This document is a transcription of a message found in a bottle floating in the Hangang River in October, 2006. Doubtless this is yet another attempt by the Korean establishment to distract attention from deeper economic woes.

A long-expected Journey

Unah had spent literally weeks planning what she would eat in Korea and writing down addresses of interesting restaurants in a notebook. She also planned a gruelling holiday itinerary -- one day in Seoul, then a trip to the northeast coast and a visit to the DMZ, then down to the southeast to Yeongcheon (the 'town' in which her father lives, you may recall), then a day in local university town Daegu to have a hanbok made for me, then a weekend on the volcanic island of Jeju with her father, brother, sister, sister's husband, and sister's two daughters, then back to Yeongcheon and finally, rather surprisingly, a few days of unplanned free time.

Then she flew off a week before me to stay with her sister, and reported back that little Seyun and Sehi had been taught to say 'Good Morning' in English in readiness for my arrival. To be honest I'm not all that comfortable with children. Or with sleeping with seven other people in a 20 foot by 20 foot apartment. I also have to admit that while our last visit to Korea (wedding) was really great, I also felt there was, well, a bit of a failure to engage between me and her family. There was no meeting of minds, no common ground. I also confess that when I have to greet someone by bowing so my head touches the ground, I typically expect them to ask me a few polite questions, or at least make eye contact or something.

I therefore prepared what I think of as my 'Asian smile' before leaving.

Confessions of an Opium Eater

It was my first time flying alone for ages. The nice lady next to me was really nervous -- not as terrified as I used to be but about as nervous as I am now.

"I take diazepam now," she said.

"Yeah, me too, it really helps," I supported.

"I take three of the yellow ones," she said. "Although I think I'm allowed to take eight in a day."

"I take two of the white ones," I said.

"That is a REALLY HIGH DOSE! Are you sure you know what you're DOING?" she replied not very supportively. I felt my moral high ground crumbling away from under me. Sadly, though, she's right, it is a pretty high dose and one infuriating side effect of this is that before getting on the plane but after taking the pills I go around letting other people cut ahead of me in queues if they look like they need a break, and saying 'what a pretty baby!' and just not worrying too much if I see something annoying. Such are the horrors of drug abuse.

Seoul Man

We stayed in the south half of Seoul, which I've never been to before. It's the 'new' half of the city, in that the buildings date from the 90s rather than the 80s. It was like being in a very very bland, clean area of Tokyo. There were people on the street holding signs that said 'free hug'. I hugged the most attractive one. It was okay, not really a great hug but then it was a busy street.

"WHY?" I asked. Because I don't know much Korean I have to talk like a Dalek, and it doesn't always work too well.

"To share a feeling of love," he replied. I was so moved that I hugged the next one, who was a pretty girl.

Then we went down to the shooting range, but all the lights were out and a scary old man told us that it had closed because of 'an accident'.

In this way, we experienced both sex and violence in Seoul. Also donuts, for Korea is inexplicably rich in Dunkin Donuts branches.

The Fightin' Manchus

While we were still in Seoul we went round to the war memorial (which is the size of the Moon, or to put it another way, about half the size of the average Korean's sense of grievance against the Japanese) to photograph some things. There was a wall with the names of all the people who died in the Korean war on it. It went 'Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim...'. I'm sorry, but it did.

The memorial is really a museum, which contained various testaments to the horrors of war, and also a big display area where Korean arms companies can show off their latest products. A GI who spoke only Ebonics and his girlfreind who spoke only Korean were looking at a panorama that depicted the return from Manchuria of the martyrs of the 1907 uprising in their struggle against whatever. "I don't know what they mad about, but they mad about somethin'," observed the GI, which was basically the theme of the entire memorial.

The Narrow Road to the Far North

We travelled by bus to the northeast coast. The west half of Korea is the half with the people; the east half is mostly mountains, which are largely now in the process of being levelled so that they can be covered in people too. Because the people doing this are Korean, they don't so much 'build a few more houses next to the old houses' as 'level a whole mountain, cover the ground in 30-storey tower blocks that can be seen from space, and build an 8-lane highway to it'. There has never been a country as utterly dependent on the motor car and the square concrete building as Korea, not even the US.

