Mokpo - City of Lights

Mokpo has never been on my radar until now for some reason and I wonder why it took so long. We flew there by KTX and that always gets you in a great frame of mind.  Near the train station there is a coffee shop named after the country Nicaragua. You need quite a few Korean characters to create that word. We went in to find out what sort of blend a Nicaraguan coffee is but I couldn't tell any difference. A one-month-old Persian kitten was in attendance as well as plenty of dishes of used coffee beans, I guess to mask its smell.  The kitten put in a brief shift of allowing itself to be rubbed by us, then moved away and we moved on.

The best thing about travel is the chance to make new friends.

Mokpo has a rather laid back feel to it. There is a sense that times could be better but that nothing is quite desperate.  Like a boom town that everybody has left except without there ever being a boom in the first place for people to be nostalgic about. 

We stayed at a place called 1935 although it appeared much older. The doors to the rooms were batwings that you pulled shut and locked with a brass pin to give you a sense of old times. Then you walked inside to see an air-con. Owing to the paper walls you could make out shapes on the other side. I looked out of a crack in the door and across the space and saw a man lying on his bed. Not that I was looking. There were a lot of noises too. At any moment something was clicking open or closed. Every time someone got up or went to the bathroom, or swatted at a mosquito, you heard it. 

We attempted to climb Yudal mountain one evening, which looked like it would be a pleasant thirty minute climb. It was said to be best at night, with lights guiding you helpfully all the way. We started on the side that had a statue park where artists had been let loose with cement and metal. This turned out to be another of the top spots of Mokpo and was well worth the wander. We had a contest to interpret some of them - this is a man pulling bread out of an oven with his hair on fire. Um no, its farmer and ox ploughing a field. 

We left the statues behind and continued the climb, sticking to the lights which looked unsettlingly like they would run out before the top. Then I realised we must have been attacking this summit from the wrong side because the peak seemed too steep from where we were. I looked straight up at it as though I was looking up at stars, with a hand on my lower back to keep my balance like a woman about to deliver a child. We climbed a bit more, until the lighting came to an abrupt end telling us we had hit the end of the road. We were in the courtyard of a Buddhist temple. Once again I was looking through a crack in a door and this time a Monk was washing rice. After a quick look around the grounds we got the hell out of there before they saw us and dragged us in to serve time in a temple stay. 

We headed toward a popular restaurant. It seemed to me like we were going to a real dog's box because the amount of and quality of civilization started to lower the nearer we got. I was fully expecting to see cars up on bricks at any moment and painted in undercoat. And then we turned a corner and there was a nice looking restaurant and a line of people waiting to get in! We turned back toward civilization. Its not polite to wait in a queue before a restaurant. At the ATM or something you know the guy in front is going to be finished soon. But at a restaurant, especially a good one, he might want seconds and thirds and settle himself in for the evening. Once we had a contest at Pizza Hut back home. They were offering a pizza slice buffet and we were going to take advantage of that so we brought Steve Lenned and a chessboard...we weren't there for the short term. Late in the second game while my brother was deploying the Sicilian defense and as Lenned was eating his 23rd slice, he conceded defeat. I concede, he announced. The manager suddenly appeared with the bill and a look of relief on his face because he thought Lenned was conceding defeat to the pizza.

Some cars in Mokpo followed the Seoul protocol of rushing pedestrians who had the green light while others came to a complete stop and may even have put the car out of gear and deployed the handbrake as they waited for you to walk. I saw one driver's palm facing up and a smile on his face as he gestured, 'after you.'

We ended up at Mokpo square one evening and it was buzzing. The weather was amazing, love was in the air. This was the kind of place to avoid at all costs if you were single. Lots of kids were driving in little electric cars with parents walking behind. I think the parents were doing the driving with remote controls and in retrospect I'd have felt safer with the kids running things. Along the waterfront were some steps to sit on and fifty meters out was a kind of pontoon that housed a water fountain. The water fountain show started. It was twenty minutes long. They sprayed water, which some projector lights hit and they played some nice tunes to go along. I heard "summer story" and "Flower new year" among others. In no way did the images up on the water, which included a running stick man and a hand - a big hand, co-ordinate with the music. After a while I realized we were sitting down with a huge crowd cheering and gazing happily at a sprinkler.

