I´m here in Vienna.  I saw Priya off to the airport this morning after traveling with her for two short weeks and now I´m contemplating my next stratagem.  I have to wait another two days to pick up my passport with my real, 100% legit Russian tourist visa, and then I´m hitching east to Budapest, north through Slovakia and onwards northern-bound until I hit Finland.  Then I´m taking the Trans-Siberian across that great evil behemoth called Russia until I hit Mongolia.  Then I want to buy a motorcycle and drive my way into China, work my way south and take a ferry to my home away from home in Korea.  That´s the plan.  Hell or highwater pending, I´m going to cross this massive bulging super continent.  Now that I have two days to wait, I can take the time necessary to properly update this silly travel website I have.  The following pictures are those I´ve collected over the past two months and haven´t be able to post because of technical difficulties.   They are chronological and span 12 countries.  More technical difficulties.  These are only 47 of 200 or so.  I’m not going to explain them because I´d rather tell some stories.

I stayed in Roma for two days and spoke to almost no one.  Roma is oppressively humid and crowded during the day, but as soon as evening comes it can be enjoyed the way it is supposed to.  At dusk it has an otherwordly aesthetic that I fell in love with.  The Vatican is a circus, but I visited before the mad-dash of tourists and it was quite enjoyable.

After Roma I took a train for Lucca.  This is a fairytale city tucked inside the Tuscan hills.  I hid my bags and then explored the city as the air cooled and came alive in activity.  The sunset I enjoyed takes the cake as the most beautiful I have ever seen. And best of all, as the sun-beaten tourists slowly retired to their hotels the city was reclaimed by the locals who ate alfresco meals by candle light as geckos scurried along the walls doing small acts of acrobatics to catch various insects lured a little too close by the flicker and hum of the mounted road lamps.  Thousands of birds swam in the skies together forming liquid-like clouds, contorting and twisting in the air like a single tortured dragon.  Then I camped beside the city walls and was eaten to death by an aresenal of mosquitoes.

The next day I went to Florence.  I met three British guys traveling on their interrail passes for their summer vacation between school.  We shared a 4 bed hostel room and explored the Tuscan capital.  And what a beautiful city it is.  There´s little that I can say that hasn´t already been toted by every travel book ever written about Florence.  It is remarkable.  It is crowded and busy, but it is one of the highlights of Italy.  We spent the afternoon trying to find an alternative entrance to the walled gardens, got a little lost, but accidentally found a beautiful spot barren of tourists where we could overlook the city in the valley below. 

The next day I headed for Siena, and the rain started pouring down in angry torrents and I figured my plans at camping were ruined.  At the train station I met two cousins from the US and Australia and three Parisians.  We all had arrived in Siena without a plan.  It was two days before Siena´s annual horse racing festivities, so to make matters worse, we were wet, cold and without a hostel because everything in a several city radius was fully booked.  We decided the best plan was still to have no plan.  Instead of worrying we went to a Cuban bar and drank mojitos until nothing really mattered, and to our good fortune, the rain stopped.  We then lugged our gear to a pizzeria and made a hell-of-a-lot-a-noise.  We had a camp out in the center of the city beneath an empty market place square.

I was up as early as humanly possible and taking trains across the country to Rimini, the closest city to the Most Serene Republic of San Marino.  Ever heard of it?  I hadn´t either, but it´s its own country hidden in the mountains west of Rimini.  Isn´t it adorable that it calls itself the `Most Serene Republic.`   This was a wild-card visit, but am I ever glad I went.  It was really charming.  I slept in the open-air in my sleeping bag on a castle wall, perched over a precarious precipice, overlooking the San Marino and Italian countryside as it stretched toward the ocean.  At dusk the sky was painted with the riches of colours and the lights of the villages below shimmered and I thought to myself that there were few other places on earth where I would rather sleep.  I´ve never had a view like that in any hotel.

The next day I was hellbent on Venice.  I arrived and then managed to navigate my way through the labyrinth of angular cobble-stoned streets, sweeping canals and the many bridges to cross them.  I made it to my hostel, a Catholic nunnery, without a map with the help of a few local Venetians.  I met some kindly Americans at the hostel and I explored the city with them.  I also witnessed one of the most unsettling scenes of my young life.  There were two pretty and shy sixteen-year-old-looking twins wearing strange circus-like clothing of purple and red and 6 inch high heals with a  man that I can only describe as a more sinister-looking version of the comedian, Gallagher, with a long mustache and grey hair, balding on top, adorned in the nondescript dress of a blue casual dress shirt and slacks.  Gallagher was holding one of the twins hands, while the other girl held a spaghetti strap-leash to a small black toy poodle.  They stood beside a bridge in the moonlight as we passed looking at our map trying to decipher where we were and how to manage our return to the confines of our hostel.  They had the most meek of expressions, like those of lambs, and as soon as we saw them they felt our amazement and they faded away into the distance.  They were like apparitions and I´m still unsure if I actually saw them that strange night in Venice, or if it wasn´t just a dream I conjured in the deepest of sleep.

After Venice, I took 8 hours of trains all the way to Switzerland.  I arrived in Brig, at around 11 o´clock.  I made a sandwich and ate for the first time since breakfast, found a fallow farmers´ field of some sort and set up camp.  The next day I took some country trains and then a touristy tram up the mountains to Murren.  Here I hiked surrounded alpine wildflowers and glacier-peaked mountains.  Cows mooed in the distance as the bells around their necks clanged back and forth.  It started to rain and I made my descent.  From here I headed to the picturesque city of Luzern.  I camped on the outside of the city wall and went to sleep quite early, exhausted from my hiking and the freshness of the mountain air.   The next day I took 2 hours of ferries across Lake Luzern and then caught a train headed in the general direction of Liechtenstein.  When at the border, I started hitching.  I managed to get a lift immediately from a girl who had been working with a friend in the alps milking goats.  She was very nice and she had some excellent music playing in her car, but I´m sad to say, she smelled like goat shit.  In ten minutes I had successfully hitched right through the silly little country of Liechtenstein and then I was in Austria.  I walked to a train station and then boarded a train for Bregenz.  I read beside Lake Konstance as a tremendous sunset bloomed before me.  I camped in a city park listening to an opera being performed in an outdoor ampitheatre half a kilometer away.

The next day I trained my way to Fussen and hiked to the Neuwanstein castle.  I can´t believe how many people were there, many Japanese and Korean tourists on enormous tour groups, wearing identical badges or hats.  I wouldn´t be able to go on the tour because they were sold out until the evening, so instead, I went exploring the natural area around the castle.   While hiking the trails I slipped on a slick tree root and took a nasty spill.  I was covered in mud, and considering I had been sleeping in my tent for the last couple of night, I was in dire need of a bath.  I walked to the river basin, stripped to my underwear and submerged myself in the freezing glacier fed waters.  Many German hikers saw me doing this and must have thought I was clinically insane, but I cleaned myself off and stayed nice and cool for the rest of the day.  I boarded more trains and went all the way to Passau.  It was after dark on a Friday and it seemed that everyone in this border city was drunk or well on their way to become so, and I set up tent in a park beside the river, less then thirty meters from a group of rowdy teenagers, and luckily for me, no one noticed me, or they decided to ignore me.  I slept perfectly.  I woke up to a misty river.  I then took three trains to bring me to Cesky Krumlov, a city in the Czech republic which I had overlooked on my last trip there.  I had a day to kill and I decided that it was a good place to go.  I met a Slovenian traveler named Jaku.  We decided to explore the city together.  We hid our bags and headed for the castle.  In Cesky Krumlov there are no crocodiles swimming in the castle´s moat, instead there are bored and sad-looking bears lazily ambling around beneath the draw bridge.  The city was stunning and affordable.  After surviving on a rigid diet of bread, cheese and tomatoes for the last 5 days, I decided to treat myself to a good hardy Czech meal of potato dumplings, pork with gravy and a couple cold ones.   I set up my tent in an old orchard skirting the castle walls and Jaku made a lean-to and slept beneath a tree.  We were up at the crack of dawn, Jaku deadset on making it home to Ljubljana for dinner and myself, Vienna for lunch.

I checked into our hotel near Praterstern station, cleaned up, slept, checked my emails and then went to pick up Priya from the airport.  The next day I tried to apply for my Russian visa, but after getting to a slow start, I missed the small window of time that the Russian embassy is open for visa-related services and there was nothing I could do about it.  Priya and I went to a Heurigen, a traditional Austrian wine house for dinner.  We ate in a rustic, vine-covered courtyard, drinking great wine and eating a sticky-to-your-bones Austrian meal of smoked ham, sausage, potatoes, roasted, mozarella tomatoes and quiche.  It was great.

The next day we took a train in the rain going to Salzburg.  The rain had stopped as we arrived to the city.  We chcked into our hostal and went to explore.  We walked to the 800+-year-old fortress perched above the city and visited the many exhibits and museums inside.  The rain started again.  Priya had planned a belated birthday present for me.  She took me to the oldest restaurant in Europe for a Mozart´s dinner.  We ate traditional meals of Mozart´s time as a group of amazing musicians performed Mozart´s most famous operas in between the courses of our meals.  It was brilliant.

From Salzburg we tried to make our way to Hallstatt, a scenic little city hidden in the mountains.  We took some trains, then a ferry across the lake, and there we were in Hallstatt.  We camped in a park beside the lake as a cover band butchered the great musicians of the past at a gas station parking lot nearby. 

The next day we tried hitching south.  Lets just say, it didn´t go too smoothly.  We took 7 hours of trains instead and made it to Ljubjana before dusk.  We checked into our hostel, a former prison, and had a `cell`to ourselves.  We went to the museum in the cities castle.  Then we tried our damnedest to find a good restaurant.  We checked the Lonely Planet and wandered around trying to find something authentically Slovenian.   With luck, we stumbled onto a little place, read the menu, looked at the Slovenian clientele and realized we had inadvertently found our Slovenian restaurant.  Three men playing three different guitaresque instruments, serenading the restaurant-goers.  We ordered a custom meal from the waitress and ate one of the best meals of my trip, if not, life.  It was a perfect night in Ljubjana.  The next day we took a tour of the Slovenian countryside around Bled.  We stopped at the quaint castle that overlooked the turquoise lake, swam in very cold waters at another nearby lake, and walked in a beautiful and lush river gorge.  That night we took a train for Zagreb and arrived fairly late, found a hostel and slept.  The next morning we boarded a bus headed for Plitvice, a place I can never remember how to pronounce even with my best effort.