We stayed in Sokcho, a largish town built around a bay. The bay has a narrow mouth -- in fact the bay is miles across and the mouth is about 80 feet across. You'd suppose, then, that there'd be a bridge over this narrow channel, and there is a huge one, but it has both ends on ONE side of the channel. That's just how pork barreling works in Korea; the contract was to build a bridge, so they build a bridge. Maybe it stays up, maybe it goes somewhere, maybe not.

Around the bridge is a long spit of land containing the kind of buildings that bring the expression 'poor but proud' irresistably to mind, and I don't mean in that cutesy way that people living in England are sometimes described as 'poor'. At the end of this long spit of land, of course, there's no way to get to the other half of the town. Or is there? Two cables stretch across the water, and a sort of flat floating platform is attached to each cable. But there is no motor, no gears, no machinery stuff, just a platform. How will Korean ingenuity solve this problem?

An old man hands me a hook, the kind you can use to yank really hard on a metal cable and thus, if you don't mind a certain amount of grease and danger, propel a floating platform. For this I pay him a dime, which he will doubtless spend on dried fish, Sokcho's principal food and principal building material.

Water Water Everywhere

We stayed in the Sokcho Good Morning Hotel, which Unah had picked in advance because it has a beach view, but unfortunately, while the hotel did occupy the advertized location, the actual beach was mostly swept away by a ferocious typhoon while we cowered in our far-from-watertight room. When daylight came, I tried to go down and look at the sea. There was a foot of water in the road. In the deeper areas, furniture and small trees sailed rapidly along, and occasionally a board or traffic cone would come sailing through the air. It was impossible to get anywhere near the sea, mainly because the emergency workers kept yelling at me and I could see this headline 'Dozens drown as rescue workers are distracted by fool tourist' in my mind.

In six or seven short hours, the typhoon became a mere storm so (as everthing else we'd come to do had been swept away) we went out to Sokcho Waterpia (see, it's like a 'utopia' of 'water') which was a huge, surprisingly luxurious complex of outdoor spas and heated baths and whatnot. We splashed around in these for the whole day as leaves and branches whirled about our heads. It was great.

In the changing room, a guy kept trying to get my attention.

"WHAT?" I Daleked, turning round without doing that 'towel casually held in front of the groin' thing, because I wanted to see if people round there look at a guy's bits in the changing room. Turns out they do, in fact it's some kind of national pasttime.

"Are you from Malaysia? ARE YOU from MALAYSIA??" he asked.

"NO." I replied. He went away. "What the hell was that about?" I body-languaged to the room at large. "We don't know," they body-languaged back. It was a rare moment of empathy between me and the Korean public.

We got a taxi back into town. "I bet you think this is a pretty bad flood," said the driver, crashing through a river while steering with a suicide knob.

"Yes, it's been in the news," we replied.

"This flood is NOTHING!! NOTHING! I love driving in bad weather, and this weather isn't even bad enough to make it fun!"

"Oh."

"Yeah, if you lived around here, you wouldn't even call this rain. It's just dampness, that's all it is. For example, you see that house?"

He pointed to a house on top of a mountain peak about six miles inland.

"Two years ago the water was halfway up that house. Hell, probably more than halfway. Now THAT was more like a proper flood. It's unbelievable what they call a typhoon these days."

World War

My secret hope was that when I visited the DMZ, North Korea would choose that moment to attack and I would seize a nearby machine gun, rally the defence, and inspire the North Korean army to turn it's weapons on its own corrupt leadership. Then I would live as a hero in the new unified Korea. Unfortunately for this plan, neither of us had checked whether the east coast DMZ observatory is actually reachable in winter -- turns out it's not, but we didn't realize this until we'd spent hours travelling up the coast by bus.

