There is a chain of stores in South Korea called Emart, where you can buy basically anything you would ever need, a store so universal that the only modifier “mart” needs is the single most common letter in the English language. On Saturday nights the place pops, free samples of everything, excited crowds all over. You can go there and just fill yourself up with samples and it adds up to a pretty decent meal. Ron is a young man that works at the Emart, and therefore a very decent human being. Today, Ron decides to take a little day trip out to Manjanggul, a famous lava tube system on Jejudo, Korea’s foremost honeymoon or semitropical holiday destination. He rents a little car in Jejusi and quickly takes a liking to it on his drive. I like to imagine him humming a little bit as he takes the turn for Manjanggul, rain pattering on the windshield. He swerves slightly to avoid the spider-legged corpse of a ruined umbrella, tumbleweeding its way along the road. The umbrella is not the most forlorn thing he will see that day, or even that minute. A couple hundred meters down the road, he finds a damp backpacker in full trudge. Ron is an empathetic kind of guy. He stops and rolls down his window. “Manjanggul-eh ga-yo?” he asks. I laugh and nod. “Manjanggul.” In the cave and on the ride to Seongsan, our fortunately shared final destination, I tell him about my trip.

I didn’t tell anyone about this beforehand because I knew some of you would flip your lids, but I took a ferry to Jeju. Those flipping lids would recall that the MV Sewol, which sank in April and killed some 300 people, was also en route to Jeju. This ferry was an overnight, 11 hours from Busan. I was a little sad to leave what was my favourite city in a while, but the views on the way out were some consolation. I spent most of my waking hours on the rear deck, watching the sun go down or come up. The ship rumbled and rattled and coughed fumes like a 6 MPG muscle car. It was funny to me at first, waiting for one of the freighters to pull up alongside and gun its engines, but after a while I started to feel the stacks depositing a layer of grime on my arms and wonder how long it took to contract black lung. At night, far from shore, the ocean sucked up the ship’s light in a matter of about ten feet, and I thought about what it would be like to be dropped out there, in the middle of the ocean, in the total darkness. I thought I would die of fear before drowning. Even the sky at least had stars. That sight spent some time bouncing around my mind, and I half woke midway through the night, sure I was dreaming. It was a pretty good explanation, I thought, for what I was doing on a mat on the floor down in third class of a Korean ferry. But more than that, it was an explanation for the water’s darkness: I had failed to imagine anything beyond the boat’s railings, and there the world ended.

My first day was spent on Udo, a little island off Jejudo that reminded me powerfully of PEI. There were horses just chilling all over the place. I saw a cow. There were all kinds of vehicles for rent, scooters and ATVs, but I ultimately went with a bicycle because I had lots of time, it was cheap, and I really missed my bike. Renting this bike was possibly the best decision I’ve made in my entire life. The index gear shifter didn’t work, but I didn’t want out of 3 anyway. I need to find my way back to bike ownership.

Back at the guest house in Jejusi, I joined the owner, a Chinese chef and his brother and uncle, an ocarina craftsman, and a Hong Kong student for a few beers. South Korea is cool that way.

I enjoyed my breakfast today. Toast is considered a treat here and bread is nearly always sweet, so the breakfast cereal = candy thing we have going in Canada actually can and does go farther elsewhere. Before leaving the city, I wanted to check out the “noodle street” that’s apparently famous. I wandered on over to that part of town, again reminded of PEI, this time Charlottetown, an anemic city that tries its hardest to look good for the tourists, but no one’s fooled. It was spitting rain and almost everything was closed, I assume because it’s Sunday, so I allowed myself to be ushered into the first place I found that looked open. The proprietor’s friendliness was quickly explained to me by the three empty growlers on the table he was sitting at with his friend. It was 12:15. The woman in charge of cooking (and, seemingly, everything – I’m not sure what the official function of the two men was) was sober enough to put together a very nice bowl of soup, though, so I left happy and hiked over to the bus station.