Plitvice is a national park encompassing sixteen lakes connected by cascading waterfalls.  It reminded me of Jiuzhaigou Valley in China that I visisted in 2006.  Priya and I explored the area for hours until it began to rain.  We took a taxi van with several other backpackers and headed for Zadar.  We tried to find some good quality food here, but ended up with a really terrible meal from a place recommended by our good old friends at Lonely Planet.  We stayed at an apartment belonging to two down and out old men.  We slept on a pull-out couch in their living room as they drank beers in their kitchen on the other side of our thin-walled room.  Good times.

The next day we were going down the coast.  We made our way to Split and immediately boarded a ferry for the furthest island, called Vis.  We met some great French couple and talked movies, travel and food with them until they caught a late night bus over the island.  Camping was strictly forbidden here, but Priya and I are a little sneaky and we set up camp in a derelect mini-golf course as strange unknown animals rustled the branches of trees near our tent.  The next day we explored the little island town and then took a ferry back to the mainland.  Luckily Priya took some medicine and avoided another bout of extreme sea-sickness.

Once in Split we took a bus to Dubrovnik, with the hopes of getting there in the evening and exploring the city by late night.  Once arriving we escaped the onslaught of dodgy appartment hustlers who wait, poised to lure each tourists arriving on every inbound bus into their apartment for the evening.  We found a reputable appartment in a nice family´s house and we drank sangria as the rain poured outside.

The next day we were up early to see the city before the cruise ships unloaded their cargos of fat old Brits on the old city.  We visited the heartbreaking photo gallery, WarPhotoLtd, and let the startling and gorgeous photography sink in.  We wandered around, had lunch and then went back to our hostel just as the cruise shippers were herded in like sheep.  We napped and then spent the afternoon and evening beside the rough and angry ocean.  I worked up the courage to swim in the choppy waves, but it still scared me so I made my swim a short one and then got back on dry land.   Priya and I took pictures for the next hour and watched the sunset.  Then we headed back to town for the evening.  I drew some pictures as Priya searched out her perfect souvenir. 

The next day we took a midday bus to Sibernik, hoping to go to Krka Park, but we arrived too late and hungry to make the final leg of the trip.  Instead we found a nice little restaurant, ate some seafood and pizza and then camped in a very uncomfortable place beneath the cities castle.  Some young punks threw rocks at our tent, but other than that, the location was great even if the rock-strewn ground was an unbearable spot for sleeping.

We tried to go to the waterfalls in Krka, but we were unable to do so because the buses and trains were not working in our favour.  We stayed in the little city by the water, had lunch, explored the emptying village, and then tried to head back to Sibernik for our train.  The bus never came because the tourist season is ending and they no longer run as frequently.  Of course no one told us this until we had already waited for the bus for more than an hour.  We had to pay through our teeth to get back to Sibernik by hiring a taxi to take us there.  We needed to make that train and we did with about ten minutes to spare.

We then rode a few trains until we arrived in Willach, a nothing special city in Austria.  We arrived at 2am and had to wait three hours until our next train would leave.  This train station was full of the dregs of Austrian society.  They were the drunk, beaten, social outcasts who gathered in the train station, open all night with bathrooms, licking their wounds and wandering around in their sad and internal worlds muttering nonsense to everyone and no one in particular.  This one man, who we affectionately called `the Count,` was wearing women´s sunglasses, at night, like the Cory Hart song, shuffling around in a chemical stupour of some sort.  He had long died black hair with stark white two inch roots growing out, a disheveled white beard and wrinkled clothes.  He beelined for Priya and I who were huddled together with our bags.  He was speaking only German, and we both felt very uncomfortable in his presense.  We asked him to leave.  He went to a neighbouring garbage can retrieved some newspapers, read them, or simply looked at the text, spat on the floor a few times, then turned to us, pulled out his knife, walked threateningly in our direction to brandish his weapon.  I told him to stay away and Priya pushed the SOS station button.  He yelled something about cleaning his fingernails and put the knife away and started his escape.  The man on the other line then told us the SOS station was only for emergencies and when we explain about the man with the knife, two security guards finally showed up, talked with the man, saw his knife and decided he was harmless and it was us who were overreacting.  They told us we should wait in the main lobby if we were worried.  We did.  We watched the other beat-up Austrian hobos shuffling through the train station for the next two hours before our train finally arrived.  We slept all the way to Vienna.

Vienna was great for the second time.  I got my Russian visa, had it expediated and paid a lot for it in the process.  We went to a great old restaurant for our final dinner together.  I had some boiled beef and horseradish and Priya, marinated pork.  It was a great meal, and something I wouldn´t usually order during my normally Spartan existence on the road.  Having Priya here was sort of a vacation within a vacation.  I saw her off at the airport.  I will miss her, but it won´t be long before I cross this continent and make my way back to her in Korea.

I´m finished, alas.  That´s been my life for the last month or so.

I’ve had a couple miserable days in a row recently.  I am trying to stay positive and look for the best in my time here.  I think my problem is I expect every day to be better than the one that came before, which ultimately leads me to disappointment.  I’ve had so many great experiences so far that its pretty hard for my experiences to perpetually surpass themselves. 

I am not going to dwell in the events.  Let’s just say, I think Spain is not suited for the type of travel I prefer.   It’s great for tourbus-going , prepackaged-planning, self-important decadent tourists…not me.  That’s fine and good.  I will come back here again and give it another go, but next time I will come with my own form of transportation and someone else.  I need a partner in crime.  Someone with which to laugh off the annoyances. 

Here is something I will rant about for a moment.  Hey Spain, clean up your dog shit.  It’s disgusting.  It’s everywhere.  As I am looking around at your beautiful buildings I keep stepping in your animals’ waste.  Never have I stepped in so much dog shit in my life.  Seriously, it’s at least one pile per day.  I feel like I’m a minesweeper in a former warzone when I’m walking your streets.  I’m a dog person, really, I am.  I love animals, but not only do your flee-bitten muts bark at me relentlessly, they are stinking up your streets.  Spain, what’s the deal?  I will ask it again…in Spanish.

España ¿cuál es el problema?

As for the rest of my journey in Portugal.  I never made it to Sagres from Vila Nova de Milifontes, as I had hoped.  Hitching in the Portuguese heat is difficult and uncomfortable.  Maybe that’s why out of the 8 or so lifts I had in Portugual, 6 were from people were of other nationalities.  It’s too hot to hitch and Portuguese people don’t want sweaty vagabonds ruining their upholstery.   People from milder climates don’t mind.  I think this is the same reason why Scottish people don’t give lifts.  It rains too much and they don’t want the insides of their cars made wet by travelers.  I think I’m on to something.  I think I will make a graph and some charts and report on my ground-breaking discoveries.

I’m in Granada now.  I visited the Alhambra.  Don’t know what it is?  Shame on you!  You should.  It’s beautiful.

I also wandered around Sevilla for two days, tried to escape the onslaught of Brits in Cadiz and enjoyed the Mezquita Cathedral in Cordoba as the first person inside when it opened.  I’m going to Barcelona tonight.  I need to make a stop in Madrid first because there are no direct trains.  Correction, there is one, but its full.  C’est la vie.  I will probably sleep in the train station.  Wish me luck.

Hoping for the best in Barcelona,

Ciao.

No, I did not come up with this little gem of wisdom.  I read it on an inspirational postcard on my friends’ cork board.  But, I like it all the same.

I have my work cut out for me to explain all that I have done in the last week and a half.  It´s hard to find the time, effort or  Internet cafes to allow me to type out a blog or two a week like I usually managed while traveling in Asia.   Alas, once every two weeks will have to suffice.

From Ulm, I took eight hours of trains to Amsterdam.  I arrived sometime after 8PM, found a hostel a short walk from the hostel, and then feeling rather overwhelmed and claustrophobic amidst the obviously stoned-stupid, cross-eyed, dribbling tourists crammed in this colourful rats-nest, I took to the streets to take some pictures of the canals by night.  I explored, found some quiet nooks and crannies of the city, took a few pictures, ambled down the red-light district to witness the human flesh for sale, and then I went back to the hostel and took my well-deserved night´s sleep.

The next day I woke up later than I had hoped, walked to the Van Gogh museum and leisurely browsed the collection and read the history of this tortured genius.  In Montreal, Priya and I went to an IMAX movie narrated in first person from “Van Gogh,” which helped me with a lot of the background that this exhibit overlooked.   After that, I explored some nearby parks, chatted with some Dutch skateboarders and then took a train out of the city to a camping ground.  My conclusion regarding Amsterdam is you need to know someone on the inside to enjoy it to its fullest, if not its just an amusement park for hell-bent Americans who want to smoke and consume illicit substances without the War on Drugs breathing down their necks.  I felt the people were rather cold and unnecessarily hostile here, but to them I was just another young North American there to waste my money and my brain cells.  I think I´d be annoyed by such tourism and show it as well if I called Amsterdam my home.

The next day, I boarded a train for Den Haag because I had heard good things.  I was greatly disappointed.  The city was not very welcoming, and after going to the over-congested and polluted beach, I took a train to Brussels.  I had no real plans for staying here when I imagined traveling through Belgium, but I was pleasantly surprised by the city, and I´m glad I made a stop.  The city is clean and the buildings are grandiose and spectacular.  It was the capitol city where the mighty king sat at the throne of a rich empire, one built on the blood and bone of those he conquered and enslaved.   This brings me to my next museum; Le Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale (Royal Museum for Central Africa).   This museum has one of the largest collections of cultural and religious artifacts, weaponry, and artwork gathered over the past century from across the former Belgian colonies.  It showcases a snapshot of the beautiful and rich cultures that were present before European nations invaded, forbade the customs, uprooted the culture and destroyed what was there and had been thriving for many millennia.  The whole time I walked through the exhibits and dodged the onslaught of runny-nosed, unenthusiastic school groups, I heard the words of Chinua Achebe in my ear.   I saw Okonkwo shake his head as ” things fell apart.“  I wondered what he would think if he came to this museum?   Would he approve of the sterile and still remnants of people´s lives tacked to walls, enclosed behind glass like butterflies pinned to boards?  Maybe it is the history student in me, but I couldn´t help dissecting the explanations, trying to delve deeper than that which was provided for day-tripping students and travelers as indisputable fact.  So much was lost or changed or ruined, and colonial Beligum under Leopold II´s rule was not the only nation responsible for these atrocities, but it still remains one of the worst perpetrators of colonial evil.  This museum is a testament to the abuses of the colonized and even in trying to preserve and respect the histories of these cultures of ghosts, I can´t help but wonder if the people from which these artifacts were stolen could rewrite what was written, what would they have to say.  These colonies had their beautiful tapestries of oral histories ignored, or condense, or oversimplified until its nearly impossible to decipher what is real and what was imagined by the invading marauders and insensitive historians of ages past.   Nonetheless, it is a beautiful and sobering place to spend a day of contemplation and quiet remembrance.

