This is what it looked like today in my back yard:

I took the day off work and sat out here for a while and stared at the tree, one of my favourite trees ever. It was extremely hot. I could hear gulls calling, couldn’t be all the way from the harbour, but still, I love that sound. I thought about some things and wrote most of this post.

This is a pretty cool house to live in. There’s a picture of my room here too if you’re interested. Mostly it’s that I’m a fan of the roomies, though, especially after the months among sweaty German backpackers.

Hamish is an engineer, mountain biker, and white water rafter. He has a tendency to fall asleep and get things drawn on him at parties, which would have been the picture of him I used but it’s hard to find one that doesn’t have some extremely vulgar work visible. Hamish is the Zelda of the group (where I’m the Zoe).

Da does something with teeth, I don’t know. She built her dad a chicken coop for his 50th birthday. That’s her friend Ally in the front, also cool. She was my buddy for the Tongariro Crossing.

Tom and Lily are probably the best-matched couple I know and almost definitely going to get married and be happy forever. There’s a nice vibe there between all of us. There’s also another housemate but I don’t know really know her well enough to non-awkwardly ask her for a photo, which tells you why I don’t think it matters if I don’t talk about her. It’s good to have a place for a while that comes to mind when I think “time to go home” at the end of the day.

Some people from real home came to visit last weekend though, so I guess I know who in the family really loves me. Jerry and Judi were in town with a bunch of doctors or something, and we had a good few hangouts. Ask them about it, it was cool. My outlook has changed a lot lately; I don’t much care at all about going to see volcanoes or whatever, but seeing those two made my year.

Work! I haven’t written anything about work yet. Trade Me is a pretty nice place to work. The slides are cool, there’s free coffee and tea, people are really chill 99% of the time. I learned some things about archaeology. Anyway I quit a couple weeks ago, so I’m leaving New Zealand pretty soon, and taking the slow pony home. Next post will probably be about the Cook Islands, cool hey!

1. Initial interview
2. Technical interview
3. Meeting the team (to ensure “culture fit”)
4. Psychometric assessment
5. Meeting this one dude that I’m still not sure why I met him? They may have been stalling.

All told it took several weeks, but whatever it’s over thank the LORD it’s over. I think it went like, approximately: good initial interview, killed technical, accidentally started talking about cartoons in the team meeting, produced worrying psych results, was checked for sanity by senior staff. Actually the psych test was pretty fun. Choice nuggets from my results:

• “You have answered in a way which is quite different to others […]”
• “You appear to be reasonably disciplined but may not be highly detail attentive naturally. You may be a little more spontaneous and sometimes may get bored if things are too dull.”
• “You have some tendency to question rules and ways things need to be done.”
• “Your profile indicates that you can sometimes be a little inconsistent in how well you apply
  yourself to work […] you could be a little easily distracted and find it hard to get motivated.”
• “You have strong views and are happy to share these with others.”

But it seems I got away with it. They have slides in their office, that’s neat.

Anyway, near future steady income secured, life is good, and the time was come again to sally forth. I went from Wellington up to Rotorua, famous for simmering volcanic activity and smelling kind of like eggs. I had a good time in a hostel there, proving that it is in fact possible. I also have started to be really into wine, which I thought I didn’t like before but maybe I just never had New Zealand wine. There’s a cool Maori village there, and a park full of sulphur pits, although to be honest once you’ve seen one sinkhole full of boiling mud you’ve pretty much seen them all. My Rotorua friend Daphne and I went for a hike one day through the redwood forest just southeast of town that was estimated at 3.5 hours. We took about 7, partly because we took a bit of a walk on the way there but mostly because of our two extended lunch/nap breaks. We understood each other. My view most of that day:

Then Paihia, plus a bus out to Cape Reinga, which was a really good time. Off the cape is where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet, and the currents get all mixed up and sometimes there are giant whirlpools, a seam in the world. There weren’t giant whirlpools then, but it was still pretty sweet. We drove back along Ninety Mile Beach and stopped to do some sandboarding, which is basically the “climb to the top of a dune and then slide down it” thing we all did as kids on the North Shore, but everything has to be extreme in New Zealand so the dunes are gigantic and they use little laminated sleds. I think I got sand, like, literally under my skin.

