30 Days to a Better Man, Day 26: take the Marine Corps fitness test

[pant, pant]

Well, I'm back.

[whew]

I took the test and the results are in. I now know precisely how out of shape I am. The only bright side to this humiliation is that I knew it was coming. I scrolled down through the list of challenges back in early January just to see what I was in for, and I saw this one and groaned. Physical fitness is, bar none, the area in which I am the least manly. I'm a flabby, wheezing blob. The last time I was in decent shape was when I was thirteen and in the High Desert Youth Soccer League.

I've always hated physical exertion. Some people get high on it, but I despise it. Even playing sports is barely tolerable for me. I am an imaginative fellow, an intellectual and bookish daydreamer, and to me there's nothing more monotonous (both mentally and physically) than putting my muscles, heart and lungs through their paces. I've heard a lot of runners and bicyclists claim that they get into "the zone," let their mind wander and get all calm and meditative and blabbity blabbity blah. Not me, no sir. To me it's just torture. Moreover, I'm an Epicurean and a hedonist. I love food and booze. But the better it tastes the more unhealthy it is. (Korean food is a notable exception to this, which is why I was able to drop 20 pounds in 2008-2009 by eating Korean and taking long walks by the Gohyeon River. I've since gained it all back.)

I know that this is no excuse for being out of shape, but I'm just explaining my position.

Okay. Ready for a good laugh? The maximum score on the Marine Corps fitness test is 300. To attain this score, you have to do at least 20 pull-ups (without a time limit), 100 crunches (in two minutes or less), and run three miles in 18 minutes.

My score was 70. 

A measly 70 points. 

Good grief.

Here were the final figures: 

• pull-ups: nearly 1
• crunches: 70 (guess where all of my points came from?)
• 3-mile run: 47 minutes

I'd previously marked out a five-kilometer (3.1-mile) course near my apartment, along the riverside jogging paths in Hangang Park: Gwangnaru Station to Gangbyeon Station, then across the Jamsil Railway Bridge, then back upstream to the foot of the Gwangjin Bridge. I'd never run it before today, however, and that might have been my undoing. I'd been doing all my training at the gym, and those dang treadmills must have been lying to me, because according to their little digital readouts I can do five kilometers in 40 minutes flat. But for some reason it took me nearly 50 today. Maybe I didn't mark it out properly, I don't know.

The other mistake I made was to do the pull-ups (well, pull-up, singular) first. Humiliation is not the best feeling to have when you're starting a 3-mile run. Needless to say, I was feeling mighty low by the time I got back to the apartment. The crunches helped bolster my self-esteem a little bit, but then I went on The Art of Manliness's Day 26 page and discovered that I'd run so slowly and was so pathetic at pull-ups that I hadn't even scored a single point. My score came solely from my crunches, and that's it.

Whoof. Where's the whiskey?

Oh well. A real man shakes humiliation off and tries harder. I still intend to be able to run three miles in 18 minutes someday (and by "someday" I mean sometime this year). I'm going to have to try a lot harder though. It looked to me like I was running my head off this afternoon, but I didn't even score. Sheesh. Pathetic. In the shape I am now, I can do 0.6 kilometers nonstop (barely 0.37 miles).

Baby steps, baby steps.

Jog on back for Day 27.

mid-September 2013 bulletins

Hey there, blogsphere. In the next few days I'm going to publish a confessional about the prejudices and preconceived notions I harbor about the People's Republic of China. Might be best to do that before I go there next week, you know?

Before that, though, here's the news:

• I am fully recovered from that week-long bout of tonsillitis that plagued me the first week of the new semester. 
• The weather appears to be turning. The dreadful summer heat has subsided, though the humidity is still sky-high. And speaking of the sky, the heavens have opened: the middle peninsula has been deluged with 120 millimeters (not quite 5 inches) of rain every day for the past three days. I'm surprised the subways haven't flooded yet. The downpour was so heavy yesterday that the lower half of my slacks were soaked through as I made my way from Gangbyeon Station to my final appointment with the ENT specialist. The rain bucketed down so hard that it was finding cracks and chinks in my umbrella, and icy drops were falling on my head at intervals. Yikes. Coupled with the unpleasant humidity (and the insane amount of sweating I do whenever it occurs), the situation has been untenable. I can't wait for fall to properly set in.
• In other news, the first two weeks of Sejong University's fall semester are over. Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival (roughly analogous to America's Thanksgiving Day) is coming up next week. It's three days, Wednesday to Friday, and that's when Miss H and I are actually going to China. I think this semester is starting out pretty well, but I feel tired already—the prospect of another four months of teaching is daunting. I think I'm finally starting to be well and truly burned out on education. I wanna go home and fly again. I may have some further news about that in the coming weeks, actually; Miss H is pretty burnt out too, what with her kids being so spoiled and unmanageable and all, so we may decide to go home early. We're going to talk it over.
• After many fits and starts, Miss H and I are going to start implementing some healthy habits around here: resuming our evening tea-and-yoga routine, for starters. It really helps us sleep. We've been looking around and garnering information about gyms, and tomorrow we'll probably stop by a few and ask about their rates and facilities. We've made dozens of attempts to get into shape on our own, but we've decided that forking over a membership fee and having personal trainers bark at us would overcome our lack of willpower and provide us with motivation. We have to start getting in shape for the wedding, you know!
• I also think I'm going to start keeping a nightly journal again. I keep buying blank journal books, excitingly leather-bound and full of blank college-ruled pages ripe for filling with life's intimate details, but I never write in 'em. It's difficult to get into the habit, for one thing. Our evenings can be so unpredictable. Hectic, too: I cook and wash dishes and plan lessons and so forth. Moreover, since I'm keeping a blog, there hardly seemed to be any point in keeping a journal...but I've realized that this blog is more like a twice-a-month thing (when I don't have travels to report on), while the journal would be every night. It'll be good to marshal my thoughts, clear my head, and sleep soundly knowing that the events of the day have been recorded and analyzed (in a non-electronic medium). Might help with penning my memoirs down the line, too. Journal-keeping rather sounds like a constructive habit to cultivate.
• Apart from that, there's not much news. After China, I don't have definite travel plans. I'm still considering doing a working holiday in Australia in January and February of 2014, but that might have to change if Miss H and I are going home early.
• Speaking of 2014, the World Cup qualifiers have begun. I was in a bottled-beer bar with a couple of coworkers last Tuesday and the Korea-Croatia game was on. I didn't stick around to see the whole thing, but apparently Korea lost 2-0. The national team has a rookie coach this year and this loss has made it warm for him. Korea will play Mali and Brazil in the coming weeks and they'd better put on a good show, or they might not qualify for the Cup. Golly, I'd hate to see what'll happen to that coach if that happens.

Alright, it's time for me to run. Miss H and I are meeting our friends Josh and JB (my coworker and his North Korean wife) for a double-date today: coffee, the Paul Gauguin exhibit at the Seoul Museum of Art, and samgyeopsal for dinner.

What's samgyeopsal, you ask?

Barbecued pork belly—strips of thick, streaky bacon fried Korean-style and eaten with lettuce leaves and ssamjang (meat sauce). Very fatty, very delicious and very popular among the locals.

Toodle-oo!

shoot to thrill

If you want to witness miracles with any kind of regularity, don't go to a church. Go to a sports game.

(Yes, that's blasphemy. It is also true.)

The sports world is full of miracles. Maybe the fan favorite makes a game-winning three-point shot as the last buzzer sounds. Or your favorite team, the literal definition of downtrodden, participates in what some have called the greatest game in NFL history...and wins. The dying first baseman calls himself "the luckiest man on the face of the earth" in his farewell address to the fans.

It's enough to make anyone a believer.

And yet, I've never experienced one of these miracles for myself. Heck, I didn't even start seriously following a major sports team until recently, and even then, soccer and football (or, as I shall refer to them henceforth in this post, football and gridiron) are my only interests. Two or three seasons of gridiron games aren't enough to witness a miracle (especially when your team is San Diego; don't get me started).

Football (soccer), however...well, it deluged me with miracles from the very first. On my last day in England, two such miracles happened within minutes of each other.

So there I was. England. June 2010. Back in Newcastle after parting with Jeff in Edinburgh. There were a couple of big games coming up, which my English host Adam, his girlfriend Elaine, their friend Jay, and yours truly made sure to watch: England vs. Slovenia and U.S.A. vs. Algeria.

I need to give you the landscape first. As I mentioned previously, Slovenia had given the U.S. a disappointing draw a few days ago, and Algeria had handed England an even more humiliating 0-0. Now matters were switched. The U.S. would be taking on Algeria and England would have to pierce Slovenia. I was dreading the U.S. game all the more now that I knew the Algerian modus operandi: forget scoring, just block the opposing team. The ploy had proven horrendously effective. How would the American boys oppose it? My Geordie friends were feeling the same unease. They had seen how wicked the Slovenians were at blocking the ball. We were all big bundles of nerves. These were the last games before the Round of 16. If either England or the U.S. lost, they would not advance. That'd be it for us. We'd be dead, finished, out of the running. Everything came down to these two games.