It threw up a big lot of water at times that came down crashing. You wanted somebody to be relaxing on the pontoon and that water to come down on them to see if there was any impact on it. To know what effect there is, if any, of water falling on you from fifty meters. Whenever they did the big one, people clapped. Or they called out "ooooh." I called out "woah."  It always makes me feel creepy to cheer after a performance like this or after a movie. I feel thankful and want to give my gratification to someone but no one is on hand to receive it.

In between sprinkler shows they put a sign up on the water. "Happy first birthday to Minsoo" it said for about five minutes. "Minji loves Jimin" for two. We took a stroll in the direction of our hotel that was ten kms away and discovered a quite delightful boardwalk that's a don't miss in the evening. Actually, I'm not sure what to recommend in the daytime? The path passed these two rocks and everyone was photographing the rocks. They look like two people with hats on, one looking down at the ground and the other up at the sky. We realised eventually that this place is called Gatbawi, or hat-rock, that its national monument number 500 and that the boardwalk was recently built in order to allow better viewing.

Now what have we here to cause so much fuss?

That best part was gone but we kept going west into the night like Frodo and his friends and the path hugged the coastline. We passed the maritime museum, a quite majestic building and for a few kms you could see the water was low. It was more like a mudflat than a coast and there were boats stranded up on the mud. I hope the tides rise again for those boats so they can become clean again.

Eventually you return to the organized desolation of the city, shopfronts with chairs leaning against the door from the inside and a sense that they haven't been open since Seoul had the Olympics. There was an old Korean flag on the ground, fluttering ever so lazily in the breeze as taxis screamed past into the open road and billboards of politicians trying to win local elections stood on buildings. You looked up at those politicians and even though they appeared happy, you were glad that this was going be their problem and not yours.

We went to that maritime museum.  Nice building.  It was free to get in.  There was free cloaking and there was a free audio guide in any language you wanted. It sensed where you were and played you the track related to that.  You had to be careful not to walk away too quickly before the narrator was finished or it would find another story to play. Then again, they just told you simple facts in that happy breezy way where history passes by without man ever entering the picture. "Shipbuilding was a big industry then and pottery making was especially popular." They had pieces of wood from broken shipwrecks and some pottery - celadon - that had been recovered from such wrecks. A lot of the stuff was from a ship that was traveling from China to Japan and got waylaid in Korea. I wonder that they are allowed to keep it. If I was from Japan or China I'd ask for some of it back. I'd say, hey my ancestor sent that to me hundreds of years ago.

It's easy to know which way to go when you have lights to guide you.

Mokpo, the City of Lights, was a fun place to spend a few days and I promise I will no longer confuse it with Mokdong.

The lost hour

I love improv.  I practice it every week.  But sadly, things have changed a bit:  we practice for only two hours instead of three nowadays.  That amounts to four lost hours of improv a month, two hundred a year, or in a standard one hundred year life, you're looking at twenty thousand hours of improv.  That's quite a few to miss out on.

The question is, what's the real cost of that lost hour?

For starters, working out less could do a lot of harm to your improv game - it's possibly as devastating as nothing at all, but it might only be as bad as giving you a slight improvement.  Improv is that kind of science where its hard to calculate how you're going.  If you do more improv, the saying goes, you will improve and if you do more improv, you will get worse.  Now don't expect to understand it or get your head around that. 

Psychologically, there is also an impact.  You walk out of the studio after two hours only slightly confused about how things are going but had you done the whole three hours, you'd be going home pretty sure that you were hopeless at it.  When its two hours there is much more room for delusion as you think, "oh I probably wasn't that warmed up or something today," or "if only there was one more scene I'm pretty certain I would have finally found my groove." 