After Brussels, I headed for Bruges.  I met two cool German guys name Lais and Kristoph.  We explored the city.  Let´s just say, I had exactly the same experiences as in the movie, In Bruges, except without all the shootouts and midget jokes.

From Bruges, I took a train to Luxembourg for lunch, just to say I´ve been there, and then left shortly later for Paris.   I arrived in Paris in the early afternoon.    I would spend the next few days exploring the city by myself as a tourist, and drinking, eating and living as the Parisians by night with an ever-changing and eclectic ensemble of students and chic bohemians; all amazing people who have carved out their place in this adorable city. This is what I think about Paris; she is the most beautiful young woman in your city.  You can´t impressive her easily.  She brushes you off.  Ignores you.  Shows you no regard.  You have to win her over.  You have to be sophisticated, elegant, charming, and maybe then, and only then will she consider getting to know you too. Without Nelly, Cami, Ninni, Victor and Benjamin I am certain my experiences in this city would have paled in comparison.  I had tremendous time in Paris and I can´t wait to visit again sometime in the near future.  Paris, je t’aime.

After Paris, I headed northwest.   First for Amien, where I slept beneath the stars in a farmer’s field as neighbourhood dogs barked in the distance from my suspicious presence.   The next day I took to hitching to Rouen, a task much harder than expected, not because of lack of lifts, but because I lacked a knowledge of French geography.  I would get in a car, ask where the driver was headed, and agree to go there, even if it was in the complete opposite direction.  At one point, this left me in the middle of no where.  I was surrounded by nothing but farmers fields where I startled grazing deer as I trudged at the sides of the roads.  I eventually made it to Clere, where I finally took a train to Rouen, and then another to Caen.  In Caen, there was no place to set up a tent.  I ended up talking with a cyclist who promptly offered his “petite jardin” as an acceptable place for a tent.  He drove me to the gardin, then gave me a pile of blankets and I set up my bed in a warm, dry shed beside an enormous vegetable garden.  His name was Louis.  He was 80 years old and looked 60.  I asked him his secret.  He said, good, hard work, laughter and gardening.  He’s doing something right, that’s for sure.  In the morning he brought me breakfast and we talked about him…in French, of course.  He was a former soldier who fought in the Amgerian war.  He returned to France horrified by the atrocities he witnessed (and I’m sure, had to commit, as well).  He found God and became a minister.  He gardens most of the time when he isn`t in church, and he gives the vegetables to families in need.  After all of his generosity, I got to work in the garden.  I watered every single leaf in that place.  Louis kept a very keen and watchful eye the entire time to make sure I did everything to his standards.

From Caen I took a bus to Courseille, the village built beside the site of Juno Beach.  It was July 1st, Canada Day, so it seemed fitting to visit one of the most important Canadian war sites.  The recently erected museum was wonderful.  It was very well-presented, but a little nostalgic, but I guess that the best way to describe WWII; it was a nostalgic war, where the good guys and the bad guys were obvious and well-defined.  I walked the beach and tried to imagine myself, maybe even me three, four or five years ago, storming the beaches, dodging bullets as people, friends and fellow soldiers were gunned down all around me.   It’s a nearly impossible thing to envision, especially while strolling the peaceful seashore now.   After Juno beach, I headed for St. Malo.  I met a fellow Canadian, Mark from Vancouver, who was going to the same place.  We agreed a makeshift Canada Day celebration was in order.  We drank cheap French beer (cheap, but delicious) and watched the sunset over the Bretegne coast, looking west towards Canada in the birthplace of Jacques Cartier, the man who “discovered” Canada in 1535.  How’s that for spontaneous and inadvertent patriotism.

I stayed in St. Malo for two nights, explore the medieval walled city, swam in the frigid sea, and then spent the next morning and afternoon visiting Le Mont St. Michel, which has a monastery perched on top of one the most beautiful and dramatic settings of any I’ve yet to see.  It looks like Oz as you approach on the less-than-yellow-brick road.  It rises so strangely out of place in the incredibly flat floodplains.  It was overrun by tourists, but it was worth it for the view.

After St. Malo, I ventured to Quimper, which was uneventful and not worth mentioning, then made the long journey to Bayonne in the Basque country.  Upon arriving I was greeted by two Basque men having a drunken fist-fight just meters from the train station, and then minutes later saw an otter frolicking in the city’s river.  I camped on the ruined wall of a fortress of some sort and was awoken in the night by rummaging hedgehogs and a local drunk who wanted to have a late night talk with me about the recent weather in the region.  Sometimes it would be better if I didn’t understand French.

Today, I made the short trip to San Sebastian.  I am staying with Juan, the guy I met in the Lofoten Islands in Norway, and his girlfriend, Suzannah, in their picture perfect Spanish apartment.  It´s time I go get lost in this vibrant city.

Adios.

Sorry for the delay everyone.  I’ve been in the middle of nowhere for what seems like an eternity.

Now that I’m back in civilization, I will try to fill you in where I’ve been and the silly antics that have occurred since I wrote on here last.

After leaving Galway, I hitched my way north.  I was picked up by a few out-of-work carpenters and a wine-maker from Scotland.   Donegal was a spectacular part of the country, and despite the fact that I only spent two days exploring the rugged north of Ireland, I was there with perfect weather and I managed to take a few decent pictures.   I spent the night in my tent, sleeping in a farmer’s field in the town of Malin Peg.   Good luck finding it on a map.   It was on one of the most remote points of the island. I took a lift from a holidaying Polish cook who agreed to take me one hour out of his way because I assured him that the scenery would be worth it.   Then I hiked for more than an hour to a little coastal community, hopped a fence and found an outcrop of rock overlooking the ocean on one side of the hill, and on the other I had an unimpeded view of Slieve League (the tallest cliffs in all of Europe at 600 meters)   I went to sleep with the sunset and the bahing of sheep in the distance.   My peaceful place turned violent when the winds changed sometime in wee hours of the morning.  Still tired and cold, but more worried about the well-being of my tent, I packed up and started by departure.   It was a Sunday morning, and I was in a particularly orthodox Irish Catholic community.   No one was driving because they were in church or in bed (probably severely hungover).   After hours of waiting, finally a very nice man driving over the mountain to pick up his son after a long night of drinking.   We drove around looking for his son, but after 30 minutes of searching, he decided to drive me to the cliffs instead.  Am I ever grateful that he did.  Every tourist in Ireland visits the Cliffs of Moher, which are impressive, but they are no way near as beautiful as Slieve League.

After that I took a lift from a Czech guy with an strange affinity to classic rock.   He drove me for two or more hours with Zeppelin and AC/DC blaring and we had a sing-a-long, shouting out the lyrics at passing pedestrians with the windows rolled down.

I took a few more short lifts until I was on the border to Northern Ireland.   I had a terrible time here because there was no good place to stand.  I walked a couple kilometers outside of the town, and luckily, a Lithuanian lumberjack stopped took me grocery shopping with his wife and kids, and then drove me to a place past Derry.  Here I waited 5 minutes and a German researcher named Hans stopped and fortunate for me, was going exactly where I was hoping to go–The Giant’s Causeway.   We drove there and talked about everything from religion, to politics, to the end of the world, the ethics of keeping livestock.   The Giant’s Causeway was worth all of the hype.  It is a surreal place of hexagonal volcanic stepping stones leading a path into the ocean.

Here’s the legend as follows:

Fionn had spent many days and nights trying to create a bridge to Scotland because he was challenged by another giant. A fellow boatsman told him that the opponent was much larger than he. Fionn told his wife and she came up with an ingenious plan to dress Fionn like a baby. They spent many nights creating a costume and bed. When the opponent came to Fionn’s house; Fionn’s wife told him that Fionn was out woodcutting and the opponent would have to wait for him to return. Then Fionn’s wife showed him her baby and when the opponent saw him he was terrified at the thought of how huge Fionn would be. He ran back to Scotland and threw random stones from the causeway into the waters bellow.      (wikipedia)

I then spent a night in Belfast, awoke the next morning and took the ferry to Stranraer, Scotland.   I had an awful time hitch-hiking here.   To my delight, an amazing couple named, Davey and Jane, drove me to their village called Killwinning, fed me a fish and chips dinner and let me sleep in their backyard in my tent.  I had a great time listening to Davey’s travel stories that he had collected over his many years of adventuring the world.  The next day, in the rain, I tried to hitch northerly toward the highlands.  Let’s just say, I didn’t get too far.   After being in the pouring rain for hours, feeling cold, wet and miserable I boarded bus after bus until I arrived in Edinburgh, found a nice old hostel in the centre of the old town, and I laid out all of my gear to dry.

I spent the next couple of days exploring the city, finding the free museums and joining the walking tours.  Aesthetically speaking, Edinburgh has some of the most impressive looking buildings and streets.  As a history nerd, I don’t think I could ever tire of walking the aged and time-honoured streets of the city.   History just seems to drip from every stone in the city, and there is something ancient and fascinating around every bend in the road and down every narrow close.

I took a Ryanair flight, and to fall within the ridiculous baggage weight restrictions, I wore more than five layers of clothing, equalling more than 3 kilos of baggage.  I was then in Norway.   What a great country.   As hard as it might seem, after reading all that I’ve written here, I’m still at a loss for words.  I’ll tell you about it later.  It’s time to explore Stockholm.

After writing my last post I explored Dublin until nightfall.   I tried to get a good night sleep.     Four drunken British yahoos crashed into the room at half past four yelling, fighting, and destroying everything in sight, including two sinks and the toilet.

I was up early to take a local bus to the outskirts of town.  From there I found the highway going south.  I wrote on a piece of paper, “SOUTH OR WEST PLEASE.”  In a matter of 30 minutes, a golfing enthusiast picked me up and drove me 10 kilometers from Kilkenny.  I stood by the road and in a matter of minutes, I was picked up by an Irish hippie headed to Kilkenny.  He took me to the city center and I set off to explore.  I stayed for three hours, then hitched another ride down the street to the motorway going south.   This time a taxi driver headed home for the day was able to drive me 30 kilometers south to a village called Callin.   It was probably a mistake going here.  I didn’t get another ride for nearly 2 hours.  Not only did no one stop for me here, but I also had rednecks yelling profanities at me from there cars, and a few regular comedians stopped for me and pulled away just as I approached their cars.  Alas, after a long and hot wait, a car with two lads slowed and they explained that they had passed an hour before and saw me, and out of pity they would drive me to the next town where I could catch a ride easier on a bigger motorway.

This was a godsend.   A very nice guy picked me up and drove me just east of Cork, all the while explaining the beauties of a simple pastoral Irish lifestyle.  From here, I was able to get a ride from a hilariously dodgy character named David, who took me as far as Kilarney, driving 50 kilometers over the speed limit, while yelling or texting into his cellphone as bumping house music beat away on his stereo, all the while complaining about everyone else and their terrible driving.   Luckily, I made it safe and sound and found a great hostel in the town of Kilarney.