Actually, it is accessible, but you need a permit and the permit is per-vehicle. We had no vehicle. The only way to get there would be to persuade a passer-by with business in that directian to add us to his own vehicle permit and let us ride with him -- and who'd do that?

As it turned out, the second person Unah asked did.

The furthest-north accessible point in South Korea turned out to be a classically South Korean building, i.e. a concrete rectangle that hasn't been cleaned in a while. To the north, the menacing impression given off by the various fences, trenches etc was somewhat diluted by the GIANT EIGHT LANE HIGHWAY AND RAILROAD which are used to ferry supplies to the North whenever it needs them -- NK being, after all, a product of US, Japanese and SK appeasement. There were also some soldiers, pillboxes, weapons etc which it was forbidden to photograph.

"Could you take a photo of us?" asked the soldiers, thus brilliantly turning the tables on The Man and his silly rules.

The hills were bare of trees -- truly, trees are first victims of any war. To the south, the coastline bristled with rather understated defences that showed a typically Korean lack of any concept of zoning. So you'd have a big carpark full of artillery, then there'd be the Unification East Sunrise Beach View Spa Motel, and then there'd be a twenty foot high barbed wire fence with floodlights on, between the motel and the beach. And the motels would occasionally be painted camouflage, whereas the pillboxes and guard posts would be painted with peaceful waves and clouds.

Of course, they might not really be motels.

German Invasion

For some reason, there were a few Germans in town. They come there to hike in the mountains, some with their Korean girlfreinds, some just as-is. There's actually (historically) a pretty large element of German contact in Korea and Japan. This is why bars are called 'hof' in Korea (the sign always says 'Beer and Hof' or 'Hof and Soju' -- no other wording is ever found).

A nice lady running a food place near the bus station asked Unah if I was German. I wasn't, though.

"I just wondered if he might be German, because sometimes you know they can speak Korean, not always though but some of them can, my daughter went out with a German once and he spoke some Korean and there's that nice man on the TV from Germany who speaks lovely Korean so you can never just assume they can't speak Korean but of course your young man's not German is he but then you never can tell for example my nephew he drives a taxi in town and once a black fellow got in the taxi and my nephew was talking away and he said having you in the taxi is just like having a black stove in the car ha ha but the thing is the black fellow could understand him so when they stopped he only gave my nephew 200 won and my nephew asked why and the fellow said well you were only transporting a stove and that's all you get for transporting a stove which just goes to show people think you can just assume that people can't speak Korean but sometimes they can speak Korean blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah..."

Run to the Hills

In Seoraksan National Park, once it dried out, Unah's general unwillingness to walk uphill was cancelled out by the fact that she also can't read a map, and our path led up progressively steeper and less path-like masses of rock until eventually it became iron ladders fixed to the face of the cliff, ladders that trembled and swayed ominously with the footsteps of hikers and also with the footsteps of a monk carrying propane cylinders on his back. At the top was a lovely cave temple, the cave being a 30-foot deep hole in the rock face with a trickle of delicious mineral water running down inside it. A little gold buddha was at the back of it, but access to him was strictly controlled by a rather fierce nun. After a while the propane monk arrived, sat down at the very edge of the cave, and began hitting his wooden bell and generally being a monk.

"Buy a prayer?" he suggested. "Write it down and we'll pray it every day for six days. We pray up here, too, not down in the valley like some monks. Did you know this is a particularly auspicious spot for prayer? 10,000 won for six prayers. Or of course we have other deals but generally its the six-prayer 10,000 won plan. Lovely temple, eh? That water there has medicinal properties, you know. It cures things, not any particular things though I think. Anyway, what would you like to have prayed for?"

We gave our details to the nun, but she vetoed all my prayers and replaced them with a rather feeble 'to have his subsequent prayers granted'.

To me, this whole process sums up Mahayana Buddhism.

Yeongcheon

I've made some rather unfair comments about Unah's hometown in the past, I suppose, and I'm going to continue that policy. It's a tough town, and by 'tough' I mean that it resembles gristle.