Whatever the case, improv asks a lot of you and puts you in all sorts of situations and you are relieved of a lot of such situations by knocking off early.  Situations frankly, that you're better off without.  Over that lifetime, there'll be thousands of deadly viruses that you simply won't contract.  Viruses that though killing you painfully and quite publicly, are considerate enough to be relatively quick and allow you time to say your last words.  You'll avoid countless bad relationships, many with people of the wrong gender - or species - for you and frequently not even of your generation, some you didn't even know you were involved in to begin with!  Not to mention the proctology and gynecological examinations you will be spared from having to undergo from unqualified and incompetent medical personnel, and you yourself will avoid needing to supply some of these very services to the afflicted.  You avoid some sudden and spontaneous births, meteor strikes, police incidents, litigation, deliveries of inedible pizza and parties full of weirdos.  On a physical level, you also get to avoid millions of slaps, kicks, punches, headbutts, stabs, knees to the nether region and shotgun blasts but you miss out on the sheer bliss of dishing these out to others. 

You also, however, miss the chance to visit space and meet aliens, some of whom are pretty cool characters before you are inevitably forced to kill them.  You miss out on some juicy church confessions with benevolent priests, which is a shame because an improv confession is just as legitimate as a church one and leaves you equally absolved of sin.  You miss out on firing bad workers and playing shenanigans with senile neighbors.  You miss talking animals, cartoon characters who have come to life and the opportunity to travel backward or forwards in time.  And of course, road trips in cars with no doors.  

You in short will go home a bit sooner to a simpler world that does at least make sense thanks to one less hour of improv.  But you'll still wish you had that extra hour.

Cruising around Paris

We have not been to the Eiffel Tower in the days we cruise Paris, but we're on a boat cruise along the River Seine tonight and will surely get a look at it. 

We have seen these cruise boats going up and back a lot; the more expensive have people seated at tables with glasses of Pinot Noir while the cheaper have patrons packed on rows of plastic chairs on deck.  
If you're a pedestrian on the banks of the river as these boats go by, their dozen spotlights will light you up so their guests can get a good look at you.  For a few moments it will feel like you're looking into the sun.

We take a cruise on the cheaper boat because it's at a more convenient hour.  Seated in front of us are a few Mothers and behind us are their collection of kids – about two rows of four.  The Mothers may have sat there strategically to get some peace and used us as a buffer.   They turn frequently to respond to requests, snap photos or check that the kids are still there.   

The river has a lot of bridges and the boat goes up and down for an hour - which is a lot of bridges. 

As we go under each bridge every couple of minutes - and into some semi-darkness - the kids do a collective Mexican wave and “woooooooo,"  as though the boogeyman might be near.  The first one or two are fine.  I join them for the third.  Mother even turns to capture the moment on her camera.  What happens next is to be predicted though.  The wave continues, even though it is becoming tired.  As Mother starts to focus on it less and less the kids work harder and harder for the attention until the "woooooooo" becomes a high-pitched scream right in my ear.  Fortunately, as a response to a few glares they receive, the mothers say something to the kids and the wave and all the ballyhoo stops. 

We go past a quieter looking part of town.   On the bank groups of young Parisians drink drinks and enjoy the night.  Every group seems to have one guy strumming on a guitar.  It's hard to tell whether the rest are singing with him or ignoring him.  Our guide is recommending that we wander along these banks one evening to enjoy the music and the flavor of Paris.  Then a guy from one group - not the guitar player - splits, comes to the edge of the bank, undoes his zipper and relieves himself in the river.  The dozen spotlights light him up like a stage actor and make sure nothing is left to the imagination.  Our guide does not know what to say and goes silent.  The Mothers turn to their kids but they are much too far away to shield their eyes which, as they see the man in his completeness, are very wide indeed.  Eventually, after valuable seconds and innocences have been lost, and for the only time I have seen, the spotlights of the boat go off. 

The Tailor

Once, in Bangkok, a man called out from the door of his store, where I was wandering by, Hey you wanna suit?  No, I don't really need a suit, I said.  That's ok, just take a look, sir.  I knew very well where this would lead and wanted to be lead almost there but not quite, and so I went in.  We sat down across a coffee table as reams of cloth lined the walls, and binders full of suited models sat atop the table.  A man was summoned to bring me a cup of tea, in a paper cup.  

We started sifting through the photos.  They looked nice.  It was becoming intense.  I didn't want to tell him that they weren't good.  And I didn't want to tell him that I'd think about it even though I was thinking about what to have for dinner.  I'm just not staying long enough, I said, heading out tomorrow.  And that was what I thought would end the conversation but it started a new conversation.  About how they could make it happen.  Teams of workers could put a quality suit together in a day.  No mention was made of the meaning of quality.  I could see one or two of them ready to take action if given the word.  Not that I had chosen a suit.  I may have only stated that this one and that one weren't bad.

