spent a lot of time explaining that I was a civilian.

I always thought the attitude on a military base would be different--industrial in a way. But it was jovial and normal. My goodness was it good to see non-homogeneous groups of people again. In Japan, almost everyone is Japanese. On base, everyone's American (or Korean) but no one stares at anyone else for the color of their skin. That was refreshing.

Very cool folks, easy to talk to. Good food and fun. Then we wandered off and went shopping. I now have a bunch of food to bring home. Woohoo!!

Now I better shut this thing down and shove it in my luggage so it'll be safe while I'm away. Yes, that is a bad idea, but I am paying $60 for this room to store my luggage tonight and most of tomorrow, so hopefully it will be okay. Also, last night I finally got the Agoda people to give me a refund--and it was a full refund, too. Like not even minus the cancellation charge. I guess that's the fee I get to receive on the grounds of having to be driven through hooker central.

Anyway, onward and upward.

From the Land of the Morning Calm: Night 1, Part 2

I have shut off the debate and am writing with background noise provided by the neighbor's TV set. I will finish this part of this story and then sleep for a few hours as I need to get up at 6AM to get ready to go to Busan in the morning. It's 1AM now.


So I got to Pyeongtaek station and looked around for my brother, who wasn't there. Then I grabbed a taxi and showed him the address of the hotel I had reserved on Agoda.com. This hotel was close to the train station and looked clean. Honestly, the pictures of the inside looked a bit like a Japanese love hotel, but I wasn't going to let that discourage me. Standards are different in Korea. Maybe this was an okay place.

The taxi driver does not try to make conversation. I guess my exhaustion and frustration are freaking obvious. He instead drives us around in a circle and then down a strange stretch of road. One side is blocked off with fences--it looks like construction is happening or a dangerous vacant lot lurks beyond. On the other side of the street there are many well lit, huge-windowed shops. There are a few girls in clothing Japan labels as "fashionable teen clothing" standing around the front, which made me think maybe it was a hair salon, and this is a part time job of theirs or something...

And then there were more. Looking beyond them into the shops I found nothing. Nothing by more mostly-naked, made-up-too-much women of indeterminate age, standing and beckoning to whatever sat in the back of the cab, hoping the hint of foreign face came with a cock and a wad of cash.

I recoiled. It's not that women are not my thing. It's that I wouldn't want to be with a hooker when I was single, much less as a happily married woman.

Then the cab stopped. At the corner. Kitty corner to the brothel was my hotel. I should have trusted my intial urge to tell the cabbie to go on, somewhere, anywhere else. I didn't. I got out and went in, thinking maybe it would all work out.

The guy at the front desk was confused when I came in, by myself and with so much luggage. Maybe he thought I had sex-midgets or a full-leather body suit in the huge rolling suitcase. In any case, he looked at my Japanese-printed form and gave me a room. I went up to it.

I didn't know that you have to put the room key in a slot by the door in order to use the electricity. Instead I would up using the emergency flashlight (which beeped like mad--I'm sure I ruined many an orgasm that night) until I figured it out. The room was normal for a love hotel. I used the toilet and tried to find a place to plug in my laptop, only to find the plugs practically soldered in place. One of them might have been unplug-able  but I didn't know what the plug using the outlet belonged to. There was a computer there, so I turned it on, anxious to tell my brother I was in town, my friends and family I was safe, and my husband that I loved him and missed him.

Once the computer loaded and told me a multitude of Korean things, I finally got it to load Internet Explorer. From there, facebook took a few minutes to get up and running (and logged in) before I could post my status update and message my brother, who had messaged me hours before that he would be wandering around the gate waiting for me. I felt like an ass.

So people knew I was safe, and my brother knew I was there, so I went down to deal with the rest. I made sure I had everything and went back down to the desk. When I came out of the elevator and laid the key along with the packet of amenities on the counter, he looked up and asked "Why?"

Really? Why? That wasn't obvious the second I walked in here? Why?

"Do you speak English?" I asked.

"No."