I stopped in Thames, apparently The Gateway to the Coromandel, mainly to hike up the Pinnacles, which was cool. After that was Hahei, a famous beach town where nothing much at all happened and I liked it that way. There’s a beach there with hot springs, you just dig yourself a little hole and sit in it and it’s like a spa. Seriously hot though in some places, not even just warm. People hurt themselves.

A lot of photos in this one, hey? Dad and Kendra were on me about that, so I took a bunch. Most of my photos end up on my Tumblr, so maybe bookmark that or subscribe to it with RSS or something if you want to keep posted on those. I’m back in Wellington now, where the weather is markedly less nice. Soon I’ll have to start thinking about doing some work, I guess? Maybe some wine first.

Beattie: “They don’t show up at your wake. Not because they don’t like you, but because they never knew your last name. A month later, someone tells them, ‘oh, Jimmy died.’
‘Jimmy who?’
‘Jimmy the cop.’
‘Oh,’ they say. ‘Him.'”
-The Wire (5.10, “-30-“)

The past couple of weeks I’ve been staying at the Cambridge, which is an old hotel that has a backpackers’ wing. It actually isn’t bad relative to lots of hostels, but that’s not saying much. I almost have an apartment lined up, and if I get a job that’ll be a nice little setup. I don’t talk to the people here much, mainly because I don’t like them and I’ve never been very good at hiding things like that. Backpackers are awfully boring people, by and large. I met a guy here who was pretty excited to meet a Canadian (naturally the first thing he asked was where I’m from, a question I have answered an average of 4.1 times a day outside of North America) and beamed at me constantly, although he may have just been drunk. He went a step farther than most and actually asked what it was like.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Canada lately, how much other places don’t feel like home. I thought, then, about waking up at 4:30 in the morning in the middle of January and going outside, and even though there isn’t a lick of dawn, having enough light from the stars and the moon bounced up off the snow to see the edges of the woods. I thought about the cold in my bones, the snow so crunchy when you walk on it that the sound carries for miles, the car not starting the first time or the second but maybe the third. I remembered gloves grabbed off and bare hands clutched around a coffee cup and gloves replaced, their owner’s ass frozen to bleachers so his useless 10-year-old son could try to skate. I thought about people that don’t ask questions when the people they love need something.

“We sure like hockey,” I said. He had a way of making his laugh sound like a word he was shouting.

I went to the grocery store today, and I saw a girl there that I had met before, at a hostel. I couldn’t remember which hostel it was, or what we talked about, or what her voice sounded like. I couldn’t remember whether I liked her or not. I pretended not to see her.

At the checkout, the person in front of me was buying a copy of Woman’s Day. I stared at it and thought of Seb. I wondered whether I ever would again.

Sometimes I learn a bit of language here and there, travelling. Languages are cool and nice. Sometimes words are such tidy encapsulations of things that you would have thought were too complicated to explain, if there wasn’t a word for it. Sometimes they express feelings that you might not have realized other people had. Good words are like tiny poems. The Maori have a word, “keo”, that means “the call of a bird”. What a nice part of the world to pick out and make a mental unit of. I’ve always thought there should be a word for the anxiety induced by awareness of the passage of time.

There’s a job I’ve had four separate interviews and two reference checks for. Tomorrow is Monday, and hopefully I’ll hear something on the exchanging labour for money front. I think I sort of got the idea at some point that because I like to go for walks and don’t own very much, I’d be a good backpacker. It turns out there is more to it than that and I hate most of it. I would really like to have a job and a home, like normal people always said. That’s okay, I think it’s good to learn these things for yourself. And there is still a lot of walking and austerity. Zealandia was my latest sally, a unique nature reserve that’s not a distance I would casually describe as “walkable” from the city but I sure did walk it. They have a fence all the way around the entire thing, like Jurassic Park, but backwards. It’s designed to keep mammals out, although they make a controlled exception for humans. That means they can bring in species that today mostly exist on small islands they’ve been moved to on account of how they get massacred by rats and weasels and stuff. I saw a couple of takahe, big flightless birds of which there are only about 200 left. Also kaka, bush parrots with an unpleasant skraark of a keo. Also kakariki, saddlebacks, parakeets, and ducks. Grammy O’Hanley would have been thrilled, I’d bet. If you want to get a glimpse at a day in the life, have a look here and consider that I walked more inside the park than outside. My hamstrings are iron these days.

