Mouse Disease

Acrostic Poems, After School Class:

Judy is not
Ugly even though she looks a
Duck,
Yeah.
– Judy, 1st Grade Student, Seokjeon Middle School

Do you like
Apple?
No, I like melon.
– Dan, 1st Grade Student, Seokjeon Middle School

On top of all my adventures in South Korea, I was lucky enough to travel around Asia a bit while I was in the neighborhood. Before my big trip in the winter, I had heard that a lot of people living in Korea felt that they missed it as they traveled around. For me, it came as a refreshing break as well as an eye-opener as to how different all of Asia is. Had I not traveled, I might have made the grave mistake that all of Asia, or at least East Asia, is like Korea. It isn’t. As far as I could tell, all of the countries I visited – Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan along with Korea – had about two things in common. They were full of Asians. And they all led to ridiculous escapades.

My first step out of Korea was in Taipei, where a couple of my college friends waited outside my gate at the airport waving my name on a sign. Although I was more or less all on my own in Korea, venturing into a ‘foreign’ country alone seemed much more overwhelming and I can’t say how glad I was to have my Chinese-speaking friends as a guide. As we made our way to their small city, I was hit with a wave of tropical island air. Palm trees lined the street. Everything was flatter and more spread out, and there were parks everywhere with young boys and older women were playing basketball. Taiwanese food was delicious, but a very different delicious from hot peppery, garlicky Korean food.

During my week there, I did many of the same activities that I would have done in Korea, such as going to a local festival, visiting a temple in the mountains, and relaxing in a hot tub. But unlike the understated wooden temples of Korea, the temple was gigantic, relatively new, and spilling over with intricate reliefs of dragons, and unlike Korean jimjilbangs, the hot tub was a natural outdoor hot spring in which we sat not naked. En route from the temple to the hot tub we needed to catch a bus, and when the one we thought was ours passed us by we chased it down until it pulled over for us at the side of the road. It wasn’t until we sat in an open seat in the back that we realized that the people singing karaoke around us were not Taiwanese. We had joined a Japanese tour group.

I had another confounding bus experience when I attempted to travel on my own while my friends worked to a park that the Lonely Planet recommended for spotting macaques. A convoluted series of taxis, trains, buses and subways took me about six hours, and when I was finally dropped off at the park entrance I didn’t see a park anywhere around me. It took another hour of walking through the residential area to find a path that might or might not have been the park. After a discouraging hike, I was about to turn back when I heard a rustle in the trees. There was my monkey. It was my first time to see a monkey in the wild, and I couldn’t believe how the creature, about the size of my Springer Spaniel, politely ignored me as I followed it closely down the road and took pictures from under it as it picked fruit out of a tree. Every country has its advantages and disadvantages, of course, and each country I visited made me lament the lack of wildlife in Korea, where magpies and banana spiders dominate. When I returned to the elusive park entrance, I realized I had no idea how long it would be before a bus returned for me and it was getting late, so I walked about 45 minutes in the dark on the shoulder of the road overlooking the shoreline to the city to catch my bus, subway, train, and taxi back to my friend’s house.

Compared to the difference between Taiwan and Korea, Southeast Asia could have been on Neptune. After waiting three hours for my friends, two fellow ESL teachers – Megan and Nate - flying in from Korea to meet me in Bangkok, we departed from the airport around 3 a.m. to catch our 6 o’clock train that we rode, tired, sweltering, and starving aside from the exotic fruits that we bought through the window during stops, to the border of Cambodia. We narrowly escaped a swindle in buying our visas to cross over, and at immigrations we overheard a guy our age speaking Korean. What really blew my mind was when we asked him where he was from and it turned out to be the same tiny farm town where I taught middle school two days a week – Yangmok.

Our three hour taxi to Angkor Wat was probably the most realistic impression of Cambodia that we got. We stopped to buy banana chips at a convenience store and were shortly after caught in a flash thunderstorm that left the cattle and schoolchildren walking along the side of the dirt road scurrying for shelter. Although the town of Siem Reap felt like a tourist resort, it was more than worth the extensive journey to see Angkor Wat. The reason that pictures don’t do justice to this ancient city of temples is because there was more to them than just beauty, although they were certainly beautiful. They were also shrouded in a feeling, and as I walked through the stone corridors I couldn’t help imagine the civilization that once inhabited them. Or the first person that stumbled upon as they were trekking through the jungle hundreds of years later. I think if it had been me, I wouldn’t have told anyone about them and instead spent the rest of my years frolicking through my secret stone kingdom with massive silk cotton trees weaving around the walls. I also, embarrassingly, couldn’t stop feeling as though I were running through the Shrine of the Silver Monkey, and I half expected a ‘Temple Guard’ to jump out from behind a corner and steal my tokens. I encountered my second wild monkey here, and it merited the term ‘wild’ much more than the Taiwanese monkey. After I got too close with my camera, it lunged at me full speed trying to bite and raced after me down the walkway hissing.