In Yeongcheon, the main businesses are growing vegetables, fixing tractors, and brushing flies off things.

Family Values

Unah's father's apartment is 20 feet by 20 feet, yet the gulf between me and him was a mile wide. "FATHER IN LAW POLITE GREETING ARE YOU FINE?" I asked, politely touching my forehead to the linoleum. Vultures circled in the gigantic chasm between us. He seemed smaller than I remembered him, like a guy who would need to use both hands to break my back rather than just one.

Unah's sister Unmi made a gigantic effort to communicate with me. "Say Good Morning to your aunt's husband," she instructed little Seyun and Sehi. "We are going to eat now," she told me, pointing to everyone in the room for 'we' and making chopsticks motions for 'eat'. She is a kindergarten teacher. Gradually, the distinction between her pupils and myself seemed to blur in her mind, and eventually even in mine.

Unmi's husband, a heavily-muscled rectangular guy dressed all in lycra, was above this pantomime.

Health and Fitness

Unah had to go to the doctor when she arrived in Yeongcheon. The doctor was on a street full of live fish, dead fish, things on plastic sheets, motorbikes riding on the pavement, and what I have to call 'fish debris'. This made it one of Yeongcheon's fancier streets. The building was crumbling and seemed partially supported by a large stove on which an old lady was cooking frankfurters. Unmi bought frankfurters for Sehi and Seyun. I got a frankfurter too! Yay!

We climed the irregular, moldy stairs to the doctor's surgery. Just as I suspected, within lay an ultra-clean, ultra-efficient fortress of sterility and modern science, jam-packed with extremely modern looking medical machinery.

Later, we went to a dentist to have our teeth cleaned, because it's cheaper and more pleasant than doing it on the NHS. "This work is unsophisticated and may develop problems," observed the dentist, tapping my NHS wisdom tooth crater while a platoon of identical, immaculate cute nurse robots clustered around. Then we went back into the fish guts and fumes and sellers of medicinal bark.

Kimono My House

We went to Daegu to have me measured for my hanbok, the Korean equivalent of a Kimono. A hanbok shop is a cubical volume of space about 15 feet on a side, in which is a raised platform, on which are rolls of silk and example hanboks, on which is a fierce old lady who knows a lot more than you about hanboks. The hanbok market consists of a grid of these shops, about 10 by 10 shops. Theoretically, you can find the one you want either by GPS or by remembering the differences (in color, texture, and finish) between the old ladies.

Unmi had already worn our fierce old lady down in a pre-purchase barrage of negotiation, and now it was a simple matter of finding her, climbing up on her platform, and standing meekly as I was measured. The other 99 old ladies looked on beadily.

Steam Valve

One place to stay in Yeongcheon if you aren't already committed to sleeping on the floor of a 400 square foot apartment with seven other people, is the sauna. Apparently every little town in Korea has one nowadays, and the one in Yeongcheon is brilliant. It's a twilit, silent space with groups of people dotted around in the half-light and pillows made of wood. It's an institution of which I completely approve. It would have been a lot more relaxing but for a little girl sitting in a giant massage chair.

"Is he your husband?" she asked Unah. "Is he American?" she asked, eating her toes. "What's he called?" she asked, putting her heels behind her head. "How much money does he make?" she asked, turning upside down. "I can count to ten in Japanese, can he?" she asked, stretching lasciviously.

I am sorry to have to report that Unah left me at the mercy of this person and went away somewhere else.

Kensington Gardens

The students at Yeongcheon's Catholic school wear white tights -- the boys as well -- and red bow ties -- the girls as well. They are overseen by maternal looking nuns, who are in turn overseen by a black and white photograph of a long dead French missionary, who in turn is overseen by the Divine.

