Doombus Omnibus:
Euphoric Ataraxia and Other Silliness

Correspondence
haikubear at gmail dot com

Vitals
* Years: 22 + 8
* Homes: Leningrad, NY, SF, Gimhae
* Totem: Bear
* Quest: Learn / Serve / Relate
* Short-term Quest: 40 weeks
* Location: NYC

Cautionary Word
"The reality is more excellent than the report." --Emerson

Books
The History of St. Petersburg, Duet of Russian Historians

Ponderables
(a) 22 is the biggest number.
(b) Some things are actually sacred.

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Питер

remnants of childhood
in crumbling brick, guilded dome
cozy windy chill

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By the numbers

The folly of planning
Days spent preparing for life in Japan: 134
Days lived in Japan: 20
Of those, days spent in transit, jetlag recovery and on-the-job training: 8
Days of regular employment at Nova before resigning: 3
Days spent preparing for life in Korea: 0
Days lived in Korea by the time of departure: 303
Plans for post-Korea made and broken: 7

Working at LCI
Teaching days in 10 months at LCI: 203
Average yearly classroom days for North American teachers: 182
Average daily classes at LCI: 6.5
Average number of students per class: 7
Number of Korean teachers employed by LCI at one time: 10
Total number of Korean teachers who quit during our tenure at LCI: 14
Number of pay-cycles during our employment: 12
Of these, number of incomplete or late payments: 5

Leisure Time in Asia
Number of trips to Japan: 3
Number of trips around Korea: 5
Flights taken since arriving in Korea: 0
Maximum number of modes of transportation taken in a single weekend: 6
Highest elevation: Gwangjan-san, ~900m
Lowest descent: Tunnel of Agression #3, DMZ, -72m
Longest transfer-less journey: Busan-Osaka ferry, 18 hours
Most consecutive nights spent at home: 98
Most consecutive nights spent in a jimjjilbang: 2
Buddhist/Shinto/Shamanist temples visited: 14
Subway systems ridden: 5
Number of walks on the Philosopher's Path: 2
Total words written in novels-in-progress:115,653
Sudoku books nearly solved: 2

Life-changers
Children conceived: 1

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Great Expectations (a time for announcements)

Planning is fun, but chance alone is possessed of magic.

What maelstrom is formed when all carefully structured notions of next steps are instantaneously irrevocably shed, when a not-yet-planned but well-known potentiality takes matters into its own hands and actualizes? What, when a inkling of instinctual suspicion is confirmed, then twice confirmed? What, when discovery makes two people dance their jitters in Gimhae's littered dusk; what, when they search out again the mysteries of each other's palpably known eyes; what, when perspectives implode and reform but daily routines must yet remain? What then forms that contains the joy and the irony the challenge the suspense the relief the improbable necessity?

Whatever thus forms in the heart, it better be ready to adapt to that which has formed, is forming, in the body.

We are 8 weeks in!

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I don't want to be Jumper


The project of planning a month of independent travel in China has been on our collective mind since at least January. Because China is China (because of where it lies geographically, and because of the place it occupies in our imaginations), it has been one of the focal points of our Asia-overland journey. But every time we have come close to having a concrete plan, events in China have turned tragic. (Really, tragic.)

Before we knew much else, we knew we wanted to visit Tibet. We planned a Far East / India / Central Asia / Russian Europe trip around the idea that we would go to Lhasa, would bus it to Kathmandu in Nepal from there, would cross the Himalayas on land. Just as this plan solidified in our heads, Tibet exploded in nearly a month of violence, and tensions remain unresolved. It's hard to know for certain what's happening, because foreign access to TAR has been closed off.

China without Tibet seemed incomplete at best, and closed the overland route to India. After a month of staring at maps, we came up with a new plan for China -- and a new all-around route, too (see earlier post). A chunk of the trip was to be spent in Sichuan province, in the Bamboo Sea and in Chongqing and Chengdu -- the closest you can get to TAR now. Yesterday, Sichuan exploded in an earthquake the ramifications of which won't be known for days, at least -- but already thousands are reported to have died, villages levelled.

It's hard to think about tourism in the face of such immense suffering. On the one hand, it's clearly wrong to go to a disaster-stricken place unless your presence there is both safe and helpful in some concrete way. On the other hand, simply rearranging our itinerary to avoid the messy parts feels like an act of trivialization; it feels cynical in the worst way.