Unfortunately, they were being played at the same time. The U.S. would face Algeria in Pretoria, South Africa, and England would play Slovenia in Port Elizabeth. This being England, and me being outnumbered three to one, it was the England game we watched. In between observing, I anxiously watched the ticker at the bottom of the TV screen for news of my fellow Americans.

The games were awful. It seemed as though neither side could gain ground. Twenty-two minutes went by as the valiant English offense battered away at the stubborn Slovenes. Before long, Gerrard, Rooney and Terry were bathed in sweat in the muggy South African air, and yet the scoreboard remained at nil.

Then it happened. Glorious relief. Jermain Defoe, a substitute striker, received a cross from Milner and bopped it into the Slovene goal with his shin. Yes. England was ahead. My heart soared for St. George's cross. The game went back and forth from there on out. Six minutes later, Milner and Defoe tried the same trick again but couldn't pull it off. It was so quiet that the announcers could hear the England fans quietly singing. After a few close goal attempts, the Slovenes were beaten back. The English ran down the clock as best they could while I chewed my nails, my eyes clinging to the ticker at the bottom of the TV screen. After 93 minutes there was still no score in the USA-Algeria game.

The English game ended. "God Save the Queen" rang 'round Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium. In Adam's mum's living room, there was jubilation. Adam and Jay were raucous, clinking cans of Carlson beer and rehashing the match in every detail. But they were good and sympathetic chaps. They patted my back, kept the TV on, and waited for news of my team.

And it happened again.

"News from Pretoria, the U.S. has scored against Algeria—"

The living room exploded. Adam, Jay and I leaped into the air, arms clasped about each other, yelling at the top of our lungs, the very air thundering with joy. Adam's mum stood there and grinned as the three of us worked off our overflowing emotions. The euphoria wouldn't let up. We'd been twice-blessed: each country had gone up against a seemingly unbeatable opponent, scored, and qualified for the next round. England had shut out Slovenia and the U.S. had beat down Algeria. Both teams were moving on to the Round of 16. In that golden afternoon, it was the best of all possible worlds.

And yet all good things must come to an end. The TV had hardly been turned off. The grins had not yet vanished from our faces. And yet the taxi was pulling up outside. It was time for me to collect my bags, ride with Adam to the train station, head to London, and spend a final 12 hours in that city before my flight to America the following morning. So it goes.

I said a heartfelt goodbye to Adam's mum and Elaine, threw my gear into the cab, and left. Adam and I soon found ourselves at the station. There was time enough for one more beer beforehand. Adam and I reaffirmed our friendship over a tall glass of suds, match recaps playing on every TV screen, travelers bustling past us. We chatted of this and that, loftily tossing around the possibility of another visit. That, I think, was the most bittersweet moment of them all. It was finally hitting me. I was leaving England. Who knew how long it would be before I saw all my crazy Geordie friends again?

The clock moved too quickly, as usual. I exchanged one last manly hug with Adam, shook his hand, hefted my knapsack over my shoulder, climbed on the train, and sat down. I gazed over the stained brick buildings of old Newcastle, the futuristic domes and bridges, the lush green trees and rolling hills. I stared into the gathering dusk and let out a hefty sigh. In that sigh were all the worries, dangers, adventures and joys I'd experienced during the past fortnight. (Two weeks! Lord! Had it only been two weeks?)

It didn't feel like quite enough. So I sighed again.

It helped ease the pain a little.

Adam and his lovely mum. Don't she rock that hat?

my northern sky

JUNE 21, 2010
1920 HOURS
NEWCASTLE, ENGLAND

Adam met me at the train station. We caught the metro to Monkseaton and a cab to Tynemouth. The middle-aged driver had "Wichita Lineman" by Glen Campbell playing on her radio. (That kind of threw me for a loop.)

We rolled up to Adam's mum's house just as it was getting dark. We debated a bit about what we wanted for dinner; when Adam and Elaine discovered that I'd never had Indian food, they rang up Marks & Spencer and ordered some, pronto. In a little over an hour, two great heaping platters of naan bread and tikka masala rang the doorbell and deposited themselves in the living room. Ahhh, bliss, my friends, sheer bliss. I found tikka masala to have an intensely-spicy-yet-not-overwhelmingly-hot kind of flavor to it, a delight for the taste buds and the brain. And having that crumbly naan bread to sop up the sauce made the evening even better. I am now of the firm belief that the U.S. needs a more universal distribution of Indian delivery joints.