This Catholic school is Unah's alma mater. It's a relic of an earlier time, when Christianity, in the form of Roman Catholicism, and Mahayana Buddhism got on well, before the Baptists and Pentecostalists and Mormons and Seventh Day Church of Jumping Up and Down Like A Fool arrived and started smiting idolaters. Unah's mother, for example, is buried in a mound and recieves offerings of crisps and blackberry wine every now and then; but the box-like Protestant churches with their red neon crosses and their locked doors and the Mercedeses of their pastors frown wrathfully on this sort of pointless sentimentality.

Despite the school uniforms, it is I who seems to be generally known as 'Peter Pan', due to some sort of confusion with 'Peterson, Benjamin' and the fact that Korean names are three syllables. I must say I have generally supposed that anyone regularly referred to as 'Peter Pan' after the age of about six may be considered a failure in life.

First in Flight

There's a saying in Korea, "The one with sons travels by car, the one with daughters travels by plane." The flight to Jeju was nevertheless Unah's father's first flight, and Hyeungon's first flight in a civilian plane, and when we disembarked I asked him "FATHER IN LAW HOW WAS PLANE?" There was a long silence that seemed to fill the car.

"It was ok," he said, staring out of the window.

This was our first ever two-way conversation.

On Jeju we went to look at various things such as caves, temples and interesting rock formations. Finally we went back to the hotel to have a barbecue. Unah's father stood aloof, a strong yet lonely figure on a beach composed of black lava.

Barbecues are such an amazing amount of hassle and trouble and there are so many things that can be dropped or be annoying or go wrong, yet somehow with Unmi cleaning things and Unmi's husband cooking them it was all strangely easy. An inspiration! I would offer Unah's father a prawn. I peeled the prawn.

"FATHER IN LAW..." Disaster! I forgot that I don't know the rest of the sentence.

"PRAWN," I finished lamely. There was a pause. Would he accept the prawn? He ate it! I felt I had built bridges.

Sehi and Seyun were incredibly well behaved.

Millipede

Unmi's husband drove us over the island at breakneck speed, steering with one elbow while Sehi and Seyun climbed around inside the vehicle. Sometimes, a particularly steep road would turn out to be one on which he himself had bicycle raced.

When we stopped at a beach, he soon identified the edible seaweeds.

Walking in the woods, he knew which red berries had an exotic and delicious flavor, but warned us away from the poisonous ones.

In the Army, I was told, while others formed squares he was sent alone into the hills to gather edibles and intelligence, for he knew the ways of moss, tree and stream.

One day, on a wall, I found a collection of beautiful, large millipedes! I love millipedes, nature's model trains.

"Don't pick those up," he said, "they bite."

Aha! He was confusing the harmless millipede with the poisonous centipede! My greater knowledge of entomology gave me an edge here. I picked up the biggest millipede and let it walk around on my hand.

It sank its tiny weak millipede teeth into my thumb.

Cyclopean Wrack

Korea is full of ruins. I don't mean the ancient buildings -- those are all lovingly rebuilt and brand-new. I mean the modern buildings, which fall apart literally before they are finished, which are of a construction quality so bad that I can't think of a way to describe it that doesn't seem like hyperbole or polemic. And often these buildings become unusable immediately after being completed, or even before being completed, and so lie in ruins, and nowhere has more of these ruins than Jeju, because it is a tourist island.

The best ruin on Jeju is the complex that stands near the dolphinarium (obviously there's a dolphinarium). Occupying a lovely rough bit of land on a cliff edge, it has all sorts of walls, tunnels, stairs and turrets, but unfortunately no name, so it's hard to work out what kind of building it was supposed to be. Not far inland there's another ruin that I was able to climb a bit with Hyunggon while Sehi and Seyun were visiting the Teddy Bear Museum. This ruin was obviously going to be a hotel, with a large central building and several little buildings arranged around it in a crescent.

Lush vegetation had grown over the buildings, because of course the ruins are pretty well the only land that's safe from development. It was an idyllic garden, in a country where flat un-built land is almost unknown. It was also filled with a dazzling array of rusty sharp objects. The underground levels were flooded.

Not far off, bulldozers were at work and further ruins were under construction, because people have to have jobs or they'd just do nothing all day.