"Nihongo Hanishimasu ka?"

"No." and he smiled. Smiling at me? Now?

"Okay. Let's try English." I tried to explain with as many hand gestures as I could think of without being crass, that I was not comfortable. That the prostitutes across the street made me uneasy. That I couldn't plug in my laptop. That I would not stay here. Not that night or any night. I also said that I didn't expect a refund from him--that I would get it online, just like I had made the reservation in the first place.

Then I asked him to call me a taxi. He really didn't get most of it, but I didn't care. While we waited for the taxi, I asked him if I could use the phone and let him dial my brother's phone number. I spent a few minutes explaining my dilemma. Bill, my brother, listened and heard me out, suggesting I just come to the base once the taxi got there. Not too long after, the phone went dead. This was a landline phone, mind you. I looked at the clerk and tried to explain. He stared at me. "The phone is dead."

"What?" Not believing me. Maybe pointing to the phone and drawing a mime-knife finger across my throat wasn't clear enough.

"E-E-E-E-E-E-E-EEEEEE." I said, mimicking the noise on the other end of the line.

He held the phone to his ear, and the nodded like he finally got it. He offered to call again, and I let him though it didn't go through.

"Maybe you want lan cord?" He asked, like I still wanted to stay there.

"No." Cars kept pulling up, but his fear that they were really customers made him demand I stay inside, waiting for a taxi that can't see me.

So the Taxi left. He went out and came back to tell me "Taxi go."

So I went to go. "No, no. I call."

Okay, so I waited. His call also went nowhere.

"It's fine. I'll walk." I said and hauled ass out of there. Luckily, only a couple of blocks from whore alley was a main street, and 2 seconds after I got there, I saw a taxi.

Thus I hailed my first Taxi.

From there, the night improved. The guy took me to the pedestrian gate at the base and I went into the main desk to wait for my brother. They let me leave my bags there when I went back outside to find him. Then I saw Bill, standing on the other side of the crosswalk, a plastic shopping bag in one hand and a smoothie (for me) in the other.

And then the trip became totally worth it.

The smoothie was awesome, but not as great as talking to my brother. We grabbed my bags and headed out to my brother's favorite restaurant here, which was a great little Korean BBQ joint. Then we went to the nearest hotel with the idea that if it sucked I would go get a different one the next morning before the 1:00 on-base barbecue I was going to with my brother (which turned out the be really fun as well)...so that was the plan.

To our surprise, the lady at the front desk of the first place we came to spoke excellent English. It turned out she had lived in America for 45 years with her American Military husband, but once he died of cancer, she stopped having a green card, so she can't work on base even though her English is a lot better than most of the Korean ladies on base.

She was cool. She got me a room and a lan cable. I cam up to find a transformer ready to go. The room was a lot like a Japanese business hotel room, but a little bit bigger. It was clean. It was not a sex den. I was happy.

My brother headed off and I started trying to relax before contacting my husband for our first skype chat ever.

Then I looked at the sheets.

I'm staying at Hotel Enterprise.

Make it so.

From the Land of the Morning Calm: First Night, Part 1

I am writing this whole listening to the first presidential debate or, as my mind sees it, "the snake oil salesman battling that nice black man."

Anyway. Let's talk about Korea.

I came into Incheon. The flight was nice and short. I was frustrated that the flight attendants served the Japanese men next to me before me even though it was out of order for our seating arrangement (starting in the middle, working to the window, then coming back to the white girl)...but otherwise it was good. I even spent most of the two hours playing a "Learn Basic Korean Words" game from Berlitz. It wasn't bad, but didn't teach me how to read. I like reading stuff.
This meant I couldn't watch the random episodes from season 2 of Sherlock, which was hard to pass up, but I want to watch them with Tomo, so it was better to wait.

The airport was easy to manage and if you have a credit card that isn't a debit card as well (like me) then you can rent a cell phone easily. So, that was a waste of time. Then I took the train, easy peasy, and I was in Seoul.

Seoul stole two hours of my life. Here's how.