There remains little left to tell, dear reader. I took no more pictures after Edinburgh; no more notes are scrawled in my little red notebook after the evening of the 21st. Now, from here on out, I shall have to rely on my memory to finish the story.

...

Ha-ha-ha, I can already tell how this is going to go.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Well, some stuff happened, and then some other stuff, and a little more stuff after that. One thing led to another and I wound up on the point.

What's the point, you ask?

A "point" is, among other things, a projection of land that juts outward into a body of water. The particular point I'm talking about is just above the widest stretch of Newcastle Beach, where the surly North Sea sweeps onto fine golden sand. We were perched on a pile of rocks, dirt and grass about 100 feet above this panorama. This being summertime and all (or close to it) the sun sets in the northwest instead of the west. So you can sit on this point and look in a northish sort of direction and see the sun set over the rooftops.

It takes roughly three hours for the sun to do this. As I've mentioned previously, the planet's semi-spherical nature means that Earth has a remarkably small circumference this close to its northerly pole. Due to the shorter distance, and the constant speed of the Earth's rotation, it's as if the Earth is spinning slower the farther north you go. In Newcastle, the sun doesn't set swiftly like it would on the equator. It

slowly

creeps

down

toward

the

horizon

at

downright

sluggish

speeds. This means, then, if you happen to be a sunset lover like yours truly, Newcastle (and points north) should be a veritable haven for you. Particularly if you have a pack of fun-loving Geordies with you who like to sit on the point, drink beer, smoke, and jibe with each other.

...which is just what I did on the everlasting evening of June the 22nd. That pack of fun-loving Geordies and I had a ball. Jay was there, Mike and his girlfriend Vee, and Jon, and Adam & Elaine of course. We laughed, talked, sipped adult beverages, and just generally reveled in each other's company.

We'd spent most of the day watching the England and Algeria in the last slew of games before the Round of 16. England's performance was...disappointing, to say the least. The game was a complete deadlock. The Algerians were less interested in scoring than they were in preventing England from scoring. Focusing all their energies on defense, they utterly stymied their opponent. The big names on England's side—Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, John Terry, and Wayne Rooney—battered away at the Algerian goal with no success. The game ended in a miserable nil-nil draw.

The comments of the voracious football fans in Adam's mum's living room, watching this unfold on television, may well be imagined.

[Spoken in various species of Geordie brogue]

"This is disgustin'..."

"Come the fuck on!"

"Rooney looks fuckin' knackered!"

"We don't deserve to win this, do we?"

"Fuckin' hell..."

It was dispiriting. And as an encore, on behalf of the American in their midst, the company took in the U.S.A.-Slovenia game immediately thereafter. Another 0-0 tie. I was mighty disappointed in my fellow Americans. I expected more from Oguchi Onyewu, Michael Bradley, Clint Dempsey, Landon Donovan, Jozy Altidore, and Carlos Bocanegra—rather unfairly, as I'd never seen any of them in action before. I was somewhat ashamed. I felt that I really ought to know more about the guys playing on my national team, who represented my country in the largest international soccer (football) tournament in the world. The English guys knew more about the American players than I did, for Pete's sake! I kept my mouth shut during the game, only making generic comments about how disappointing the outcome was, and thus concealed my staggering ignorance.

But, at the end of the day, we commiserated over cans of Carlson out on the point, the fresh North Sea breeze in our faces and a staggeringly beautiful sunset unfolding slowly in front of us. This is my single greatest regret about the entire trip: that I didn't have my camera that evening. You'd have really loved the view. It looked a bit like this:

Only, like, you know, better. A lot better.

You'll have to take my word for it.

the Great Edinburgh Pub Crawl

Five hundred yards from our hostel, wedged onto the corner of Queensferry Street and Shandwick Place, a half-mile from the Haymarket Rail Station, lies a little bar named Mathers.

It's an unassuming place: stony façade, brass lettering, long wooden bar with an oblong room in front of it. Standing room only, unless you grab a bench in the corner. High ceiling. Some television sets. Flags from all the soccer-playing nations strung up across the walls. Regular patrons having a sip of ale or cider. Two hooch-mongers meandering slowly up and down behind the bar, like ducks at a shooting gallery.