Denizens of the Deep

On Jeju, and elsewhere, we ate many delicious foods and in retrospect I have to say that in some ways I am pretty damn cosmopolitan, considering that apart from the sitting on the floor issue (in Korea they don't have the cunningly positioned leg-spaces that Tokyo restaurants have these days) earing these delicious foods frequently involved eating whole ungutted fish, wrapping things in leaves, spearing still-twitching chunks of snail flesh, and in extreme cases even tangling with the awful mungge, a graceless creature much like a rubber glove full of orange jelly.

I poured some blackberry wine for Unah's father. "What food is it that he likes best?" he inquired via Unah. On being told that it was galchi, a small knifelike fish, he called for more galchi! I felt favored. I drank some blackberry wine.

"His face is going red," said Unah's father. "He is probably not used to drinking. He doesn't have to have any more." In Korea, as once in Japan, everyone seems to be terrified of the idea of marrying an alcoholic, so this is an approving thing to say.

How I Brutally Intimidated a 6-Year-Old

You wouldn't think it would be possible to stay somewhere for several days, constantly in a car or a room with someone else's 6 and 3 year old children, without going insane. With Sehi and Seyun, however, it's possible. Seyun was given a notebook at the Teddy Bear Museum and thereafter spent her time writing poetry (vers libre). She can write fifty Chinese characters at only 6! She is quite a prodigy. Sehi is the more social one.

I swear during this whole time I never saw either of them ask for something twice, or cry, or whine or argue or complain or even get bored. They spent their whole time trotting around being interested in things and playing games and being sunny. It was like wandering into some very implausible Victorian children's book.

There was one exception, for which Unah and I were, sadly, responsible. We gave them my English coins, divided into two exacly equal piles, but alas! Money is the root of all evil and soon Seyun's pile was bigger than than of her hapless younger sister. Sehi bitterly held on to her remaining coins but Seyun pried them away from her one by one. Sehi pulled hair. I decided to separate them by lifting Seyun away but Sehi clung on to her like James Bond clinging to a helicopter and I was forced to refer the matter to their mother who took Sehi away for comforting, still coinless.

I glared bitterly at Seyun. "THING OF SEHI," I pointed out. Seyun hung her head and pushed the coins away from her with her fingertips, thus remaining virtuous at the core.

It seemed to me that Seyun and Sehi were the happy children that I wasn't, than Unmi was the domestic superwoman most mothers aren't, that her husband was the strong yet tender family leader that nobody is. Watching the family of four sleeping in a line it was hard to avoid the feeling that I should be less like myself and more like them.

Farewell to Arms

Unah's father drove us back from the airport in his truck. I asked to go in his truck because, I don't know, I just felt the truck (a KIA 'Bongo') looked a bit sheepish compared to Unmi's husband's great big people carrier.

"I guess this is about a 1-ton truck," I observed to Unah.

"He says it's a four ton truck," she said in Japanese.

"Wow, it's really small for that. An American four-ton truck would be way bigger. It just goes to show how inefficient Detroit engineering is."

There was a pause of about half an hour.

"He says it's really only a one-ton truck," said Unah. Great Buddha! Had I been party to a joke??

When we left Yeongcheon, Sehi cried, in that a single tear rolled from each eye as she pleaded "Don't go, Aunt!" I would have cried too, so I thought about how much I despise Rational Humanism. I felt as if very briefly I had witnessed a fairytale family, with strong father and caring mother and happy, good children, and probably secret magic gardens and whatnot as well.

Unah's father gave us some dried squid, the kind with the eyeballs still on. They smelled as if they hadn't been dried all that thoroughly. When her father drove us to the station, there were some vegetables in the back of his truck, which he had been planning on giving us to eat, but the train timetable didn't really allow it. "Bye," he said, and drove away. Some cultures, such as those of Texas and possibly parts of Korea, are not very given to emotional displays, so one has to say it with vegetables.