“Whatever. Travelling!”
–anonymous jackass

I don’t have a lot to say about Auckland. It isn’t terrible, but it didn’t give me many good stories. Certainly nothing I can blog about, at least. I went to a Scala conference one weekend, and Lord there were a lot of beards in that room, and I’m not sure what I expected. There was a break in the afternoon to get at the beer fridge, “So go on, have a drink, mingle a bit,” said one of the host employees. In roughly 20 minutes, I got through three beers and mingled very little. Dev stuff is not always my jam. A Woman’s Day writer named Seb let me stay on his couch for a few days while I wrapped up my time in Auckland. He was a fun guy, and his apartment looked like this:

He also pointed me in the direction of the Winter Garden, which was easily my favourite thing in the city. I spent two long afternoons there, reading and drawing the flowers. I would like to live there and am not interested in hearing about why it’s not suitable as a home.

I left on an overnight bus, 11 winding hours to the south for Wellington, a city I’d heard lots of very nice things about. New Zealand is somewhat bigger than I thought, hey. Looking absently out the window around midnight, I realized it was my first time seeing the wrong stars, too much light in Auckland. We stopped at a gas station, and I got out with the smokers, laid on my back on a dryish piece of wood, shivered and looked. They really are wrong, you know. I wasn’t sure they’d look obtrusively different but they’re just completely off. I glanced over at the smokers. How do they tolerate it?

Wellington has sea on three sides and is extremely windy. The entire city feels like a giant ship and I like that a lot. I’m trying to get a job and a place to live, and hopefully that will work out and I’ll be here for a good while.

I will certainly not be staying at Nomads Central Wellington, which the rest of this post will be an extended review of. Kendra has a very particular facial expression that she uses to express the thought that you’re being extremely stupid, a combination of offense taken and incredulity, both at the fact that you could even possibly be so stupid. I first walked in to Nomads off the night bus on a Monday morning, and got the key to the bag room from a gal that used that exact same expression to react to my arriving earlier than check-in time as well as my locking the key in the bag room. That second one was my bad though, yeah (side note: this is far from the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in a hostel. Ask me about the time I accidentally did a load of laundry with orange Kool-Aid crystals instead of detergent). As time has gone on, some doubt has arisen in my mind as to whether she actually thinks everyone is stupid or that’s just a neutral expression to her. I might be overly sensitive to it on account of getting it approximately 17,000 times from Kendra, so benefit of the doubt, I think.

Nomads is advertised as offering a free meal every night of your stay at the bar next door, which is true-ish. The “meals” are really just snacks and if I paid anything for them, I mean literally anything 10 cents up, I would be pissed. Everything the surly staff dish out, from chili on rice to bacon fettucine, tastes exactly the same.

Nomads also advertises having a kitchen available to guests. This is akin to advertising Bunbury as having an arena available to NHL teams. I guess you could say that and it wouldn’t, strictly speaking, be an outright lie. Kitchen amenities do not, for instance, include an oven. They do include free pancake batter in the morning, which I was somewhat excited about until my actual first morning here. These pancakes are terrible. They taste like nothing and the syrup they have is, I’m sorry for my Canadian maple syrup snobbery but, godawful. In practice, I could pretty much take or leave the pancakes (Let’s keep score! I’ve gone from excited to indifferent on the subject of the pancakes). There are four four-element stoves in the kitchen, for a total of 16 burners. Of these, four burners are capable of generating enough heat to just barely cook food to a safe temperature. They struggle mightily to do it, so cooking a single pancake takes about twelve minutes (I pretty much don’t even want the pancakes at this point, and the batter takes up precious counter space, so put me in the anti-pancake camp from here on). In most hostels, nobody bothers to make breakfast, or if they do it’s just cereal or whatever. I like to make eggs most mornings, and generally can do so unmolested. At Nomads, the kitchen is swarmed every morning with cheapskates that can’t pass up 13 cents worth of free pancake batter (I am now deeply resentful of the pancakes). This combined with the limited burners and slow cooking leads to what would be an enormous queue of people if the people in this hostel had the common courtesy to queue. Instead, it’s a culinary jungle less forgiving than Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen when ratings are bad. This very morning I watched someone cut the line in front of a patiently waiting middle-aged woman with small children. “Dude,” was the only thing I could think to say, and she was very quick to apologize. “Oh, are you waiting?” she asked the woman, betraying herself by demonstrating that she knew precisely who was actually supposed to be next. On my second morning here, I brought my pan over to my plate to drop off a pancake, and when I turned around to put it back on the burner, a shifty French guy had jacked it. The ensuing standoff ended fairly quickly, and a good thing because I truly don’t know how far I would have gone to get that burner back, but it has led to ongoing tension as it turns out the guy is one of my roommates. The pancakes, then, have gone in my mind from fun hostel bonus to scraps of gristle tossed to a mass of profound inhumanity disguised as backpacking youth. It would be better for this hostel if pancakes had never been invented.