Unfortunately, my friends and I budgeted our time so that almost as much of it was spent in transportation as in relaxing and taking in the sights, but two plane rides and another long taxi ride later we were in Phuket, Thailand. There was no question that the beach was beautiful, but we’d found ourselves in yet another tourist hot spot and at night Nate and I were drinking Piña Coladas with retired American couples in Hawaiian shirts. It was liberating to walk around in a tank top again, and the fresh mango, pineapple, and fried banana chocolate crepes were definitely something I wished I could bring back to Korea with me. We happened to run into a few of our friends from Korea who were staying at a nearby beach and took a ferry with them to Phi Phi Island, which had also erupted in hotels, night clubs, and tattoo parlors since my brother had visited the gorgeous, isolated island a decade earlier thanks to Leonardo DiCaprio scampering across the rocky cliffs shirtless in ‘The Beach.’

We topped off our trip with a couple of days in Bangkok, again settling into the most touristy area of the city, but at least it wasn’t the red light district. I did enjoy the rows of cheap clothing and souvenir markets without the persistent, heartbreaking children that had been trained to push products on us in Cambodia, and street vendors were selling hot Pad Thai at every turn for under a dollar. We walked across the entire city for what was probably the best and definitely the most authentic part of the whole trip. We met my Thai friend who had been an exchange student at my high school and whom I hadn’t seen for five years, Bom.

I do not think that I missed Korea once during my two weeks of travel, and there were plenty of things that I liked better about Taiwan, Thailand and Cambodia than Korea, such as open spaces, wildlife, fresh fruit, tropical beaches, and in many ways, more liberal societies. When I returned from the trip, though, I was relieved to be back in a country where I already knew the ropes of how to get around and what to order in a restaurant and could speak the language a little bit and, finally, to sleep in my bed. It was a good affirmation that, halfway through my year, Korea was not a trip but my home.

Several months later I spent a long weekend in Japan. This time I was with my co-teacher Okhee, so I gained insight not only on Japan, but on Korea. I noticed obvious differences between the countries – Japan’s crazy, anime hairdos (despite their extremely more liberal appearances, Okhee insisted that it was a more conservative society), traditionally low housing rather than high rise apartments, expensive food that was greasier and saltier than Korean food, and some order to walking on the sidewalk whereas Korea has no designated side that they tend to walk on and people will walk straight towards you until you pick a direction to veer off towards – while Okhee noticed subtler differences, such as Japanese hanging laundry outside instead of on glassed in balconies and the men not sitting with their legs spread wide open on the subway. We visited Osaka and Kyoto and I insisted that we should be laid back travelers rather than model our trip after the typical Korean package tour - racing around to as many tourist attractions as possible in order to get a picture holding up the peace sign next to each one. Still, we crammed in quite a few sights in our three days, such as the golden temple, Kinkaku-ji, a deer park where we fed special wafers to the fawns that were following us around like Snow White, and Osaka Castle.

As we were walking through the airport in Osaka, there was a saying on the wall that was something along the lines of, “The memories you make are worth more than the stars in your guidebook,” so we decided to make that the motto of our trip. Even more than the towering pagodas and serene rock garden, we enjoyed the several Japanese people who led us down the sidewalk chatting when we couldn’t find our way, the restaurant owner who spread the plastic sushi displayed in the window across our table because we couldn’t read the menu, and the pocketknife toothpick sword that Okhee bought the school principal as a souvenir. My favorite was when we decided to have a picnic on the Imperial Palace lawn with takeout fried rice. Open spaces of grass are a rarity in Korea, and Okhee, who was sitting on her jacket, turned to me after eating and said, “I want to lie down, but I am afraid of getting mouse disease.” Apparently Koreans have justified their lack of grass to sit in with rumors of mice that scurry about trailing disease for all of those foolhardy enough to loaf about on the lawn to catch. After rolling around in the grass, I put a clover in Okhee’s hair, and learned that in Korea a flower in your hair signifies insanity. Soon after, we were laden with clover necklaces, rings, and flowers poking out of our hair in every direction.

The entire trip we had joked about how great it would be if our flight home was canceled and we could stay in Japan rather than returning to work on Wednesday. Our tune changed when we arrived at the airport after an hour long bus ride and with only pocket change left in yen to hear that there might be storms in Busan where we were supposed to land, and that our flight might take off anyways with the chance that it would return to Japan. Even though this trip had only been three days, we found Waegwan to be as welcoming as ever.