National Park

I wanted to see Seokguram (a word well worth Googling) again, so we went from Yeongcheon to Gyeongju. This agonizingly inconvenient tourist town stands on the capital of the ancient kingdom of Silla, which is considered the forerunner of modern unified Korea. This is not because it actually is the forerunner of modern unified Korea; it's because President Park, the Roosevelt, Hitler and Putin of recent Korean history, came from Silla territory and was obsessed with the place, mandating that all Korean children visit Gyeongju at least once and renaming Silla 'The Unified Silla Period' in defiance of the fact that it wasn't.

Another thing he did was forbid Gyeongju to build a town center. Gigantic sprawling hotel complexes, ten-lane freeways, these things are all A-OK because this is Korea, but a town center with sidewalks is not OK because Silla didn't have sidewalks so neither can you. He also attempted to moderate the excesses of the sprawling hotel complexes, by mandating that no matter how huge and ugly the structure, it must look at least a little bit like an ancient Silla palace. This means that gas stations and transformers have tiled roofs.

Another Park project in the area is the Palace of Unification. I went to look at this palace, and it appears that the population of Korea are ignoring it in perfect unison, so perhaps it's worked. The countryside in which it stands is now much scarred with elegant wood-and-tile walled homes, their quiet courtyards and curving roofs reminiscent of the best of the Confucian architecture of old -- in other words, McPagodas erected by nouveau riche local politicians.

On the road to Seokguram, schoolchildren said "Hello" to me in English. I averted my eyes and tried to look Asian, but to no avail; the next, larger group said "Hello" even more boldly. The chain reaction had started. On my left, a cliff face going upward -- on my right the sacred pines of Seokguram upon which I dared not tread. There was no escape. "HELLOOOOO," chorused a still larger group, bringing back traumatic memories of my last visit to the area, when literally hundreds of the little slanty eyed devils had pursued me through the ancient temple of Bulguksa. "HELLOOO!!" chanted even more of them, tugging at my sleeves. It was hell indeed.

The point of Seokguram is an extraordinarily worked Buddha of the 7th century sitting in a white granite cave, commonly considered the great artistic masterpiece of Korea.

Old men were standing around gazing reverently at the Buddha, whose granite face stares sternly out over the East Sea.

"When I was a lad," said one, "you could go right into that cave and walk around that Buddha. In fact, I spanked his bottom."

Four Legs Good

We walked around Seoul a bit, me waving my towel around in an attempt to get squid smell off it.

My quest for books on Korean architecture led me to the Seoul Museum of History. Two nice ladies were manning a sort of exhibit where you could dress up in royal robes of the Joson period and sit on a royal throne (or chipboard facsimile thereof)! Being tourists, we jumped at this opportunity, but I hit a serious royal Joson boot related snag.

"SMALL," I noted. But they insisted I put on these boots. "SMALL. SMALL." I repeated. If only I knew a comparative expression, such as '...er than my foot'! But alas, I could not make myself understood. Eventually I got on the throne in my socks, but it would not do! They came running after me with boots. I pleaded, I cajoled, I refused to have anything to do with the boots, but the trouble is that the royal robes of the Joson period must not be worn without the matching fur Mongolian-style boots, and the other trouble is that it's pretty hard to argue when you're dressed as a village idiot.

In the end, an unfavorable compromise was reached and this is why the only extant picture of me in royal robes of the Joson period shows me with four feet.

Samuel Jackson

Packing was a big pain because we each had our new hanboks, in other words about ten pounds of silk that cannot be rolled up or trusted to baggage handlers or put in a backpack. Eventually we managed to buy a plastic bag that was exactly the size and shape of two folded up hanboks, and also had "Love Is What Makes You Smile When Your Tried" written on it. This we brought on the plane as hand luggage, consigning my squid-saturated rucksack to the hold.

I didn't sleep much on the flight because I kept waking up and thinking the plane was going to crash and picturing the headline "Squid Crash Stench Tragedy". But it didn't crash.

When we got back home, we discovered that we were being evicted. Also I miss Sehi.