I got off the train and took the elevator up to the main floor. I went to a handy maching, punched in Pyeongtaek and paid for a ticket. Then I went to the bullet-train desk and bought tickets for my brother and I to go to Busan on Saturday. What I should have done next was buy the ticket to Pyeongtaek from the same people and got on the dang train. Instead, I went down to the only information desk I could find (basement level 2) and asked the only people not staring at their feet about it. One woman who didn't know squat then sent me to another woman who said "Go up. Take exit 2." But nothing else. The look of "And then..." on my face that would have made a woman in Japan go on explaining, maybe using a map to do so, did nothing for this woman. She just repeated, with frustration, "Exit 2."

So I took exit 2, and found a multitude of options. I could walk around the street side stuff in 2 directions or down one of two different subway entrances. I picked one I saw a man in camo going down and followed him. None of the signs below indicated Pyeongtaek. I looked at a larger station map. Pyeongtaek, being outside of Seoul, was of course not on the subway. That didn't stop the information desk from sending me there.

Then I freaked out for a little while. I wanted to cry. I wanted to call my brother, and could have, but thought better of it. Instead, I put myself and my massive luggage against a pillar and thought for a minute.

I went through a larger gate this time, not getting my luggage caught on the turnstiles  I found a security guard and asked him, "How do I get to Pyeongtaek?"

"Pyeongtaek?" He asked, stopping to talk into his walkie-talkie. "No subway."

"Okay, then how?" I ask, wanting some form of pointing or information.

"Go inside." He points at the doors to Seoul station, through exit 2.

"But where do I go then?"

"Inside. Go Inside," he said, before turning profile and ignoring me.

So I stormed past the foreigners, who looked at me strangely. And I thought a little too loudly, "I already hate this fucking country."

Mind you, it's not really the country I hate. It's people who can't be bothered to help you. If I had gone on their advice alone, I probably would have been murdered somewhere in Seoul that night.

So I go inside and think about finding internet or something similar. Then and only then did it occur to me that Pyeongtaek was on the same line that went to Busan. Duh. So I bought a ticket for the train leaving in less than 10 minutes and raced down the well labelled stairs to platform five. I found my seat and tried to relax.

The woman next to me offered me a strange green fruit, which I tried to humbly decline before remembering that in Korea, they won't ask over and over, and I don't know how to tell her anything at all.

So the next hour was spent in uncomfortable silence, but I succeeded in getting to a zen state for a moment.

Pyeongtaek would prove just as challenging.

Shopping...Now with Radiation!

Today was unusual in that it was a Saturday and I didn't have to work because it is some sort of national holiday. Huzzah!
So I slept in, but still woke up before noon. I elected to go to the grocery store at noon to avoid the hordes of housewives and families that would be coming later in the day. At noon, many more traditional suburban families are having lunch. Exactly noon. This seems really weird to me, as lunch for me happens when I am hungry and it's in the middle of the day or I have a break. Some days I don't even have a class before noon, but still what I eat before work is breakfast to me.

Regardless of my lunch versus breakfast semantics debate, I went to the grocery store and only had to battle a few people to get to where I wanted to go. Crowded spaces tend to freak me out. If I can't find a way out easily, I start to hyperventilate. It's my nerves. Apparently part of my mind is always in a zombie film. That would explain my fear of being surrounded as well as my comfortable, useful, and unfashionable taste in footwear. (Always sneakers. Always...)

To my delight, they finally stopped trying to sell peaches from Fukushima! Other stores in the bigger cities don't even carry produce from that prefecture as almost everyone thinks "radioactive" when they see the name. Not my local grocery.

The whole "eat local produce" thing doesn't really work when you live here. Miyagi doesn't have the worst of it, but the government's dedication to checking for contamination leaves something to be desired. As far as I know, they still haven't even let independent investigators anywhere near the actual Daiichi plant and are busy telling the rest of us that of course everything is ok. I'm not buying it. Neither is my Japanese husband.