The French guy. My roommates. Last night, I had a few drinks, went to a show, and went to bed around 12:30. It was a fun and reasonable night. I woke up what felt like an hour later when a young gentleman blundered in and collapsed onto his bed, making no effort whatsoever to be quiet. This guy had a nasty case of hiccups, and was apparently pretty frustrated because he tended to groan loudly after each one. After a few minutes, it became clear to me that he wasn’t going to stop. I leaned over the edge of the bed. “Who the [puppies] is that?” he asked, gobsmacked by the idea of there being another person in his 10-bed dorm room. I asked him if he would mind shutting most or all of the way up. He did quiet down a bit and I managed to get back to sleep. I woke up again some unknown amount of time later, when some people walked in and turned the bloody lights on. They, too, seemed surprised to see me, a person trying to sleep in his bed. They switched the light back off and bumbled around in the dark with their phones, apologizing loudly and repeatedly. I heard the unbelievable but unmistakable sound of a guitar being tuned. “Shut,” I suggested, “the [puppies] up.” The guitar was put away and the revellers shuffled out of the room. One I heard mutter, “Seems a bit aggressive,” which I thought was unfair because really I think it was pretty diplomatic given the situation. I fell asleep again after they left and woke up again when some people came in later. I don’t know if they were the same, I can’t tell these people apart. One of them took a lot of convincing to sleep in his own bed. The one he wanted to sleep in and had to be physically repelled from happened to be the one right under mine. I told him to shut up and go away, to which his response was absolutely ideal. He said nothing and went away. I looked at my phone after this. It was 4:00.

Actually, there was one more quote from last night I remember. When people were galumphing around with the light on and most expressed some regret, there was one guy who said, “Whatever. Travelling!” and laughed. This guy has a lot of symbolic importance to me.

The trouble is it’s “winter” here. I had always thought of winter as a meteorological fact, but it is something of a cultural thing, I guess. I met a guy from London, Tom, at the first hostel I stayed at, and we went out to Waiheke Island, where there are a bunch of vineyards and it’s apparently possible to get very cheap wine. My priorities may need rethinking, but there you are. We found a half-cheap rental car – “Just don’t get smashed,” the cheery South African behind the desk winked – and set off around the island. Every vineyard we went to was closed. We did get some nice views and eventually ended up at what we had been told was a nice place to hike and look around, the site of an old WWII gun emplacement. It was closed. At that point we simply weren’t having it and jumped the fence. Having been decommissioned many years ago, it’s now half historic site, half active farm. Sheep and cows roamed as freely as we did. That was a good day, in spite of its total lack of wine or accomplishment.

That hostel was a bit of a hippy place, where people ate nothing but organically grown local vegetables and one guy insisted that doing so was a moral imperative. Climate change might end the world, but I guess their hands will be clean. There was a guy there, twentysome years old, with a tattoo of a globe in a backpack. Next to it was written, “Into the Wild”. I imagined punching him in the mouth. What he calls the wild, impressed enough with his own intrepid nature to get it tattooed on his arm, I call an amusement park for white people that like birds.

Not that I don’t like birds, and I guess hippies are mostly harmless. This hostel I’m at now is a much more commercial, professional kind of place, and very central. That has its perks, but at least the hippies have a little more soul than the gap year party crowd.

Am I getting older?

I know I sound a bit cranky in this post, but I’m actually feeling very nice and chilled these days. Last night I baked a batch of cookies, which was awesome because I haven’t had proper kitchen access for months. Lots of nice little walks and talks. I’ve been picking up leads on things to do, and eventually I’ll follow one.