The next day I woke up early, and rented a bicycle to explore the neighbouring national park.  A leisurely cycle took hours and  I returned, exhausted, at 5 pm, before setting off to try and hitch hike to Galway.  I walked to the motorway, and after 20 minutes, a university student going to school in Limerick offered to drive me there.  He was very hungover and in need of sleep.  He was grateful to have the company so he wouldn’t drive off the road from exhaustion.   I waited ten minutes at my next stop, before I was on the road again, this time for just ten minutes.   Another person stopped almost immediately and drove me another 40 or so kilometers.  As I waited, the next car that drove by was a 1978 MGB Roadster, I yelled, “nice car!” to him as he waited at a stop light.  He offered me a ride.   I could barely fit all of my gear into this tiny little British sports car.  He took me to Galway, and let me call my friends on his cellphone.

At this point I was exhausted, but I had successfully hitchhiked all across this delightful country.   I am a big fan of hitching, as you can imagine.  It is a great way to meet local people and listen to the Irish people and their gift for gab.  I had a great time, and best yet, it cost me nothing.   Oh yeah, and I also got a sunburn.   I brought the sun to Ireland and it’s been unseasonably beautiful and warm.

I’ll post some more when I have the time or the energy.

Iceland is like no place I’ve been before.   The isolation is palpable.   You feel it in the cold wind, see it in the enormity of the sky—it’s like the ends of the earth, and in many ways, it is.   I can’t imagine what the first settlers thought when they left their homes in Denmark, set sail for the North Atlantic, found the harsh island of fire and ice, and decided to call it home.  What compelled these Viking forbearers to leave with the intentions of never returning?   According to the Icelandic Sagas, it was a political clash which caused a rift in the Viking community.   It’s remarkable that they were guided there of all places, and even more remarkable that they stayed—for more than one thousand years.  Most of the population of Iceland still derives from those first expeditions of courageous Vikings.   As you can imagine, understanding your family history is not just a pastime in Iceland, it is necessity, because no one wants to marry a cousin.

I really can’t explain how amazing this country is.   It has an undeniable mystique that my words cannot fully capture.

The highlight of my trip took place when I rented a Toyota Yaris with two girls from Adelaide.  We drove as far as we could in two days and saw some of Iceland’s most impressive sights.    We really pushed that Yaris to its limits too.   We left with a vague notion of where we were going, and a tourist map with even vaguer details.   We drove through remote fishing villages along the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, crossed frozen lunar-like mountain passes, basked in the beauty of abandoned seaside farmhouses, stood and beheld the magnificent force of the Golden falls , the beauty of the Geyser and witnessed the primeval strength of Eyjafjallajokull volcano—whose fiery, lightning strewn ash-plumes have landlocked aircrafts across Western Europe.

Wherever my travels take me in this world, I will take my memories of Iceland.   It is a traveler’s dream come true.

After Iceland, I flew to London, luckily for me, with little to no trouble or delays.   The airport was a little frantic, but considering the circumstances, everything seemed to be running quite smoothly.   I explored London for a day, took a bus to Portsmouth, just to find it as lively as a ghost town.  I camped overnight in a golf course and spent the morning of the next day hitching to Wootten Bassett, where my British family calls home.  I met some very interesting people along the way, and I was received with a really warm welcome from my family, who drove me all over the country-side and stuffed me full of traditional English meals.   After indulging me with everything British, they drove me to Bristol where I boarded a bus from Birmingham, where I slept overnight in a train station, to wake up and take a train to Holyhead, Wales.   Here I hopped aboard a ferry headed for Dublin, where I am currently.  I haven’t explored any of the city yet, mostly because I’ve been in this internet café trying to write this overdue post.   It’s about time I get out there and enjoy this charming-looking city…and the weather.  It’s a balmy 26 degrees, in Ireland of all places.

Until next time.

Living on the edge from Gunnar Konradsson on Vimeo.

I´ve traveled all over the states, and nothing really compares to NYC.  It´s its own planet in the center of its universe.   It  glimmers with an unmentionable eccentricity while welcoming with a refreshing familiarity.    People congregate from the world over, pulled closer by rumours and reputations of elegance, the promises, the hype, of a city worth the time, worth the name.   New York is where all the world´s cultures overlap, intertwine, compliment and contrast.  It is the crossroads of all civilizations, its the capitol city of Earth.

Although I didn´t have enough time or money to experience the city the ways its meant to be experienced, I did manage to walk for two days straight on blistered feet, seeing most of the major sights before flying to Reykjavik.   It is a beautiful gritty city, where the people are genuinely friendly and helpful, while simultaneously crude and unapologetic.   NYC is the best place to people watch.  I saw the most comical of characters and eavesdropped on the most hilarious of conversations, while sitting in parks, and feelings the subterranean rumbling of passing trains beneath my feet.   It is an intoxication city, and I am awaiting my next visit.

While NYC is at the center, Iceland is the lost planet, on the outskirts of existence, the little dwarf planet knocked out of the gravitation pull of its cosmos, adrift in a cold silent ocean, isolated, mysterious, a vestige of a time long gone.

I feel like a need a few more days to properly write about Iceland, absorb some more of its charm, let it sink into my skin.  Here are some pictures for now. They aren´t uploading…oh well. I´m going on a two day road trip tomorrow, so I hope to rack up a collection of pictures to post in a few days.

enjoy…

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?…I should grow myself a beard.

The Longest Way 1.0 – one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

I still can’t post pictures directly onto my site, but I’ve found a way around the many annoyances of my site’s many html script errors.

These pictures are a collection of pictures for the last few months, some even date back to February.

I spent the first few months of my teaching job trying to save as much money as I could, so as to travel as much as possible when I completed this stint of teaching in Korea.  But, as the sun got warmer and the trees bloomed, my objectives have slightly changed.  Korea is a fun place to travel once mercury rises.  The buses are cheap, the mountains and beaches are abundant and the food is good.  Inevitably, my outlook on living in Korea became less about saving and more about living and enjoying.  I still aim to save, save, save, but ultimately, I wouldn’t be doing myself justice as a traveler and a teacher in a foreign country unless I was also trying to truly explore and experience this fine East Asian country.

I have been going on weekend excursions that are affordable and fun.  I’m not too picky about the destinations.  All I ask is that the destinations that await me host scenic vistas, cultural phenomena or historical wonders.  So far, I think I’ve seen some pretty amazing cities.

I visited Jirisan Mountain with my co-workers, Jason and Neil, and Neil’s girlfriend, Yongju.  It was a nice overnight excursion.  We stayed in a pension, the Korean equivalent of a summer cabin/cottage.  It looked like the new houses that are being built in North Whitby and Oshawa, mostly because the owner’s children go to university at York and when their parents went to visit them they bought the designs for the houses they saw to build North American-looking pensions in South Korea.  Strange.

The mountains around our pension were beautiful.  We visited in the winter and the rolling mountains were covered in barren trees, which gave them an unusual haunting quality.  We got to a late start, no thanks to the quantity of wine consumed the night before, but we still managed to do some exploring and I got a few shots of our mountainous surroundings.

There are also some pictures of my trip to Mokpo with Brad.  We went there on one of the only holidays that we weren’t shafted out of because of this unlucky calender year; Students Day–the one day Korean students dont have to go to school.  We climbed to the top of the “mountain” and took some picture of the city and harbour below.  Then Brad and I were made to feel like rock-stars when a group of blushing teen-aged girls wanted to take pictures with us.  It was a good day trip.

Also, there’s pictures from my excursion to Busan.  I went to Busan only once before, but it was in the midst of my visa application process.  On my first visit, I only stopped into the city for a few hours to get my criminal record notarized, and after 4 hours or so I was headed back to Gwangju to crash on Brad’s floor.

This time I went with Priya.  We ate some great foods unavailable to us in Gwanju (excellent Indian and Mexican food), we laid out on the beach playing Uno, and we did a little shopping for summer attire (flip-flops and polos).  Before heading home, we stopped at an amazing temple in the mountains above the city.  As we walked up the stairs to the temple we could hear the beating of a drum.  When we arrived in the main complex we watched several drummers beat on a drum the size of a Buick.  We were there for the evening prayers and we sat in awe and watched fifty or so monks chant in unison.  I have seen prayer ceremonies before at various temples throughout my journeys, but never with such a large group of monks.  The effect that the monks’ voices had on the air around them was remarkable.  They were in such perfect unison that we could feel the note reverberating through the air and resonating within our bodies, which was particularly impressive because we were standing a fair distance away while watching them.  It was an unforgettable experience.

There’s some pictures from Sinji Island too.  This was a different kind of trip.  I went with Priya, Brad, Jolean, Lauran, Beth and Kate.  We mostly bummed around on the beach, drinking Soju and Poweraid (Poju) for several hours and enjoyed the breathtaking sunset.  For some unknown reason, I was a grumpy old man that weekend and I might have said some things I shouldn’t have.  My bad.

The last set of pictures are from my most recent excursion to Bigeumdo, and island 2.5 hours off the coast of Korea.  This island is renowned for its more rustic natural aesthetic.  It was pretty undeveloped and in even traveling there I felt like I was leaving Korea altogether and visiting a different country.  I went with Priya again on this trip.  We had these hopes of camping out on the beach, cooking our own meals on a fire or gas range and being uninterrupted by the onslaught of curiously offensive Koreans, but unfortunately, these visions were dashed.  First, Priya lost the gas range somewhere from Mokpo to Bigeumdo.  We still haven’t told her friend who was kind enough to lend us the gas range that we lost.  Second, that tent we borrowed was without a doubt, the worst tent made by humankind.  I tried my damnedest to build it, because as every man knows, putting up a tent is a matter of male pride.  But, alas, I failed horribly.  it was a sad day in the history of men.  Luckily, there was a minbak (room-for-rent) a five minute walk away.  This worked out better, I dare say, because we got a bed, a shower and we got to hang out with the owner, who was this very generous and kind women, and her friend, who both made us feel very welcome.  We still got to cook our lunch outside.  We borrowed a gas range from the minbak owner and we cooked sausage, egg and noodles on the roof overlooking the Yellow Sea.

Other than teaching, that should fill everyone in on where I have been for the last few months.  Take care and I’ll try to make some new adventures soon!

Christmas away from Whitby just didn’t feel right.  Those of you who know me well know I’m not the biggest fan of Christmas, or as I like to call it, Corporate Annual Gift Exchange Day, but my resistance to the material obsessive nature of the holidays still doesn’t negate the fact that from December 24th-January 1st nothing beats being well-fed at home surrounded by my closest friends and family.

I still had a good time hanging out in Gwangju for the holidays.  I don’t quite feel like explaining my adventures, so instead I’ll sum it up in a few simple sentences.