In Apgujeong, Seoul we went to look at wedding dresses.  Got in, sat at the coffee table as white walls and mirrors lined the background.  It was the closest I would ever get to going inside the house of mormon.  We were in the complementary position at the coffee table, not opposite but not on the same side, two of them two of us.  The tea came out in a real cup.  The binders of magazines came out too.  Four people all concerned.  The pressure.  The indians from Thailand were back.

At some stage I was instructed that I could leave, which I wanted to.  After all, everyone else was a female and everyone else had some idea of what was being asked for.  I felt like I was leaving a man behind enemy lines though.  Now it would become five on one and these people were ruthless.  I didn't know what had been going on and I wanted to, so I said, honey, aren't you gonna walk me out?  So Jin did, and they followed within a cat's step, concerned that their prize was about to get away.

They came out with a clipboard and asked a lot of questions.  It was like you were about to get in a nasa rocket and go to the moon.  And they wanted to handle other areas of the operation, like make up and so forth.

What stays with you is the sheer intensity of what should be a fun time.  They said you had to pay 30,000 won to try something on.  You might be able to buy some clothes for that.

In Thailand, the men were profuse in their work.  No please don't go without at least trying something on, sir, give us an address overseas and we will ship it there directly.  I'll think on your kind proposal, I said, but actually, I was heading out to eat on it.

Gunsan

Gunsan is a little town on the west coast about halfway down Korea.  We took a bus down, one of those luxury three-seaters that are so comfortable that when they stop at a rest break you're already resting and miss it.  When there are three seats from left to right, the aisle is no longer in the middle, but skewed and in line with overhanging compartments.  It forced me to walk out with my head uncomfortably positioned directly above my left shoulder.

We were dropped off at the Gunsan bus station that had a little bit of ghetto about it.  We started to stroll in the direction of what we believed to be a fine restaurant but only got deeper into a ghetto where the only food options would be those we caught ourselves.  So we got a taxi back into town.  This too was not so easy.  The cabbie drove the wrong way for a while and as it seemed we were heading into a deeper wasteland I considered how it wasn't even easy to get back to square one in this place.  He did have one good quality.  As he drove he maintained double the speed limit and tailgated whenever the chance came up, and so while we lost money, it cost no time.  Eventually, after 4,000 won of adventure, we had him make a U-turn. 

We went past the oldest bakery in Korea, which is an achievement you wouldn't think hard to win.  Who likes bread?  Apparently though, this place has been doing business in the same spot since '45.  You couldn’t get in for food easily either.  No easier than finding the first restaurant.  The line at 3pm went out the door and around the corner and was still like that when we went past for another try at 8.  Jieun would have waited the estimated hour and a half just to be a part of history but it was pretty cold out.  And when I line up for bread, I'd like to make it count.  I'd like it to be in the midst of some kind of wheat shortage or when a tornado is coming and everybody is stocking up.  In any event, they have another outlet in Seoul that you can walk into anytime you like.  

The shtick of Gunsan was that it was a colonial port town that didn’t necessarily rid itself of all evidence of colonialism.  There was no purge.  No good riddance to buildings and such.  Order was restored and the new guys probably saw some stuff and said, "hey I didn't like those guys, but we might as well keep some of this stuff here." 

They have a Buddhist Temple inspired by the colonialists that the monks decided to keep.  There is also a bank and post office and things like that still standing in their original style.  We walked into the bank.  An exhibition by a Korean artist was on display in the central area.  If you went off to the side on the other side of a partition, you'd see a bit of history.  There was a black and white picture of a group of guys and a caption that said, "forced labor exploited to work rice paddies."  Apparently the nearby farms grew top-notch rice.  I believe the rice of the area is still good because you could see plenty of guys and ladies riding bikes with big sacks on the back.  They looked pretty happy because they were carting it home for dinner.  