I got off the bus at a stop clearly marked “Manjanggul”. I looked around. There were no caves. There were only two other people at the same stop, a young couple that were quickly picked up by a taxi and left me alone and confused. Ludicrously, I resented them. I knew that, generally speaking, I needed to head south, and there was only one north-south road in the vicinity. The rain was coming down a little harder, but I knew it wasn’t going to get any better. I pulled out the umbrella I had had since Busan. The sharp-minded reader will recall that I was in Busan during Typhoon Nakri, which means that this umbrella had seen some pretty serious punishment. I remembered it as having one broken arm, but it had broken another at some point. The main shaft wasn’t in very good shape either, having been wrestled against unfairly strong winds, and wouldn’t lock at its full length anymore. It was better than nothing, I figured. It actually turned out to be about the same as nothing, but I guess it wasn’t worse. I set off. I hadn’t gone far when a strong gust inverted the umbrella and pulled it to the edge of my grasp. I moved to bring it back in, but as I pulled on the handle, it broke off, and the umbrella sailed away down the road. I gazed sadly after it. I knew that I wasn’t going back to the bus stop, having only this one day to see Manjanggul, and knew further that there was no way I was going to find another umbrella sooner than the end of this road. I squared my shoulders.

I hadn’t gone another hundred meters when Ron stopped up ahead and reversed to meet me, which made him one of my top 3 best friends in the world. Manjanggul was pretty cool, and now I’m at some other guesthouse in the middle of bloody nowhere. I didn’t realize where it was when I booked it, but, so it goes. There is, apparently, a restaurant nearby that the owner has offered to drive me to when a table opens up. He seems like a nice man. I will make a final assessment of his character at the restaurant.

Lots to catch up on, since the last post. Just after noon last Saturday, Gianna texts me to get lunch, which I want, and go to a noraebang (karaoke), which I’m trying to avoid. We make some plans. Erik wants to come along, I know. “I’ll go wake up Erik,” I say, and do so. Erik says he would be glad to come along but has to go wake Kristen. Kristen, I assume, will want to come but need to wake someone else, and so on in a chain that will ultimately encompass the entirety of sentient life on Earth when all we want is some friggin LUNCH but it doesn’t actually turn out that bad, I’m just in a mood. It had been another one of those weeks.

Thursday was the last day of class, and they had a goodbye party at Gecko’s, a little bar/restaurant that was also the venue for the welcome party way back when. Gecko’s management must, I think, be trying to ingratiate themselves with the foreign student contingent at DKU with free drinks and food. Ordinarily I might call that the soundest strategy ever formulated, but the food kind of sucks and the drink selection is very weak, so nobody ever went there except for free stuff, as far as I heard. I feel a little bad for them, but not all that bad because one of the bartenders made fun of me at the goodbye party for taking a “girl’s shot”. I won’t describe the exact reasons for it being considered a girl’s shot, in mindfulness of my grandmothers’ delicate sensibilities, but let it suffice to say I resent having my masculinity policed. There was also another chapter written that night in the book of people sneaking soju into bars, and another in that of me climbing onto rooftops I’m not supposed to.

Erik, Maggie and I left around 10:15 to meet Kristen in Cheonan. Her reasons for being there were never quite explained to me, but it was going to be roughly a 90-minute ride on the subway, which stops running at midnight. As we stood at the station, waiting for the train, at 10:40, we started to consider that we might not make it. Do they kick you off the subway when it stops, or does it go all the way to the end of the line? No one was sure. We were feeling adventurous (read: mildly drunk), so we embarked when the train arrived, around 10:45.

We were the happy inhabitants of a bubble that included only the three of us, the kind of bubble that tends to form around the buzzed and makes them forget the presence of other people. Maggie voiced her opinion that Rita Skeeter was a much smarter Harry Potter-themed costume than Hermione Granger. Erik yelled a lot. I drew a Ulam spiral on my arm in pen. I was startled when I heard an indeterminate grunt from just beyond my right shoulder. Hovering there was an old, old man who evidently spoke little English.

This was to be matched against my almost non-existent Korean, because Erik and Maggie’s Korean was fully non-existent. He gestured at the drawing on my arm. “Ah!” I thought. “Saved once again by the universal language of mathematics!” I assumed that he was a fellow number theorist, attempting to point out a mistake I had made in my spiral. I was already beginning to suspect something had gone awry when it looked like 46 should be prime, and was very happy to see where I had gone wrong. I didn’t even have to wait for the sober reflection of the next morning to realize that this hope had been foolishly high. For one, number theorists usually have more teeth. Instead, I thought, maybe I’ll try to explain what I’m doing. I reached for my sketchbook, intending to use the paper to explain the idea of anomalously prime-rich polynomials and, if necessary, prime numbers themselves, and if necessary numbers themselves. Instead, he spotted my drawings and was instantly absorbed. He tried to snatch the book and was hard to discourage.