There was a terrible movie Dina and I saw, called "Jumper" -- the protagonist had the superpower of teleportation. Early on, he is watching television and sees, live, flooded New Orleans. People are on rooftops, awaiting help. He resolutely turns off the TV (he's going to help them, I'm thinking, hoping) and teleports to a bar in London where he picks up a woman for a one-night stand. New Orleans and Katrina are never mentioned again. No question is ever raised about what responsibility is entailed by the privilege of his power.

Where is this line between service and hedonism? I don't know, and I don't know and I don't know -- but I must go to work in less than 8 hours.

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Plans

Ever since we set foot on Korean soil, we've been planning the next step. In the nearly seven months that have passed, many ideas have been born, researched, turned into plans and then scrapped. The volunteer gig at a Malaysian orangutan-rehab center turned out to be too expensive. The four-month teaching job in Japan was run by rules-crazy corpodroids. A change in Korean employment was not justifiable vis-a-vis new and ridiculous visa requirements. The ethical question of whether to travel through Tibet became moot in the middle of March. Long-considered ideas for Chinese travels have had to be bumped because of new and ridiculous visa requirements. The 3-day music festival outside of Tokyo featuring Gogol Bordello is forbiddingly expensive in every way.

Some of you have hurtled accusations of elusiveness at the windows of the Doombus as if they were eggs and the bus were an evil president-elect's inauguration limousine. Nay! Not elusive, merely uncertain. To prove as much, and also because Dina and I both want to be joined on our upcoming travels by fellow world-participants, here is the tentative bus route:

1. July: finish work on the 25th, fly to Thailand.
2. August: Thailand with occasional Malaysia/Singapore, then trains through Cambodia to Vietnam.
3. September: Train, bus, river-ferry travel through China. Roughly, begin at Nanning (Vietnamese border), train to Shanghai then Wuhan, Yangtze ferry to Chongqing, short trek in the Bamboo Sea, train to Xi'an; then make our way West to Muslim China, the Gobi, and Kashgar.
4. October: India by train via Pakistan. Spend October travelling and volunteering in India; fly to Nepal.
5. November: 7 - 10 days in Nepal, Kathmandu valley chilling. Return by air to North America: NY, Calgary, and ultimately Vancouver.

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30k in May

During November, I was able to write 50,000 words towards a novel. I thought that it was a finished first draft, and have been steadily, if slowly, editing it since. However, the more I edit the more inescapable it seems that I must write much, much more to make it into a readable work. So, not wanting to wait until November (when the task of re-settling in the West of the world will probably have to take priority), Dina and I are making May DiRoNoWriMo.

pre-May word count: 54,207
May pledge: 30,000 words

Let the writing begin!

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Mother did it have to be so high?

I've been told: "When you describe something as good, you generally mean it's terrible. It's when you use words like 'great' that you can be believed."

It's true. I try not to cast negative judgments, at least not outwardly. Who am I to say that so-and-so is a bad student, or that such-and-such country is ugly, or that such-and-such culture is lacking depth? It's easier on my conscience to say things like "So-and-so is surely very bright, she just needs better discipline," or "Such-and-such place is interested in utility and efficiency, not in making itself glossy for tourists." These aren't lies or mere euphemisms, I'd like to hope -- they are ways for my reactions and understanding of things to be framed outside the oversimplified bad-to-good spectrum. However, somewhere underneath this imposed structure, there remains a personal judgment.

For the first six months of our stay here, I answered every question of "How is Korea?" with "It's good," followed by many examples of just how good of a place it is. Clearly, I wasn't crazy about the country. It wasn't that anything struck me as negative or worthy of dislike, but probably that things weren't extraordinarily amazing often enough to satisfy my appetite for "gross and violent stimulants." In the meantime, the subtleties of Korean excellence were submerged under the occasional irritant of pedestrian-rage. The far-cleaner-than-the-Bronx streets seemed filthy after the enduring shock of the obsessively clean sidewalks of Japan. I didn't have any central conception of the Korean, so the occasional novelties of the jjim-jil-bang, the DVD-room, the stone-carved mountain temple didn't have a concrete foundation and remained isolated experiences -- somehow detached from their home. When things wowed me, they didn't have anything to stick to. So most of the time, even though I was overwhelmingly happy, it seemed to me that it wasn't for reasons of Korean origin. While nothing close to regret ever entered my mind, I didn't imagine I'd ever recommend the Korean experience. It was good, but it wasn't great.