The museum next door to the bank had plenty of role-playing options to take you back to what life may have been like.  There was a small store, a cinema playing black and white on an old reel etc.  You could even try on the garment of a farmer or officer and pose for a picture.  In fact, this museum was where the picture thing got taken to an insanely extreme level.  I think they set it up like that just to mess with me.  Throughout the museum all I could hear were people going, "1-2-3" before a camera went off.  The first few times I waited politely just to the side of their shot.  Later I ignored all countdowns. 

In one shot you could stand next to some Korean farmers who were in the background.  On the side some colonial troops pointed guns at you.  Plenty of people lined up to be in that photo and none of them were armed. 

A shoe store had some wooden shoes to try on, which hurt.  They told you that rubber shoes were particularly rare and at that time, the greatest gift a kid might get.  In 1929 an anonymous benefactor sent scores of pairs over to a kids poor night school.  That touched me for a few moments.  And then my skeptical side wondered if all those pairs made it.  I hoped they did.  I hoped the teachers didn’t stick any aside for their own kids. 

We left this place, as a local lad was out front taking a photo of the building.  He didn’t need to say 1-2-3 because buildings don't generally smile.  He needed to go back ever further to get it all in the frame. As we left, I looked back.  He was backed onto the main road a little bit.  I hoped his shot – and he himself - would turn out all right.

Fishing

I'm running along the Han River at seven in the morning and a boat is moving to the shore just ahead of me.  It drifts out of the fog toward the bank where an ambulance waits for it.  Two paramedics get out to meet the boat and you can see there is not much urgency about them.  Their ambulance lights are on only to warn cyclists to go easy.  The siren is off and the tools of their trade are packed away.  A few old men on bikes stop their morning ride to stand nearby and learn more about the catch of the day.  

I have been running up and down the river for a while, but this is the first time I do it early in the morning.  You have to get out of bed in the morning.

At night there are fisherman and I notice that they are not here this morning.  I miss them.  Not that they usually wave to me or anything.  And not that I ever see any of them reeling in a big one.  They're just another presence.

Usually they set themselves up in a spot with six fishing rods all in a row, two meters apart.  When I see that I think how nobody who feels confident about catching a fish, does that.  You must leave the house with six rods in your arms thinking, "well I probably won't come back with anything much but at least I'll be throwing everything at them."  I just hope they put different baits on different hooks, for variety, so the fish come along and go, "hmm, snail, no, not today.  Oh look theres an earthworm on that line, that's more like it, I'll just have me some of that."

Or perhaps casting so many lines in the one spot is a tactic to corner the fish.  A hapless fish comes along and dodges one line and another is ahead so he turns left to get out of the way of that and then gets snared by a third?

What would happen if Santiago in the old man and the sea threw six lines in off his little boat?  And a few big marlins bit all at once?  He was a proud fisherman who never cut rope and even with six big ones all at once, I still don't think he'd write any of them off.  One fish would pull his boat north for a while and then the other would pull him the other way.  In the end his boat would be ripped apart.  And then he'd really have to decide which line to hang onto.

The boat docks and I am twenty metres away.  It's a police boat and the three men in it look pretty serious.  I decide that when I get up there, I am not going to slow down and gawk, and I am surprised these cyclists have.  I really want to look, though.  It is in my instinct somehow.  But I say no to that instinct, no, you're above that, I say, and I look into the middle distance like I'm serious about my running.

These cyclists are the same ones who ring their bell at me when I'm running in their lane instead of the walking lane where people are not walking.  These are the people who stop on this river for one thing - 7-11, where there are hot noodles and cool alcohol.  If you took away the fact that it was cold, and that there was a police boat and an ambulance exchanging cargo and just looked at them, you'd think it was sunset on a beach and they were contemplating the horizon.  Because they were the only ones here that didn't look grave.  They looked just how I would look if one of those fisherman were pulling in a big one.

The paramedics jump the railing and climb down to the boat.  The people on the boat have obviously ordered them to do that.  I wonder if it is a seniority thing because these paramedics are clearly younger.  Or if the police on the boat say, "guys, we caught this and prepared it and brought it all the way to you, you come down here and get rid of it."

I pass them just as they make it to the boat, and I don't look back.

Some time later I pass this spot as I head for home and there are no more bikes or vans of boats, or signs that life had taken pause on the Han River.  And there are no more fishermen.