Saw an old man fight a bus driver.

Saw a drunk driver crash a motorcycle while riding with a passenger on the back.

Ate Christmas curry while drinking Japanese sake.

Read several more books.

Warmed my frozen body with a drunk Korean groundskeeper at a temple around a blazing fire.

Fell asleep at a karaoke room.

Fell asleep in a taxi.

That pretty much sums it up alright.  It was fun.  I’ve met a whole bunch new people with similar tastes in music, movies and books.  I’m working on making some sort of book exchange for foreigners in the city who are as desperate for English reading materials as I am.

I hope everyone’s holidays were as good or better than mine, and of course, I am thinking of and missing everyone back in Canada.

Lucas Does Tokyo

I had the highest of expectations for Tokyo, and despite this, my trip there last week still managed to exceed my hopes. I was only there for 5 days, which isn’t nearly enough to do Japan or even Tokyo any justice, but nonetheless, my short time there was fulfilling; jam-packed with sight-seeing, train adventures and window-shopping. I also ate some of the best food I’ve has thus far on my trip. I need to venture to Japan again. I’ve just skimmed the surface and now I need to cannonball into the culture sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Also, I cannot convey my gratitude to Sachiko Kon for hosting me in her house and showing me around her fine city. She made Japan just that much better for me.

Sachiko, thanks again. I am in your debt.

I have other news, rather important news, but I’ll save it for a later post.

Right now I`m on my friend`s ultra-Japanese computer.   It is far too advanced for my simpleton brain.

Here are a few picture teasers of my latest/current excursion to Tokyo.

I will post more good stuff a little later.  Maybe on Christmas day.

Staying couped up inside while patiently awaiting my visa approval is slowly driving me crazy. I have cabin fever. I don’t have enough money to go on adventures, but conserving my resources by waiting is making me crawl in my own skin. I’m planning a prison escape. Don’t tell the guards.

On another note, I’ve decided to do a…

***Public Service Announcement for Any English Teacher Hopefuls***

I admit, I should have done more research before wandering into this country with the expectation of easily getting a working visa and starting a job teaching. I was naive. I really expected it to be a simple process. I assumed I’d have a few weeks of waiting time and before I knew it I’d be at the helms of an English class. Little did I know, I had an arduous process I’d have to undergo and numerous hoops to jump through to get this silly piece of paper that states I’m qualified to legally teach English in Korea. For everyone who has ever considered the possibility of coming to Korea in the near future to teach, I hope my simple advice will save you some hassles and headaches.

The Korean immigration process is incredibly archaic, and in recent times, they have tightened the regulations making it even more difficult to ascertain a working visa. Don’t get me wrong, they have some legitimate reasons for tightening up their standards. Interpol did an investigation of the native English teachers in Korea and discovered that a large amount of these people had criminal records in their home countries, many of which were arrested in sexually-related or drug-related crimes, or had histories of violence. The most publicized story revolves around Christopher Neil, who was a Canadian pedophile, teaching children in Gwangju, Korea. You can read about the story here. I understand that ultimately, the education of Korean children and their safety is at stake, and it is essential that the teachers who are coming into this country should not pose a threat. However, having acknowledged that their is a need for regulations, I think they have a foolishly strict policy for preventing people from getting a working visa who are already inside Korea. You’d think they would be more interested in hiring someone who they could meet in person to interview, over someone who applies from their home country via an emailed resume with a photo attachment.    Strangely enough, this is not the case. I have had a harder time than most because I’ve had to wait for documents to be sent to me from home, just to send signed copies back to Canada to be approved, and then wait for them to be returned to me once again in Korea. In the technological era, it just seems strangely outdated.  If you are traveling and hope to stop in Korea to get a job, think twice.  It is very difficult and the process will drive you crazy.  Go home and apply from there.  Trust me.

So, for those of you who have considered someday teaching in Korea, I can make the following suggestions;

• Firstly, consider applying for a public school position. In theory, the pay is a little less than private institutes, but the working hours are better day-by-day and these jobs offer 90 days of paid vacation time per yearly contract. In my opinion, this is well worth a little less pay. Also, these teachers have nights off, and though it is technically illegal, you can easily teach private lessons on the side in your evenings and make enough to survive off your private earnings while completely banking your public school earnings. Because you are hired by the government, the hiring process takes longer. I’ve been told the hiring of public school teachers takes at least three months. Overall, most of the people I’ve heard speak about their jobs in public school, have nothing but positive things to say.

• If you want more immediate money, you should consider private institutes. They have worst working hours, usually 1PM-9PM, or 2PM-10PM, five days a week, with split shifts over the summer and winter vacation with hours ranging from 8AM-11AM and then again from 5PM-9PM. Private institutes only offer 10 days a year off for vacation time. Also, something to consider, private institutes are businesses, often with no governing body to regulate labour rights and quality of education. But ultimately, they pay better salaries, which for many people with mounting student debts, is the most important perk.

• Whatever job you decide to take, read the contract inside and out. You will hear bosses tell you things like, “In Korea contracts are not important because here in the ‘East’ the employee/employer relationship is based on trust and mutual respect.” With these sorts of sentiments, employers justify forcing employees to work tasks outside of their contracted services, often without overtime pay. This is mostly a problem with private institutes because as I said before, they are businesses that want to capitalize on their gains. Be wary, and don’t let employers bully or guilt-trip you into working above and beyond the duties listed in your contract.

• Take your time deciding what position to take. If sometime doesn’t sound right, it probably isn’t. Ask your employer or recruiter about the aspects of the contract that don’t sit well with you. If they clarify or verbally refute parts of the contract, ask them to put it in writing for you. From what I understand, Korean employers will go out of their way to avoid shame and disrespect. If you feel you’re rights are being infringed on, confront your employer in private. If things still persist, stand strong and even make a scene if you have to. They will concede for the sake of their business and their reputation.

• Come to Korea with enough money to survive for at least a month and a half–approximately $700 CAD. It is common in the industry for teachers to work for more than 45 days without receiving any pay. This is hard for people who’ve come to Korea to make immediate money.

Below is a site that is particularly helpful for those who are planning on teaching in Korea and also many other world destinations.  Give the site a read, or email me any questions you might have.  I’m no authority, but I learn more an more about teaching in Korea each day and I’ve spent the better part of two months discussing teaching with foreign teachers to know what the deal is.

• Dave’s ESL Cafe

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.

Jon Krakauer – Into The Wild

So, I might have neglected to mention to you, my readers, that I am now a teacher of English Literature at Two Months Academy in Gwangju City, Jeollanam-do province, in the great Republic of Korea.

All my paperwork is yet to be completely finalized, but tomorrow I’m going in to do a demo class to get accustomed to standing at the front of a class room teaching Korean children the finer points of the English language. I’m experiencing a mixture of excitement and nervousness…mostly excitement, especially after waiting so long to get my documents in order to be granted a working visa within South Korea’s incredibly archaic application process.

The pictures above came from this weekend. Brad and I met some British teachers who just started teaching in the Gwangju area. Vikki is the blond-haired young woman and Bradley is the sharply-dressed bloke beside me in the pictures. They are a lot of fun. Gwangju is a great little city and I’m happy to finally settle down and have a bed to call my own–I’m looking forward to anything softer than a hardwood floor, which is all I’ve know as a bed for the last two weeks.

Funny story; Brad’s apartment is down the street from two of Korea’s most prevalent yet contradictory establishments. There is at least ten churches stationed beside or nearby a very active red-light district. This is not uncommon to anyone who has visited South Korea before. Almost every city in Korea has a skyline dotted with neon signs flashing advertisements for sex-motels, “VIP business clubs” and sexy-massage parlours. For those who are planning on visiting South Korea, a little pointer–if you need a haircut, make sure you go to a shop has a single spinning barber shop pole, not a shop with two spinning poles, because from what I gather, the “service” at a double pole shops doesn’t extend to anything above the waste.

Below is a video of Brad and I doing a walking tour of his entertaining neighbourhood…

The more novels I read the more I realize what I constitute as a great author.  To me, a novel should have a defined voice, a personality, almost as if the pages make up the features of a living human being, a wise storyteller who sits beside you and tells you, and only you, a tale you’ve never heard before.  A great novel should envelop you with it’s warmth in the moments of heartfelt, grab you by the throat when it is angry, wrench your heart when it’s upsetting, bring you into places you have never been and awakening you to perspectives you’ve never had.  What’s more, it should offer its reader some simple words of wisdom.  It shouldn’t preach per say, rather, it should offer a sentence or two that directly speaks to you as a reader.  I have encountered this repeatedly over my travels, and I think this is the best sign of excellent authorship.  Certain writers have the ability to offer me, an anonymous and distant reader in which they have never met, some tangible advice for my own life and my own character.  As I said, I’ve found this over and over again in some of the best novels I’ve read in the last few months…

• “Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love.”  Cormac McCarthy – All the Pretty Horses

• “It is not good to want a thing too much. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with God or the gods.” John Steinbeck – The Pearl

• Haruki Murakami’s novel, Wind-up Bird Chronicles, showed me the perspective of person who is driven by an unexplainable need to cheat on their significant other.

• Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible illustrated to me the simple dignity in poverty and how asking for aid is not a shameful act.  There is no shame in asking those who have excess to give up what they can easily survive without.

Now, if only I could get a job reading novels all day long.  I’d be damn good at it.  I am getting close to being employed.  I have a few more hoops to jump through.  My criminal record check is in the mail.  Then after that, I have to do a visa run in Tokyo, and then, and only then, will I be an English teacher in South Korea.

I received a serendipitous invitation to Samcheok, a coastal city on the eastern side of Korea, by the delightful, Anna Lee, and I eagerly accepted her offer and boarded a four hour bus to Samcheok Saturday morning. She took me on a bicycle tour of her humble city, I took countless pictures of the sleepy seaside and we ate sushi and drank lots of beer.  The next day we eventually boarded a bus for Gangneong, hoping to have time to climb a mountain, maybe witness the magisty of the changing colours, but instead, we enjoyed a leisurely stroll along the seashore and a chilly walk around the city’s lake.  I met a fellow Trent-grads and a former Whitby resident who are currently teaching in Gangneong, shot roman candles, lit tons of sparklers on the beach and I ate some mind-blowingly good Korean BBQ. 

Anna’s new, possibly asthmatic Pomeranian, Saja, loved me so much it tried to sleep on top of my stomach in the night and then settled for the small space on the pillow beside my own head.  I’m not going to lie to you, the dog got a little fresh with me when I was sleeping.  I feel little violated.

It was a great weekend, and exactly what I needed after spending too many oppressive days in the go-go-go city of Seoul. 

Thank you Anna.