However, I'm now here to say that Korea is goddamn awesome. Over the past three weeks, somehow the aggregate of experience finally clicked. There is a strong sense of the Korean that I now have, that has glued together the isolated impressions of the last six months and made them into a whole.

There is an almost allegorical tale about how it all happened. We arrived in Gimhae, so long ago now, before the winter. One of the first city landmarks to catch our eye was the old fortress wall snaking around the head of one of the omnipresent hills. I felt an immediate pull towards it, there being something in it that corresponded with my imagination's view of Asia. I wanted to anchor those wispy ideas in reality -- after all, wasn't that why we were here in the first place?

But winter set it before we found an opportune day to explore all the way to the wall. In winter, even the six-minute walk to work was unpleasantly cold; hiking up hillsides was out of the question. So months passed. The wall was ever in sight, ever out of reach. It remained an object of imagination, no more a part of my actual experience than the Mariana Trench or Jupiter.

At last, April brought in sunny warm days, cherry blossoms and soft breezes. Dina and I eagerly embarked on the wall journey on the first Saturday of the month. We had heard vague stories of a busride to a trailhead, but not knowing which bus, and wanting a walk anyway, we set out by foot. Quickly leaving behind the familiar streets of Nae-dong, we ran into our first hill. "Straight up this way," we imagined. Following a semblance of a trail, we marched past men and women working in their terraced garden plots, over a car-tunnel through the hill, and up up up.... into impassable, thick brambles. This kind of "trail-invention" is not new for us (we'd done it in Glacier NP, Vancouver Island, Fish Creek, Moji -- pretty much everywhere we've been), so we stubbornly persevered. However, after I pierced my thumb courtesy of a thorn on steroids, we gave up and returned to street level.

I began to imagine the wall as a mythical place, if not straight up magically repellent.

However, our walk continued. Up through the streets zig-zagging up the hill, past tiny temples and men working in tadpole-filled rice paddies, through silent alleys and past terraces with goats our walk continued. Past larger temples and monuments to Gimhae's historic heroes, up sharp hills and finally onto trails, ever closer to the wall our walk continued. Winding through the forest, past grassy-hill tombs of unknowable age, sharing the path with middle-aged men with transistor radios our walk continued. And suddenly, the trail turned into rocks.

There were rocks beneath our feet.

There were large boulders, which we must climb. The boulders turned into a wall (not before a final obstacle of being contained within a closed-off construction/renovation zone). It was made of millions of rocks of large, medium and small sizes. It had been costructed to protect Gimhae's brave from the Japanese invasion and perhaps renovated as recently as yesterday. Its history was much less determinate than its physicality, it was under our feet and taller than our heads and around us and stretching forward past us. It was solid.

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5 months, 170 syllables

 -- Sept/Oct --

moji's spiderwebs			east-bound shinkansen
are less precarious than		a world of nightingale floors
our jobs in japan.			kyoto is afloat

 -- Oct/Nov --

were it not for you			hiking korea
our walls would still be empty,		we pass through hillside lessons
mosquito carcass			in human kindness

 -- Nov/Dec --

kindergarten work:			two nanowrimos
two hundred squealing children		both complete both incomplete
four baffled foreigners			while gimhae grows cold

 -- Dec/Jan --

new year's number one			too comfy, we'll quit
potoncho floods with vodka		a new job, volunteer or
monkeys groom. we freeze.		maybe not, who knows

 -- Jan/Feb --

new year's number two			new-york-sized crowds rush	
we learn to bow to elders		through eel-thin alleys filled with
eat delicious soup			more fish than humans

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Seokbulsa, or How I learned to stop worrying and love Busan

• Japan broke, so Dina and I live in Korea now.
• We live in Gimhae.
• We buy food at the night market. and eat kimbap.
• "Gimhae" sounds like a mix between "Gimme" and "Kimmy." It's a small town in the hills, a suburb of Busan.
• Busan is also Pusan. It's a big town in the hills.
• Aquariums are everywhere, but their denizens are for food. We have hatched many plans to rescue the lot of them and release them into the wild, but the plans remain unexecuted.

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