So we don't buy produce from Fukushima. Miyagi, Iwate, Yamagata, and even Aomori have some issues but probably aren't as dangerous. Seeing as we're trying to make a baby in the near future, we're trying to be as safe as possible, so we don't buy from them either. This also means Chiba is out. Despite being next to Tokyo and therefor not so close to Fukushima itself, the prefecture was directly in the path of the winds from the time of the meltdown. As far as my cautious husband is concerned, they're out, along with Ibaraki and just about everywhere north of central Japan. South of Nagoya is okay, apparently.

This means every time I go grocery shopping, I have to read carefully for where everything comes from. Mind you, all these names are in Kanji. The basic tactic I've adopted is if I can't read it, it's probably not safe. This makes shopping for dinner much more challenging.

I feel bad for the farmers. Through no fault of their own, everything they've ever known has become contaminated and almost if not completely worthless. The land that may have been in their family for generations, the seeds they plant, the fruit they harvest, the livestock they keep--if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's all for nothing. Meanwhile, most of Japan is perfectly fine, like nothing ever happened. Honestly even those farmers have reason to rejoice because after all, they are still here to tend the land. The sea did not steal them away like so many near the shores.

It's been a year and a half. Somehow that doesn't seem to mean anything. Thousands of families are still in trailers. Thousands of people are still "missing" and their families suffer. But keep in mind, that's just Fukushima, Miyagi, and Iwate. If you ever go to Tokyo, it will be fine because NOTHING HAPPENED THERE.

But I digress...


We wind up buying a lot of stuff from Hokkaido. Because I can read "Hokkaido"...though in my mind it's read as "North...sea (mom with a hat and water)...street?" Yeah, that's my brain and Kanji.

And I've been out here for almost five years.

Post Number 1: Just the Basic Facts

Hello out there! Welcome to my blog!

Let's start with a couple of questions I might have if I were you.

1) What's with the title?

I was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, where tornado watches and warnings come with summer, which makes up half of the year. We did tornado drills in school, in which we all ran into the hallway and hid our faces between our knees while sticking our butts in the air, for fear that a tornado might come break all our windows. I never thought this was especially practical, but it was the standard procedure. We got used to the problems that came with tornadoes and the fear that grips you when one is in the area. The first few times you hear those sirens, it's terrifying. After a few years of it, you learn to just stay inside and prepare the candles. There's no telling when the power will go out, but it'll probably be out for a while when it does. If the tornado hits your house, no amount of sticking your butt in the air will save you.

I now live in Shiogama, Miyagi, Japan. That's just north of Sendai. A little over a year ago, we saw one of the biggest seismic events in recorded history. Earthquakes in Japan aren't new, which is precisely why so much of Sendai looks practically the same as before. Earthquake damage isn't what killed people here for the most part. The tsunami on the other hand...

The point is that earthquakes have become my all-too-constant reminder that mother nature has a temper and when it attacks, you don't really get to choose if you live or die. That's my opinion anyway. You can get under a desk. You can get out of the building. You can take cover. Nothing guarantees the success of any of these tasks. Earthquakes have taken over the place in my regular fear-generation-factory that tornadoes used to have.

In my first year in Japan, when I moved to a small mountain town in Gifu prefecture (central Japan, not near here at all), I came up with the title "Trading Tornadoes for Earthquakes" and figured it would be apt for an autobiography if anything interesting happened while I was out here.

That was more than four years ago now, and a lot of life has happened. Here's the synopsis: I fell in love. My company went bankrupt. I moved to the other side of Japan to live with my boyfriend's family. We had a three-fold crazy-ass disaster. Despite differences in culture, class, mother tongue, We got married. We continued living.

And that brings me to now. Follow me as I continue living in Japan and embark on the path to becoming a successful writer!

Is this blog personal or professional? Are you going to talk about writing or Japan or yourself?

I'm going to try to keep things professionally motivated in that I refuse to rant idly. I may post a good deal of impressions that I have of Japan as a foreigner living here. I will also keep you apprised of successes and failures I find as I make the journey toward established author-dom.

Other questions? Ask!