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.

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.

Busan is a port city in the southeast, of five beaches and around five million people. It’s built mostly of unadorned cement in a way that has a certain utilitarian charm, but my feelings about the city weren’t established until we got to Haeundae, one of the eastern beaches. The ocean always surprises me a little, like I knew I missed it but couldn’t quite put a memory together that captured it properly. The sky was a stony grey, wind stripped spray from the crests of waves, a gull wheeled and cried and made us, like humans before us for millennia, yearn for the winds of the endless open sea. Also it found and ate half a bag of chips and pooped a little. My Korean is not great, so I’m not exactly sure how the surf was classified, but I believe a reasonable translation would be “You will die if you swim here,” and there were lifeguards all along the beach that wouldn’t let us in the water.

We came to the hotel to drop off our bags. Diana, one of the relative strangers (to me) in the group at this point, and I went to try to check in, me because my name was on the reservation and Diana because she speaks Korean. We met a woman inside behind the reception desk, and a man standing in the lobby with a small towel around his neck. I found it hard to imagine the woman leaving the room that the reception desk was actually a small window into, somewhat below eye level so that you had to bend over to look straight into it. The combination of the odd window placement with the woman’s shrinking personality gave me a strong feeling of dealing with a very large snail. Towel man was very helpful and put our bags away for us even though it was before check-out time. We noticed that there was a sideish door into the lobby that would allow a quiet person to sneak to the stairs out of visual range of reception, and especially easily if the woman were to retreat a few feet into her proto-shell, which she was in the habit of doing. We felt optimistic. It was 1:00.

We found a BBQ restaurant across the street that also featured 1,000 won bibimbap on the menu, which is preposterously cheap and I was very curious about it. I meant to get it for breakfast, but things got complicated. We went to the Emart not far away and bought supplies for the weekend, mainly soju and snack cakes. Bellies full and larders stocked, our spirits continued to rise, even as rain began to spatter on the walk back. This was our first introduction to another important character that weekend, Typhoon Nakri.

We got back to the hotel around 5:30, hoping that the day shift might be over and there would be not many people around. Towel man was still there. We told him that our (Diana’s and my) friends needed to keep their stuff in the room as they were staying at a jjimjilbang, kind of a bathhouse thing. He would, we figured, at least be gone by the time we were getting back, which would be quite late because we were going clubbing. This seemed to go over smoothly, and up we went. A lot happened after that, the main thing I remember being the construction of an elaborate blanket fort. We went to a nightclub where I got two free drinks for agreeing to be in a promotional video wherein I claimed, “I love Wurzel Peter,” Wurzel Peter being a German liquor of some sort that is really just okay if we’re being honest. We danced and sang and fanned ourselves because it was hot as all heck in there. We went to the beach for a while and saw some fireworks. We headed back to the hotel, utterly pleased with ourselves and our evening.

Towel man was still there. Our buoyant happiness had its air let out and flew around a bit with a loud farting noise before slapping onto the wet pavement. I’m not sure whether I just imagined it that way or if Erik actually farted and someone fell down. Towel man, who we named Jun at this point after the name of the hotel, had at this point been working for at least 15 hours, and likely much more. It also turned out there were cameras all over the place and inside the snail shell was an array of televisions on which our six extra people were plainly visible, “hiding” outside. He was wise to our game. We would not be sneaking eight people into this room. Jun had set the new tone for our relationship, less helpful bag handler and more Sherlock to our eightfold Moriarty. His dogged determination to see us sleep on the street or in the dirt or something, I don’t know, earned our seething rage and grudging respect.

An aside: he had also had the towel on his neck for those same 15 hours at least. We thought at first it might have been for sunburn, but he kept it on even at night. Why? What was he hiding? I believe he may have been a cyborg.

There was at this point an unforeseen benefit to my having used my credit card to make this booking, which was that we decided some two people should stay here if we were paying for it anyway, and one of them was legally required to be me. The other was Gianna, who was sick and got privileges. The peasants, aka my friends and companions, slept on the beach. Literally they slept in the dirt are you happy now Jun? I know you’re reading. Actually they mostly didn’t sleep at all. The next day, the typhoon hit.

A lot more things happened then and I don’t have the energy to write about all of them, so maybe this will be a story about a single day. Overall I would rate Busan quite highly.