Spring is a mindset. The whole world says, "Okay, enough laying around under blankets or huddling near fires. Up and at 'em." Everybody, especially the young, is fired with energy from nowhere. Perhaps it's the warm weather, the suddenly fragrant air, or the friendly blue skies. Everything just seems to want to explode, and will do so on the slightest pretext. It's infectious. The children were never really subdued over winter, but with the advent of spring they seem to be bouncing a few feet higher off the walls.
In recognition of springtime (and the fact that I've never seen a cherry tree blossom in spring), Charles and I arranged to travel to Daegeumsan Flower Mountain last Thursday. At 7:00 a.m., Charles duly woke me up by telephone, then came and picked me up in his trusty Matiz. We drove for thirty minutes to the northeast side of the island, through morning fog that was occasionally so thick as to obscure the road thirty yards ahead. We had to stop and ask for directions four times: once from a severely-dressed carnie setting up for an event; once from a worker at the mountain, smoking a cigarette in town; once from a schoolgirl hiking up a hill; and once from a somber farmer leading his cow to his fields, a handmade firewood rack slung across his back. Eventually, we found the place. The gate was closed and locked, but we'd come all that way and asked all those nonplussed people for help, darn it. So we hopped the gate and proceeded 1.3 kilometers up the mountain. That was surprisingly hard on my legs and lungs, for even if it was early in the morning and I as out of shape as a hibernating bear, we were still only a little bit above sea level. The views were scenic and the birds were singing gaily in the trees.
Then we approached the mountain:
Daegeumsan is famous for three kinds of blooms: purple wildflowers called jindallae, the cherry blossoms from the trees planted by the Japanese during the occupation (whose name I won't transliterate for fear of inaccuracy), and some-bloom-whose-name-I-can't-remember-because-it-was-infernally-similar-to-jindallae, which are yellow flowers that bloom near roads. The first two were much in evidence on the mountain, even though we'd missed the prime; green leaves were superseding the blossoms.
Still and all, the sight was impressive. It's no wonder a lot of Geoje Islanders choose to propose to their significant others here. I captured some images for posterity, and then Charles and I headed back down. On the way back to Gohyeon, we stopped at a traditional folk village, converted from an elementary school:
It had some tools, some paraphernalia of ancient Korea, and some impressive statues:
That's Yi Sun-Sin, the heroic naval commander who defeated the Japanese in the Imjin War and who invented the turtle ship, an armored vessel covered with spikes with a dragon-shaped vent on the bowsprit for dispensing poison gas at enemies.
Then (with nearly as much difficulty as with Daegeumsan) we located an open restaurant in Gohyeon and Charles treated me to lunch. I had bulgogi over rice, and he had a spicy soup that I can't remember the name of. Started with a "y" in its Romanized form, anyway. Must remember to try it; it looked delectable.
So, as of the 27th of this month, I will have been in Korea for ten months, and will have a scant two left. Yikes. Much remains to be done; I have to sort out what I'm sending home and what I'm leaving behind from what I'm packing into my suitcases. I'll keep you posted. More to the point, I must inform my director where I'd like an airline ticket to when my contract expires in June!
I've finally made up my mind: I'm going to Alaska. My purpose there is threefold: I want to continue my flying lessons and hopefully earn my desired licenses and ratings (commercial license, with multi-engine, complex, and seaplane ratings). I want to pad out my job history with a media-related job that I also happen to like; writing for magazines is and always has been preferable, but if that's not available I'll take something else and continue trying to break into that market.
That "something else" can be anything from newspapers to TV. I would love to get into radio again; I had a radio show with a buddy in college. It was just an hour per week, but it was a blast; he played classic rock and I did news of the weird. It was grand, even though I never got any feedback about it. I'd like to try my hand at radio again, and I expect Anchorage will have plenty of small-time stations.
Finally, I want to find out if I want to live in Alaska. The only way I know how to do that is to live there. I want a dirt-cheap studio apartment or perhaps something a little larger, but only if I can find a roomie and split the rent. I'll live frugally, pound the pavement until I find some gainful employment, start taking flying lessons again, and keep writing. There's the rub.
However...there have been some new developments in my prospects for the meantime between when my contract expires here and I actually go to the land of the midnight sun. You see, my folks are moving. They have understandably gotten sick of having two houses (they put their house in California on the market two years ago now and moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming; but the California house never sold). Finding out they're not too keen on Wyoming and would like to live someplace warmer, they've decided to sell the Wyoming house, and move back into the California one until they sell it. Dad's got some prospects lined up already. They plan to put the Cheyenne house on the market in May and move in late June. That's exactly the time my contract expires, so the chances of them being able to meet me in Anchorage (as we'd planned) are now almost nil. I'm saddened by that, but I'm confident I'll be okay without them; I've brazened up a little since I've been out here. Or so I like to think.
Even so, this now means I'm a free agent. I can do what I like after I conclude my Korean sojourn. I've been thinking about getting my visa extended for a couple of weeks (Charles mentioned this was possible) and seeing everything I haven't seen in Korea so far due to time constraints: specifically, Jeju Island and Gyeongju. Jeju-do is the Korean holiday hot spot and the largest Korean island, a tropical paradise off the southwest coast, filled with jungles and beaches and nice hotels and so on. You can rent scooters for next to nothing and get around that way, pay a little money and use enormous truck-tire inner tubes on the beaches, and see the world's largest lava tube.
I figure I'll take a week to do that and a week to do Gyeongju, north of Gyeongsangnam-do in Gyeongsangbuk-do. It's known as the "museum without walls." (How can anyone who calls himself an explorer resist a moniker like that?) It's a historic town, literally: a law has been passed forbidding the construction of modern buildings. Only traditional ones can be built within the city limits. There are enough palaces (Gyeongju was once the seat of the Silla Kingdom), royal tombs, burial mounds, graves, statuary, Buddhist temples, museums and related edifices to make any red-blooded scholar foam at the mouth. I intend to see it before I leave or bust. I was figuring on doing that even before I learned that my folks could potentially miss our Anchorage appointment.
Now I've taken a running dive back into the wild travel schemes I was cooking up before my folks suggested meeting up directly after the expiration of my contract: specifically, riding the Trans-Siberian Express across Russia. I don't want to ride the Trans-Siberian Express, though. That's just a tourist trap. I want to ride the proletarian train. Something similar to the ride Paul Theroux had on it a few decades back: borscht in enormous metal bowls in the dining car, gap-toothed conductors, baroque wooden carriages dating from White Russia, and all that jazz. I think I'll get off at Moscow and head south, maybe knock around Kazakhstan or Turkey for a bit, then perhaps head back to Alaska. (Hey, I can dream, can't I?)
That, or some variation of it, is what I was fantasizing about doing: wandering around a bit before I head back. I'll come outside the boundaries to travel again, but who knows when? I'm young, this is my first time abroad, and I want to take the long way home. I've never been disappointed yet in a scenic route.
No comments:
Post a Comment