DAY 13: KEEPING IT KOREAN

Then it was on to Gwanju Province in a nice (and uncrowded bus that took us across the spine of Northern Korea. We all slept a bit and I also snapped a few pictures).


"ARE YOU HUNGRY?"
We got to Gwanju where I was introduced to another bizarre Korean thing. We're all carrying our luggage and some of us haven't showered, but there is no going to the hotel because ..... well, there is no because..... we just can't do it because it would make sense to drop off our luggage and freshen up. Instead we are immediately plunged into the only thing that is important to a Korean family, a 24 hour marathon of either eating or deciding when and where our next meal will be. I have no idea how Koreans have ever produced so much as one car or glitzy miniaturized cell-phone accessory because they certainly don't have time for it.

Each meal is an epic procedure (I have learned to ask if food we are eating is "appetizers" or "main course" as it is always possible, at any given point in a meal, that no matter how much you have eaten, the "real" meal has not yet begun. This is problematic when you get full and realize that everyone is staring at you when the fish-head soaked in rotted bean munge arrives) with multiple dishes, plenty of drinking, and time being no object.


POSSLQ LOOKING SCEPTICAL

As soon as that meal is concluded, it is on to the next one, or to begin planning it.

Somewhere in the course of this planning we eventually did get to our hotel and when we did it was a Love Motel (a place Koreans go to rip a quick one off). You can usually tell a Love Motel because it has a driveway (and parking stalls) that are obscured by the kind of strips you normally see dragging over your car at the car wash.

Korean motels have an ingenious system in which you enter the room and insert your key into a slot by the door. This signals the room that you are back and the room responds by reverting to whatever state you left it. If you left lights on the go back on, if you left the TV on it goes back on, the heating system turns back to where you had it.

In our case, Jae's dad, Jae's brother, Jae, Ed, POSSLQ and I all watched as the (all red) lights came on, the TV snapped on, and the porno movie unexpectedly started playing - a slender Korean woman on top of a slender Korean man simulating sex with such ferocity that her breasts threatened to tear off. We all stared for about one second and made a concerted rush towards the TV to turn the thing off. If that's what their porno looks like there is no question why the Korean reproductive rate is down.

Korean porno is a bit hobbled by the fact that it not only can't show sex, but it can't show any naughty bits or pubic hair either. This leads to bizarre scenarios like a woman in panties pouring beer all over herself, stroking her breasts, masturbating with panties on, and then frantically humping the edge of a breakfast table (this is also weird given the Korean mania about cleanliness - you'd think a table would be forbidden). Flipping through the channels I was struck by the similarities between Korean porn and Korean wrassling - two semi-attractive people in shorts rolling around and pummeling each other until suddenly, and usually inexplicably, it is over.

Actually, re-reading that? I'm ashamed to admit it sounds like my sex life as well. ;-)

Anyway, we had to go out to eat lunch, we had to go out to eat dinner, and we had to come back for drinks.

It was New Year's Eve and we had to go out and drink about the whole thing with the entire South Korean Horde, which had descended upon Jae's parent's house while we had drinks and Anju there. We got loaded, sang karaoke, and were back in our hotel before midnight. POSSLQ and I had time to open a Coke and a Beer, toast the New Year, and fall asleep in our dimly-lit red room.

TEMPUS FUGITS LIKE a MOFO
The New Year also highlighted something else that has happened since I arrived here. I have begun to age at supersonic speeds. I left California on a Monday morning and arrived in Korea, 13 hours later, on the same Monday morning. Somehow this tore the time-space continuum as the sprightly 46 year old (me) who left Cali was now 47. Koreans count you as one-year old at birth, so I had "gained" one. As if this isn't tragic enough, when the new year comes *everyone* moves into their next year in perfect Korean lockstep style. So, presto-chango-derango, I am now 48. I have aged two years in less that 13 days and have high hopes of expiring of old age before I return to California.