I’ve had some adventures over the past few days.  I explored two different cities, failed to climb any mountains and met some more great teachers here in Korea.  However, I regret that I didn’t take many pictures.  Here’s some of those I did take.  I don’t really feel like explaining them in too much detail.

The lovely Sachiko Kon.

My favourite alley in Korea.  I wander down this alley to find Kimbap and bibimbap shops.  MMMMM delicious.

Brandon and his curt barber.

Somewhere north of Gwangju.  I took this from the train.  I wish I could have been outside of the train to take a proper photoraph.

A old man pimp near Anguk Station, exit 5 (aka- the ol’ man pimp stomping-grounds).

The Fat Korean Man (AKA -  The bane of my existence at this hostel)  I told you he was real.  Oh, how I loathe this man.

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A Short Story

Below I’ve included a short story I wrote last night and finished this morning.  It’s a modern rendition of one of my favourite anonymous medieval poems, called (surprise, surprise), The Wanderer.  It’s a dark story, which I accredit mostly on my recent reading of Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road.  If you people feel so inclined, give it a read and tell me what you think.

The Wanderer (First Draft) – By Lucas Brailsford

“Gone are the days…” he whispered to himself.  The words felt dry and jagged in his throat, making him cough.

He opened his eyes to his world.  He stared for an unknown number of minutes at the ceiling of the empty train station.  Then at the wall standing before him.  The clock was still, the arms paralyzed at 10:47.  His temples throbbed, his eyes stung and he needed to piss. He sat up from his makeshift bed, a jacket draped over the tiled floor to soften the cold and hard of the flat stone.  His well-worn knapsack was his pillow.  There were marks moulded into the skin of the right side of his face from the sack’s zippers and buckles.  They were etched like little pink canyons in the sallow of his face.  He cracked his neck, but to his dissatisfaction, it felt just as stiff as before.  His hips were soar from sleeping on the ground for the third time in three nights.  He wondered if it would get easier the next night, or the next week’s nights, or sadly, as many nights as it would take to get to where he was going…or flee where he had been.

In that moment, what he hoped for more than anything was his next night’s sleep to be in a big bed.  Although, beds had their disadvantages too.   He would settle for anything better than a concrete floor, even a strip of dry, soft ground.  Dry ground was also an unlikely prospect because it had rained every day, drizzle mostly but sometimes pouring for hours on end, for as long as he could remember.  And as he thought more about sleeping in the dirt, he conjured visions of insects crawling over his unconscious body, and this made him shiver slightly. Sure, concrete was hard as hell, but truth-be-known, it did limit the number of unwelcome visitors in the night.

That past night he had slept very little, if not at all.  His mind had wandered endlessly to distant thoughts of dread and impending doom. He feared nothing in particular but everything in general.  Mostly of eternal loneliness, and of course, death–but not his own death. He feared the deaths of everyone else.  He himself felt dead already.  There was no need to fear his own death. Instead, he was visited in the night by apparitions of all those dead he had witnessed in all his many years of service.  They came to him more and more these days and long nights.  He was consumed by the strongest sense of unease and regret.  It had been swelling within him for a long time, ever-multiplying, growing to form a solid mass that churned in the pit of his stomach.  Despite his hunger, he felt over-nourished by dread, bloated by his worried thoughts.  They left a bad taste in his mouth.  He tongued the roof of his mouth and the mossy backs of his teeth and cursed under his breath.  All he’d consumed for more than twenty-four hours had been born within his troubled mind.  He had feasted for too long on these thoughts, the bitterness he tasted gave him reason to start another long day.  The more he moved, the less he thought—but even this remedy was wearing thin like the soles of his boots.

Mechanically, he rubbed the crust from the corners of his eyes.  Slowly they had adjusted to the early dawn’s haze. This was the first time he had seen his surroundings.  He had settled down so late the previous night he could barely make out the source and identity of the strange dark shapes around him.  The buildings beyond slowly appeared from their grey misty shrouds.  There were small shrubs outside entangled with plastic bags and other trash, lining the walkway and a few twisted and barren trees that grew on a lawn in the distance.  There was a garbage can’s nearby which grinned mockingly as flies dipped and darted from its recessed belly.  The trains outside in the yard sat empty and foreboding, like everything he encountered everywhere he went.

He stood upon his numb legs and felt his blood begin to melt and flow through every inch of his flesh and bone. He would begin walking soon.  But first, he would piss.

He walked a few meters from the place where he had made his bed, and settled on a place as good as any other to relieve himself.  He chose a corner beside the public lockers.  As the piss ran down the wall it collected on the tiled floor and slowly crept towards him in yellow trails like bony outstretched fingers pushing up from a grave.  One of the trails went through his legs, while another flowed towards his left boot.  To avoid the piss he shifted his weight to the other leg and then pivoted, standing on his tip-toes.  He had to shake quickly, rush over to where he’d slept that night, before the piss reached his bag and jacket on the floor.

This was his routine.  Every morning, more or less, followed the same model.  Sometimes, when he was fortunate, he would have a bed or a couch or even a carpeted floor to spend the night.  However, even those nights were awful on their own.  The more comfortable the sleep the stronger his memories were of her.  He would awake and expect to find her asleep beside him, awake with something to tell her, swearing he could smell the scent of her hair or feel her breath on the back of his neck.  He would wish to hear her laugh, long to make her smile, awake to say, “g’mornin’,” but she was never there beside him.  These half-sleep thoughts pooled in his mind and made him feel content for fleeting, ephemeral moments—these were glorious instances to curl up the corners of his mouth, but always, as sudden at the thoughts arose they too were dashed by his reality and the endless void of loneliness that swelled around him.  They dried up like a salt-flat.  They became the great expanse of a dead, dry sea.
These were the worst times, the times that proceeded the best memories.

He walked all day, everyday.  It was hard to know distances or times of his travels, but he awoke with dawn’s light every morning and laid his head down many hours after each rusty-red dusk.  He wandered endlessly–a refugee of a war that waged in his thoughts—a fugitive of his past crimes—a slave to his torturous reveries—an exile in oblivion.  His ultimate destination was unknown but it all seemed inconsequential really.  He just knew each place he found was just as desolate as the last, so what did it matter?

That was how he started his walk that morning, like every day before.  He looked to his left and then to his right.  He was somewhere on the outskirts of a small town.  He thought he had come from the east the night before, but it was hard to tell in the day’s light where he’d been previously—the world looked so different in the overcast light of day.  He followed his instinct, and decidedly headed west.  His stomach grumbled from hunger and his throat was raspy and dry.  He saw what looked to be stretches of suburban houses in the distance, and his hunger led him there without a second thought.
When he neared the suburban street he abruptly stopped, violently shaking his head to forbid the onset of his thoughts, to clear the approach of a memory of his past.  This neighbourhood reminded him of where he lived as a child.  The cookie-cutter houses. The flags standing erect and embedded in the brick of the house-fronts. The fire hydrants.  The basketball nets.  The gardens.  The mailboxes.  The power-lines.  The memories. The heartbreak.  He rushed through his surroundings, head-down, focusing on the ground and each step he took to enter the closest house as quickly as he could.

He found food easily enough in his world.  It was never too far out of his reach.  Upon entering the abandoned houses that lined most streets, he would find shelves full of canned foods aged long past their expiry dates, bottles of water, fruit juice and liquor.  Despite the abundance of food and no matter how appetizing it appeared to his starving soul, upon prying open their metal tops, he mourned when he realized that each can contained the same empty tasting matter.  Nothing had any flavour.  Everything tasted of nothingness, of sorrow, of pain.  Every morsel he choked down to fill his empty stomach conjured the memories of the foods of his past life.  The water could never quench his thirst and liquor could never drown his thoughts.  He ate for the attempted comfort, but mourned the act of vanity, the filling of an empty stomach with tasteless matter.

That particular house he entered had the regular selection of foods.  Tomato soup and stale crackers. Red beans.  Canned meat chili. A bottle of cola. Box of chocolate chip cookies.  He wanted to gorge on his findings, hoping desperately that today’s food would actually taste like anything at all, but once again, he eagerly engulfed the different foods and he cringed to find each food possessed the same dry cardboard and dust flavour of everything else.  His insatiable hunger dwindled with every forced bite.  The water helped wash back the lumps of food that barely slid down his throat, but it did very little of anything else.  He was always thirsty.

He walked passed through the house without making noise, almost passing through the walls.  In the living room he found a piano, the white keys darkened by the countless hours of play and rehearsal, the oil and dirt of fingerprints. He pulled the bench out, sat down and tried to play a tune he thought he should remember.  His fingers graced the keys and the song slipped from his mind.  Instead, he pressed the keys to hear the ring of the notes.  They rang out loud in the empty house, but they were out of tune.  They sounded harsh to the ear.  He stood up and left the house, walking into the middle of the street.  The wind had picked up, carrying a thin sheet of rain that soaked his right side, the side which faced the gale.  He raised his collar to shield his face, but he didn’t know why he even bothered because the water still beaded on his brow, trickled into his eyes and rolled down his face.

He leaned forward and began to marched briskly into the wind, into his hardships, as he was trained to do all those years ago.  Each step of his boots on the asphalt clip-clapped heal-toe-heal-toe, reminding him of the drills he had learned and perfected.  He remembered his movements synchronized with all the others, the comfort of belonging to a greater good, the lack of individuality—this was what he lived for, before the solitude took everything from him.  These thoughts would lead him to remember the cheers of battle cries, the companionship, the feeling of purpose.  He saw their faces often in times like these—all his friends, his fellow soldiers, his brothers in arms.  These warm thoughts never lasted long.  Quickly they became his nightmarish visions of all those he had hurt and terrorized.  He remembered the kicking down of doors, the screams of horror, his mechanical instincts, nerves of steal, his shiny gun and his cold, hardened eyes.  He’d enter a darkened room to find, capture and incapacitate his target, the name assigned on simple slip of paper.  His muscles tensed as he dragged the frail and frightened body into the cold night lit by flashlights attached to guns and the overhead sparkle of stars. He saw the family members who cried and trashed at his knees begging in a tongue incomprehensible, but then again, as distinguishable as own, “Please, leave my son, my husband, my brother, my friend.  He is good!  He is innocent!  Where will you take him?  What has he done to you?”  He remembered their hot tears, the gaping mouths, their clenched fists, their frustration.  He then remembered his successes as a soldier.  His promotions accepted.  His good deeds noticed.  His fortunes made.  His esteems earned.  His nation and his king. His government and his God.  What did he have now if not just shards of memories of past experiences strewn in a broken, dark and empty soul.  He was so hungry for redemption but no amount of walking could bring him any closer and no distance walked could take him any further away from his misery.  He walked because it was all he could do.  He wandered because that was his fate now.

