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Published: September 20th 2005
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Dawn, Yesterday
I couldn't get more than a couple hours of sleep without my lungs filling with fluid, so I got to see the dawn. I should have prayed to my ancestors, and left them some candy or something.
I had a four-day weekend, the last day of which is today, due to the Korean holiday of Chuseok, which is a harvest moon festival, on Sunday. It is most closely related to Thanksgiving in America, which means that traffic on an around the holiday is a nightmare, it's impossible to get a domestic flight or a train (I tried to go to Seoul, but I went to the KTX station and it was a Train in Vain. Ha, get it? The Clash have a song...oh, forget it. I am getting dumber.) Koreans get together and eat traditional foods: songpyeon, which are little squishy rice-cakes, and fruit were the most often mentioned foods when I asked my students about Chuseok. They prepare a ton of food, and then leave it for the spirits of their ancestors, praying to the revered dead for good luck, health, and other blessings. They believe if the food is prepared well, it will provide blessings, and if not, family members will get sick or have bad luck. This sounds weird, but is far from being in conflict with Christianity or Buddhism.
The Power of the Storm
I took this picture while standing on some sandbags propped against a gate, which is why it's a little blurry. To give you an idea of the power of the storm, the shore has moved up about fifty feet in this picture from where it normally is. Korea is a very Confucian nation, which means that age is equated with wisdom, therefore the ancestors are very important. Anyway, nothing was open, I couldn't go to Seoul, and I was sick for a couple of days.
That's right, some awful lung infection (that's what I'm officially attributing it to) totally fucked me up for the past two days. My head was a veritable faucet of snot, my lungs filling with fluid while I slept, seriously good times. And it made my vacation pretty lame. Instead of going to the beach or seeing sights, I spent a lot of time feeling like crap, laying down, eating ramen, drinking tea, feeling like crap, and did I mention feeling like crap? I'm still a little sick, but the fluid has become more viscous now...all of which I'm sure offends my delicate reader, but you don't come to my blog to be treated with kid gloves, do you? Hell, no. Anyway, it's almost better that I get sick on vacation, since there really isn't a notion of "sick days" in Korea. If you're sick, you go to work, and if you miss work, you had better be writing your will. At
least I got to wallow in my sickness and treat myself okay, instead of fighting it and stretching it out over a period of weeks. Still kind of sucks that I spent most of my vacation slowly drowning in my own mucus.
And now for what you've all been waiting for...
The Typhoon Report
While Nabi was deadly in some areas of Japan and Korea, I believe, it left Busan relatively unscathed. There were strong winds and some minor flooding, but mostly it didn't do too much damage, except to cheap umbrellas, which sustained almost total devastation under any prolonged exposure. My umbrella managed to survive only being turned inside out a couple of times, and a broken arm, which will probably never heal right. But the cheap umbrellas, oh, the umbrella humanity. Strewn about like so many aluminum spiders, sometimes stripped of all of their flaps, leaving them totally exposed and appearing for all the world like Wile E. Coyote's ill-fated umbrella-parachutes (which almost invariably went up in flames).
On the day Nabi hit, it rained cats and dogs and occasionally antelopes, but there wasn't much to worry about, except the state of one's garments,
From the Lavatory
This is from a public restroom on the beach. The guy in the picture is probably a coast guard officer making sure I don't do something stupid. soaked as they would become after spending any more than five minutes in the rain. I walked to work, so my pants looked as though my prophecy from the last blog (the one about soiled undergarments) had rung all too true, so wrung with moisture were they. But it was just rain, I swear.
After a couple of hours, the boss decided it was too dangerous (or not cost-effective, since very few children were showing up) to keep the school open for the remainded of the evening, so everyone went home to wait out the storm and pray. Except me. I went to the beach.
What better place to see the typhoon at its full glory than in a barely sheltered and deserted environment, where if I disappeared, swept up by the wind like some ugly Dorothy, no one would bear witness? Of course the beach was a swell idea, and I resolved to get to Haeundae as quickly as possible.
By the time I got there, the wind had really whipped up (or it was simply that I wasn't inland anymore). There were a couple of gusts that really did threaten to knock me over, and
The Destructive Power of Typhoon Nabi
No road cone or cheap umbrella was safe. one where I had to hold on to a tree, which was unsettlingly close to another tree that had been knocked over. One gust helped a guy down the street and into some sandbags, but mostly it was maybe 20-30 mph gusts with constant 10-15 mph wind. And it was, unfortunately, dark already. I would have liked to see the ocean, but mostly I only got to see the shore, which had crept up the beach a considerable distance from the usual coastline. It was pretty awesome, actually, as they had these giant spotlights shining green light into the surf, as if some light were going to stop the water from swelling up into the streets (granted it was probably to monitor the waves and make sure no idiots got close enough to the water to get caught in the waves. Yeah, the idiots we are talking about here are me and those like me.)
To fortify myself for the walk along the beach, I went to Starbucks, somehow miraculously still open, which affords an excellent view of the beach due to its situation in a
glass building. I didn't think about this until I was about halfway through
The Calm After the Storm
This was the morning after the storm, a very pleasant day. my blueberry muffin and cup of coffee, when the windows on the far side of the shop started to rattle and flex. There was a big "X" of tape on the most afflicted of the windows, and the whole thing looked a little like the drying cycle of a carwash, the little droplets of rain being swept to the outsides of the windows. I thought about how it would take only one strong gust to turn the Starbucks into what I describe in my journal as a "long-pig killing floor." Shortly thereafter I finished my coffee and got myself back into the elements, out of the danger of a torrent of glass shards, and into the danger of being sucked into the eye of the tornado. Strangely, none of this was as worrying as it was really fun. I guess years of skateboarding, riding bikes, and jumping off of and over things has conditioned me to find the fear of death as a thrill-seeking proposition. Countless "woo-hoo-hoo!"s later I got across the street to the beach, and found a covered area where I could take pictures. I took some photos, walked back to the subway station, and rode home drenched.
Dawn Panorama
I don't know how to merge these pictures, but you can do it at home. It was hella fun.
In Other News
There really isn't much other news to report. My students are beginning to test me, as I am no longer a fascinating presence. I'm going to start having to be an ominous presence if I want my classes back. It's a struggle, and not one I am naturally inclined to deal with, as my idea of boundaries is not spitting directly on people (which I have crossed once, as Tim Peterson could attest to) and saying, "excuse me" after I burp or fart proudly with a big grin.
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Cait
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A Perfectly Reasonable Response
Hey, I don't know, it sounds completely logical to me to go toward the risk of death by the elements! That is, after all, where all the cool shit is happening! ("Mama said never to look into the eyes of the sun...But Mama, that's where the fun is...") The preceding bit of illuminating wisdom was originally contributed by Manford Man and his Earth Band, back in days lost to paleontological antiquity--okay, sometime in the early '70s. I think. Anyway, it was an awfully long time ago, and I was in full flight from reality in that era. I am so jazzed you got to experience a Huge Fucking Phenomenon of Nature in safety. Sort of safety. Woohah!! --Cait