At this point, Maggie and I started to exchange nervous glances. Erik was exasperated by the entire thing and appeared to be unhelpfully feigning sleep. As a way to get the book firmly back in my possession, I offered to draw the old man himself. He struck a pose happily, V for victory. Or peace or whatever it actually means in Korea, I don’t know. I drew an atrocious likeness of him, tore it out and gave it to him. Looking back, I wish I had taken my time and drawn him better because a) it would have been more fun and b) we still had like eight stops to go. We managed to extricate ourselves with promises to call him (???). He had, in fact, scrawled his phone number, name, and the word “OK” across a space in my book, in the giant letters of the type of person who, had he been born an Islander, would be at this very moment stopping his truck right in the road to talk to a friend in the opposing lane, also stopped in his truck, caring little for the approaching computer scientist in a Corolla. His only piece of luggage was a large bag of rice that he got Maggie to autograph for him. I imagine that that scrap of rice bag and the drawing of him I did are now hanging on his wall or are possibly in his wallet. We crossed paths with him again leaving a convenience store with a bottle of makgeolli, and he flashed us one last grin as we fell into a taxi.

Kristen was upset. Someone, it seems, had promised to meet her at ten and it was past midnight. I blamed Erik for this although I’m not sure whose fault it actually was. Anyway the venue we ended up occupying for the night, the place we rode on the train for 90 minutes for (equivalent to the ride to Seoul, note), was a plastic table outside the CU. So little changes. Kristen fell asleep at the table and remained that way for about four hours. Some Koreans came by and sat down, one of whom showed me a good place to get chicken. I’m told Maggie made out with one of them, apparently in some sort of misunderstanding. A loud DJ parked himself at our table and talked to us pretty uninterestingly. It took a long time to get him to leave, because he seemed to think our motivations were racist. He asked Erik if he knew what racism was. Eventually he left. Erik and Maggie practised their kickboxing to work off their aggression. We left in the early morning, fell asleep on the train, and missed our exit by eighteen stops. Oh well.

The next day, we all went for another round, minus Kristen, the first casualty of the end of the program. I was very sleep-deprived, then, when Gianna woke me for lunch, but I couldn’t say no to the noraebang with such a sense of urgency about our friendship. The next day, everyone left, I waved at a bunch of buses, and that was it. So, the DKU thing is over. I’m back in Busan now, and I find myself much less accustomed to being alone than I remembered myself. Some of the DKU people were really pretty cool, and I’m going to miss them. I’m also in Korea for some reason, which makes it a little hard to meet new people given the language barrier. Why, a more idealistic me might ask, should that matter? Language speakers must surely form granfalloons, our mother tongues no indication of spiritual destiny, only hurdles to be jumped on the way to true and lasting friendships based on more fundamental ties. Or something, I don’t know, it just makes me a little uneasy that my heart leaps when I see another white person. Not uneasy enough that I won’t be bailing for New Zealand, though, so I suppose that thought is more or less idle.

Speaking of idle, I’m done with university, assuming I don’t fail Edward Chung’s class on account of getting 0/25 for participation, which I would argue with but honestly probably not very well. I wouldn’t even be all that upset, I think. My life needs structure, I’ve realized, and I don’t create much of it myself. I remember having a little bit of the same feeling I have now when I graduated from high school, the feeling that I was out on my own and it was cool and exciting and terrifying. Back then, of course, I was utterly wrong about that as with most things. Today, though, it feels a little real. I will need a job.

This is a little test post to see if everything is working okay. I moved the blog over to my own domain because wordpress.com was throwing ads on it, the capitalist swine. Anyway everything should be more or less the same, except if you have this blog bookmarked you’ll need to update that. Korea is still cool, but I think I’ll be leaving sooner than I planned. Busan and Seoul are nice cities, but big cities aren’t really my solo travel jam. Still a few weeks left, then Australia, the start of a new summer. And one without jang-ma – the rain comes down so hard here sometimes that an open window feels like a refrigerator door, not that it does anything to clear out the humidity. Some time in the desert ought to change my tune, I guess.