He walked for most of the day until his feet ached and his calves shook.  When evening came, the drizzling rain became sleet.  He took shelter beneath the awning of a toy shop to catch his breath and regain some of the warmth the icy wind had stripped away from his sore bones.  He wrapped his arms around himself trying to quell his shivering.  He leaned his back against the window of the shop.  He turned his head, staring at shop’s window-display.  These were the toys of his youth, he thought.  He remembered the train set models and toy guns.  The cowboy hats and army figurines.  But where were the horses and their riders? As his eyes peared across the toys they caught a shot of movement.  He leaned forward and focused.  In the window’s reflection he saw someone approaching down the road he had just walked.  He swung around.  He squinted his eyes to see the person in the distance marching into the wind.  Who was this person?  It had been so long since he’d had any contact with anyone.  He had almost forgot how to socialize.  How was he to approach someone, after so long.  As the stranger came closer he couldn’t help but notice his familiarity.  He looked handsome and young.  He looked like himself, decades ago.  He wandered  into the street to meet the man.  The man raised his head and revealed his tawny eyes.  They were the same person, separate by many years and much sorrow.

The elder stared and then finally whispered in his harsh voice,

Why are you here now?
I am going to war.
Who are you fighting?
I don’t know. I suppose whoever I’m told to fight.
I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.
But, you are me.
Yes, we’re the same.  I also know the painful road you’re walking.
What am I supposed to do then?
Live, love, be honest and kind, and god, whatever you do, don’t go n’kill n’one.  You don’t wanna become me.
Are you dead?
I don’t know.  What do you think?
Yes, I think you’re as good as dead.  Your jacket is stained with blood and it’s all bullet-holed.

The old man held his fingers to his shoulder.  Felt the hole in the fabric of his coat and touched the open wound in his shoulder-blade.  He looked astonished, shook his head to himself, uttering,

Funny thing, that is. I guess I am dead.
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Just then, I awoke to a hand glasped tight on my shoulder.

“What the hell is wrong with you?  You keep shaking and yelling in your sleep,” said the tall dark silhouette that loomed over me.
“Michaels, s’that you? What? Sorry, was I yelling again?”
“Yeah, so keep it down.  You’re waking up everybody.  We all need to sleep for tomorrow.”
“I just had a bad dream is all.  It was as vivid as could be.  I was dead and stuck wandering an empty world alone.”
“I don’t care, I just want to sleep.  If I don’t get a solid sleep it’ll be mine and everyone else’s asses on the line tomorrow.”
“We gotta take that eastern village tomorrow, yeah?”
“Yeah, we do.  Now, shut it!”

The silhuette disappeared from above my body.  I sat and stared, eyes wide at the ceiling above my head.  My head throbbed and my eyes stung.
Was I going to die tomorrow?

I gulped.  My throat was dry as a bone.

I sure missed home, I missed my baby.  I wish I wasn’t in this foresaken, god-awful desert.

I rolled over, closed my eyes and tried to sleep.  It was useless.  The rest of the night I lay awake thinking about endlessly wandering the earth.  I could hear the clip-clap of boots echoing in halls outside.

heal-toe-heal-toe
heal-toe
heal-toe
heal-toe

heal
toe

heal

toe.

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References The Wanderer – An Anonymous Medieval Poem Japanese Folklore – YureiMcCarthy, Cormac (2006). The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.————————————————————-

 I left Seoul last Thursday, and headed south.  I stopped first in a city which borders Seoul called, Suwon, to explore some traditional Korean culture and see the Korea Folk Village.  I just briefly read about the living museum in my Lonely Planet, and having some hours to kill, I decided it was a good enough destination for a leisurely afternoon. 

After a surprisingly long train and bus journey I finally arrived at the village, and I immediately regretted my decision.   I thought I had made an error of judgement.  The entire front entrance was overrun with children in matching white, yellow or red jumpsuits.  Everwhere I looked were knee-high, rows of synchronized Korean kids, laughing, singing, holding hands and having fun, at what I then came to realize was a kids amusement park.  I just pondered to myself, why the hell had I just bought a entrance ticket and bus fare to an amusement park for children.  I swallowed my pride and sulked into the entrance gates, expecting to be gawked at by the crowds of Korean kids and their suspicious teachers, but to my surprise, all the kids were just at the front, getting prepared to leave.  In fact, Korean Folk Village, was a pioneer village, Korean styles, where people lived, tended to plants and animals, worked the grounds and retained the traditional fashions of 19th century Korea.  There were actually plenty of foreign tourists there, young and old, and I even saw many who were traveling on their own, like me, which was reassuring. 

The village was interesting, and as I wondered the extensive grounds, I couldn’t help but feel that looking at the village’s arrangement (despite being fabricated for tourists), it could have been a replica of a pre-industrial village from any other world culture.  I guess it’s a nice thought to think that all cultures have commonality.

After exploring the village, I boarded a train for Hongseong, the small rural city where Brandon Khan currently calls home.  I arrived late, but we had enough time to eat some spicy Korean chicken and grab a big jug of flavoured Soju. 

—interuption—

Soju, for those who do not know, is Korea’s national and very potent alcohol.  Everyone loves this drink, from the homeless people who gather around outside of metro stop, compiling their days earning to buy a bottle (approximately$1 CAD), sharing swigs for the liquid’s warming effect, or college kids worn out with studying, or the business men celebrating a good day in the market.  Everyone loves Soju.  And did I mention the business men love Soju?  Because they really love Soju.  If you ever wish to see people passed out like Oktoberfest any given day of the week, come to Korea.  At 7PM you will see business men in several-hundred-dollar designer suits stumbling on and off the subway slurring their obscenities to everyone and no one, or at 3AM, you see girls fast asleep on park benches with their make-up smeared and their hair twisted and tangled with dried vomit.  As far as my not-so-keen eyes can tell, Soju is the cause and solution to every Korean problem.   It makes for some entertaining people watching, that’s for sure.

—end of interuption—

…where was I?  On the weekend, Brandon and I headed to Daechung to attend his friend’s birthday.  Ashlee is a extremely nice and hospitable girl from Alabama.  We explored the bar district and stumbled back to her house and slept on the floor, which might sound uncomfortable, but in Korea, the floors are more comfy than many of beds I’ve slept on throughout my travels.  They are heated and very soft.  

I don’t feel like I’ve had many stories to tell recently, but here is my most latest annoyance to rant about…

I came back to Seoul on Sunday, and had a very long night because I met the most obnoxious man alive.  I checked into the dorm at 3PM, and when I entered there was a huge, topless Korean man asleep with the lights on and the television blaring, snoring like no snoring I have ever heard before.  The warning bells were going off, but I was tired from my travels and in need of a shower.  I showered up, got ready to go and then left to explore some different corners of Seoul.  When I came back I met some cool Japanese people who I talked with for ages in the lounge.  By time I decided to go to sleep it was late.  I opened the door and I heard the snoring.  My dad snores pretty loud, but nothing like this.  This is beyond snoring.  This man has severe sleep apnea.  Wikipedia will back me up…

The sign that is most suggestive of sleep apneas occurs if snoring stops. If it does, along with breath, while the persons’ chest and body tries to breathe – that is literally a description of an event in obstructive sleep apnea syndrome. When breathing starts again, there is typically a deep gasp, and then the resumption of snoring.

This took place for hours.  This big fat man kept this cycle of snoring and gasping for breath from 3 AM until my roommates got so frustrating we kicked him out at 6:30AM.  It was just too much.  I can eventually get accustomed to the rhythmic nature of snoring–its possible to ignore it.  However, sleep apnea is a completely different beast.  Not only did this big oaf keep us awake because the soft tissue of his throat kept collapsing to stop his breathing, he also had night terrors.  When his big ol’ neck choked itself he would sometimes start to yell and mumble in his sleep, flailing his arms.  There is no getting used to this.  The times when I was almost drifting to sleep, the bed below me would erupt in commotion and he’s yell some words in Korean, punch the ladder, roll over and immediately continue snoring.  As I said, we kicked him out.  We told him it was rude of him to stay in a dorm when you are that loud.  I understand he has a syndrome which prevents him from sleeping, but its not cool to keep up three other travelers just because he was too cheap to pay for a single room where he wouldn’t bother anyone.  He slept on a couch in the lounge for the next two nights, thank god.

Oh, and did I mention, he stole my frigging comforter.  I had to sleep wearing my sweatshirt.  I would have woke him up and yelled at him for that too, but after I saw it draped over his big fat body, I decided he could keep it.

He is the type of person who is completely oblivious to those around him.  His intentions aren’t bad, but everywhere he goes and everything he does leads to people becoming disgruntled.  For instance, the computer lounge was full with people.  He sat down at the only empty computer (there are 12 computers in the lounge), a mosquito landed on him, he stood up and quickly ran out of the room and returned moments later with a aerosol can in his hand.  He then proceeded to spray Korean Raid all over the room, at peoples’ feet, on their laps, above their heads.  Some British man had to shout, “Hey! Don’t spray me with that stuff, its toxic.”  The big ol’ fat man, then apologized and slumped back into his seat.  He still sprayed the Raid wildly as soon as he saw anything that remotely resembled an insect.  He also offended a group of Japanese tourists.  He’s is a larger than life kind of moron.  He might be the live-in-colour Korean equivalent of Homer Simpson.  Here is a composite sketch I drew…

One of the days he was actually wearing a McDonald’s shirt.  I couldn’t make this stuff up!  Well, I made up the “I’m lovin’ it” part.  But everything else is accurate, I swear.

I meant to mention in the previous post, I’m no longer in Taiwan.  I’m in South Korea.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me explain what I’ve done with myself for the last few days.  Sunday I tried to go to Taipei in the middle of a raging typhoon (yes, another typhoon).  All of the buses were cancelled so I went back to Jessica’s and she let me stay there another night.  She was a very patient and hospitable host.

The typhoon was pretty wild.  My taxi ride was a harrowing adventure.  I saw huge sheets of metal gliding through the air like plastic bags in an updraft.  Trees were falling over everywhere I looked, and despite the obvious peril, many people were still riding their scooters around town doing errands.  The next day it rained for hours, but the winds had stopped.  When I left Jessica’s, to my surprise, the city was already mostly cleaned up.  I’m truly amazed at how comfortable the Taiwanese are with the destruction of a typhoon.  Their attitude is, more or less, well typhoons happen, so stop complaining and clean up the mess.  Only a few hours after the raging winds tore through the city, the people of Taichung had cleaned up almost all evidence of a typhoon (except for a few roofs and fences twisted, crushed or toppled).

I stayed in Taipei for two nights.  I met a cool French Canadian at my hostel.  We stayed up one of the nights drinking every kind of beer we could buy at the next-door 7-11, talking movies and music.  We also explored Shilin marker, considered to be Taiwan’s best night market.  I also explored a few temples and walked around Taipei until my feet bled.

Wednesday, I flew to Seoul (Incheon), and found my hostel in old Seoul.  Its a great hostel, a little expensive, but still a good home base to explore the city.  My Japanese dorm roommate is cycling across Asia, a pretty impressive vision, because I just ventured to all of the places he wants to go, and I did them by bus, taxi, car, boat and train, but definitely not bicycle.  He is in for a world of pain once he gets to Laos.  Those mountains are going to be hard as hell.  We checked out the main tourist spots in Seoul, and tried to avoid the droves of Korean students.  The worst of which took place in Gyeongbokgung Palace, where thousands of students of all ages rushed in and out of every building, nook and cranny.  It made it difficult to get pictures without these little snot-nosed devils ruining my shots.  The kids here are pretty cute though. They all have cell phones. I don’t have a cell phone, but these kids do.

Today I’ve been trying to find a job and get a police check.  So far so good.  I will have to wait until Monday to get anything else done because it is holiday time in Korea.

Seoul is a fun place.  I’m liking it here so far.  I’ve figured out the name of a cheap meal.  I pronounce it Bi Bean Pap.  It’s like a Korean Jambalai.  It is really cheap and filling.  I think this is the key to going to an expensive place like Korea, when you are a backpacker, such as myself…find a local cheap staple, learn its local name and then eat it one, two or three times a day.  It will eventually get boring, but as long as its filling, you wont go hungry and waste away.

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On another note….

Here is the music that gets me through oppressively hot and bumpy bus rides or long and lonely nights…

Bon Iver – Skinny Love

Jose Gonzales – Teardrop

Jimmy Cliff – The Harder They Come

Skip James – Crow Jane

Santogold – Lights Out

Sigur Ros – Saeglopur

Chad Vangaalen – Molten Light <– Very disturbing music video

The Cool Kids – Black Mags

Lykke Li – Dance Dance Dance

I hope next time I post I will be a teacher…wish me luck.

I’ve had a lot to think about this past week.  Firstly, my finances; my travel funds have almost run dry.  This isn’t the end of the world, and in fact, I was fully anticipating this moment, however, it leads me to my second trouble…where to start working.  I’ve been endlessly weighting my options between Taiwan, Korea, and to a lesser extent, Japan.  I’ve been contacting people in each country, asking as many people as I know who’ve done the teaching/traveling thing, scouring the internet, and just really trying to figure out my best plan of action.  I left last Sunday on my grand tour of Taiwan, with my mind buzzing with all my many options for my future.

I left Sunday from Taichung to Tainan, the old capital of Taiwan.  I got there in the early afternoon, and I walked around a temple or two and bumped into a Canadian face (which doesn’t say much, because Taiwan has to be the country with the most Canadians outside of Canada, because they are everywhere).  His name was Matt Gibson (here is his amazing blog).  In my previous post I mentioned the guy who gave me the tips about teaching and editing papers in Taiwan-well that was Matt.  Mr. Gibson and his friend (maybe girlfriend?) bought me beers, we talked about travel, teaching and Canada.  He told me that in four years of living in Taiwan, I was one of only a handful of backpackers he had ever met traveling in Taiwan.  Everyone who comes here does so to, surprise surprise, teach English.  After we talked I went to find a night market to pick up some Taiwanese delicasies, but the directions I got led me in the wrong direction and after hours of searching I finally found the market.  To add insult to injury, when I finally find a place with pictures on the menu I order what I thought was a noodle soup, instead, to my dismay, to be served one of the worst meals I’ve had thus far on my trip.  It was a fishy tofu soup with terrible hunks or pork bone and undercooked vegetables.  I tried my damnedest to eat it, but it was just too awful to handle.  I actually even lost my appetite.  I was supposed to meet Matt and some other expats for some beers, but my “hostel” closed the door at 11:30 so I had to hike back, plus I was pretty tired and wasn’t in the mood to drink.  Little did I know, that was the last chance I had to converse in English for the rest of my Taiwanese oddysey.

The next morning I took a bus to Kenting, to realize while on the bus there, that Mrs. Typhoon Nina was set to strike later that day.  I had hopes of sleeping out beneath the stars on the vast and open beaches, but the terrible weather meant that the beach was not an option.  I searched through the main strip of Kenting, looking for a hotel or guest house that had reasonable rates.  Everything was out of my price range, except for the Catholic Church.  They had small dorm rooms for rent for a good price, so I took a small room with a hard bed beneath a big ol’ Jesus crucifix.   I explored a bit, as explained in last post, broke into some closed beaches, took some cool shots and ran inside as the weather got increasingly more violent.  I stayed in my dorm room, all by my lonesome and read Les Miserables as the skies blackened, the rain pelted the windowpanes, the winds wailed, and the trees shook back and forth by the roots.  The typhoon lasted all night and by morning it was past and headed for Taiwan’s red neighbours to the northwest.

Upon learning that the weather was going to be awful for the next few days, and figuring that it wasn’t worth staying in a beach city when you cant use a beach, I decided to go towards Taroko National Park.  I took a 5 hour train ride to Hualien, a nice metropolitan city at the foot of the mountains, and found a bus ride to Taroko.  The bus took me away from the hustle and bustle of the city, taking outer-city kids home from school, and eventually I was the last person on the bus.  The bus driver stopped in the middle of nowhere, not even a street light in sight, and turned to me and said, “Taroko”, pointing into the black abyss.  I got off the bus and started walking towards some unlit buildings in the distance.  As I approached, I realized that one had people in it.  It was already 7 and I’d been travelling all day and I just wanted to set up a camp for the night.  I decided to talk to the people and hopefully get my bearings.  It was a police station.  One woman knew enough English to tell me that there was no camping nearby.  I then understood that I was in the “town” of Taroko, not Taroko National Park.  The police officers were great and they offered me a ride up the mountain road to the nearest camping site…roughly 45 minutes away.  They drove up with winding road cutting through the pitch black darkness, zigging and zagging through the obscurity.  They finally came to a point in the road, told me to get out and pointed into the darkness and said “walk five”.  I was hoping that they meant five minutes because I couldn’t see anything through the darkness and I really didn’t feel like walking five kilometers, or five hours, or five days, or whatever “walk five” meant.  Luckily, they meant five minutes, and I scrounged a flashlight from my pack and walked down the dark road to find the campground.  There were two groups camping there, myself and 10 Taiwanese middle aged friends.  They were nice and came to see if I needed help setting my tent up in the dark, and then they resumed to playing cards and talking.  I was happy to go to sleep and get up early.  The sun sets so early here and there didn’t seem to by anything around, so I was just as happy to get some well-needed sleep.

I woke up the next day, in the dawn’s early light, to see where the officers had dropped me off.  I was in the middle of a gorge with towering green forest-covered shale cliffs and mountains on either side of me, camping on a plateau above a raging river cutting over enormous marble boulders.  It was a beautiful sight to wake up to.  I got my pack in order and I walked around the area, did some trails and took some great photos.  Because of the typhoon they had shut down a lot of the trails because of the worry of rock slides.  In one case, I had to hop a nine foot barrier because there was no way I was going all the way to Taroko and not seeing some waterfalls.  I also ventured to the top of a cliff and visited a temple and fell asleep in the shade beside a pagoda.  I hardly saw anyone all day, it was as if I was the only traveler in Taiwan.  I felt like I had the whole countryside to myself.

The next morning I took a bus back to Hualien and took a train to Jiaoshi, where there were natural hot springs for a great price.  I found the place and read a sign about the minerals in the salty spring waters and how great they were for relieving a troubled mind.  I felt like this was a sign from someone upstairs, if you know what I mean, so I payed, showered up and sat in the pools.  It was so hot, so much hotter than any hot tub I’ve been in.  After ten minutes I almost felt delusional.  It was a very strange sensation.  Your sight becomes tunneled and you become light-headed.   It isn’t nauseating, if that makes any sense, just overwhelming.  I  went back and forth between sitting completely in the water and sitting with just my legs hanging in, and then eventually I dove in the pool of cold water.  It gives you a really amazing head rush, sort of like jumping into snow after a sauna, only more intense.  To tell you the truth, I think it did help my troubled thoughts.

From the spring I took another train to Daxi, a small port city and I started to hike up the mountain on the Caoling Historic Trail.  It was 5:30 when I started hiking, and I figured I would hike until it was dark and set up a tent.  The Taiwan Lonely Planet said the whole trail was 11 km long and took an average of eight hours to complete.  I didn’t think it sounded too strenuous so I bought another big bottle of water and started the ascent.  It was pretty steep stuff and with my bag full of wet clothes, bottles of water and the massive three-person tent I borrowed from Laura, it was a hard trek.  Darkness fell around me like a heavy curtain and I was forced to hike by flashlight.  Matters became worst when I realized that between a certain altitude, these gigantic spiders built their six-foot-wide webs right across the path, at face height.  These spiders were black and yellow, oh yeah, and did I forget to mention, the biggest of them were roughly eight inches from leg to leg.  These were the scariest spiders I have ever seen.  I wandered the forested path with a stick in one hand, a flashlight in the other, avoiding the webs like lasers in a museum robbery movie.  When I was struggling to avoid a particularly scary spider this great rustle of sound exploded beside me as an unknown animal took off into the brush.  I’m not sure what it was, but it wasn’t too pleased with me.  It sat twenty feet or so away from me, in the bushes beyond my sight, making this great guttural growl, warning to me to get away from its turf.  I listened to unknown animal’s threats and eagerly continued up the trail.  After another hour or so of night-hiking I made it to the top of the first peak, where there was a flat piece of grass set up as a look out.  I set up my tent and tried to sleep.  The thing about sleep on the top of a mountain is it is really windy.  The wind shook my tent endlessly.  And if you are skeptical of the presence of ghosts in this good world we share, spend a night on a Taiwanese mountaintop and the sounds you hear all night long might change your opinions.  It was frightful night to say the least.

I woke up at five in the morning, packed up the tent and continued the trek.  After hiking up and down the peaks of this path in the mist of the passing clouds I came to realize that this was a much longer trail than my faithful Lonely Planet had explained.  From Daxi to Fulong it was closer to 18 kilometers, not 11.  I did 13 kilometers of the trail with a 45 lb pack.  I ran out of water somewhere close to the 9 kilometer point and the last two hours were hellish descents.  But I made it in Dali, where I took a train to Taipei and another bus to Taichung.  In five days I had successfully circled the entire island of Taiwan.

The End.

ps.  I’ve decided to work in Taiwan rather than Korea or Japan.  Maybe it was the hot springs…whatever it was, I think this is the best gig.  It was probably the fact that without people to talk to I spent the better part of six days with myself, thinking and pondering my future.  I had a strange six days of meditation…