It was here at Mathers that Jeff and I decided to start our Great Pub Crawl on the evening of June 20, 2010. Showered, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we waltzed into the establishment at about five o'clock to start our pregame warm-up. As the sun set slowly over the New Town, Jeff and I sipped some Strongbow and watched the World Cup, omnipresent as always, twinkling away on every TV screen in every pub in the U.K.

We only stuck around for a little sip, though. We gulped down our glasses and gave a satisfying burp apiece. When we felt the first blurry tendrils of the alcohol begin to tickle our brains, we adjourned across the street to Ryan's Bar, a distinctly larger and more energetic establishment.

And more touristy. Billing itself as "Edinburgh's Busiest West End Bar, Cellar Bar and Coffee Shop," Ryan's was situated quite conveniently on the opposite corner of Queensferry and Shandwick, right where Shandwick met Princes Street. Simply put, the place was on the outskirts of the largest tourist trap in Scotland. It was only later that we found out that Ryan's was also a "tied house," and thereby required to buy at least some of its beer from the breweries which owned it. The general feeling in the U.K. is that a tied house can never be superior to a "free house" which, as the name suggests, is allowed to buy its beer from anywhere. Selection, as you may guess, is generally better at a free house. Free houses also preserve more of the character of an "authentic" British pub. The atmosphere at Ryan's, I noticed, was almost akin to a grill or a classy fast-food joint.

Ryan's was, indeed, a gastropub. That was something of a consolation. Undaunted, Jeff and I sat down, ordered some Tennent's, a roast for Jeff and some nachos for yours truly, and watched as Brazil literally kicked the crap out of the Ivory Coast on the numerous TV screens.

I should point out that Ryan's was our second and last stop. (Some pub crawl, eh?) Certain events transpired which prevented us from leaving. Number one, they were late in bringing Jeff's roast. I got my nachos on time, and they were incredible. They didn't have quite the same flavor as (finger quotes) authentic nachos. I'd say they were lacking in certain irreplaceable spices, unique to the Mexican culinary hemisphere. But nonetheless they were tasty, with adequate amounts of salsa and sour cream to go around.

But Jeff's roast had gotten lost in the shuffle. When we called this to the attention of the barmaid, she apologized, took the offending item off the bill, and brought a sizzling, delectable beef roast to our table and set it down in front of Jeff, lickety-split.

Now that's service.

Number two, we wanted to see how the Ivory Coast-Brazil game ended. That was a foregone conclusion. We should've known better. The Africans are renowned for their expertise in the sport (as they would prove a few days later, when I was back in Newcastle); but the Brazilians are among the top five on the planet, consistently making it into the final rounds of every championship. It was still a pretty good game, though. So Jeff and I waited it out and watched the rest of it. That's what we had come to the U.K. for, after all. 

And number three...

There was a rather pretty girl standing up at the bar.

(Try and guess where this is going. I think you can figure it out.)

I noticed her about halfway through my nachos. She was of medium height, neither skinny nor plump, with a tactical stockpile of curves. Her skin was fair, and lightly freckled. Her nose was assertive and lent an angular sort of seriousness to her otherwise round and innocent face. Her hair was bobbed short, and either dirty-blonde or brown with golden highlights. Her wardrobe was modest, a top and jacket over jeans and tennis shoes. A woolen scarf completed the ensemble. I perceived her charms at a glance; the effect only grew with each successive look.

After a little thought, some more beer, and a few more Brazilian goals, I made up my mind.

"Jeff," I said, "I do believe I'm going to go talk to that girl at the bar."

Jeff gave me his blessing. That is to say, he knocked back another Scotch ale, and I took the gesture to mean "Go to it, buddy." It seemed like a favorable sign. I was a bit sozzled by now and everything was suddenly open to interpretation.

I swung myself out of my chair, sauntered up to the bar, and planted my elbows down upon it. I looked the bartender squarely in his two foreheads, and asked for a whisky. I chose the ten-year-old Springbank, distilled in the Campbeltown region—the only one I had yet to sample. Then I casually turned to the lady.

"Evening," I said, or something equally eloquent. (At least I managed to refrain from the cheesier pick-up lines, like "Is it hot in here, or is it just you?" or "Do you know karate? 'Cause your body's kickin'.")

"Evening," she replied, in heavily accented English. I couldn't quite place it. She introduced herself as Karla, a German student on holiday in the U.K. She was quite fluent in English (though with the noisy pub, her soft-spoken nature, and my own thick-headedness I sometimes found her hard to understand). Jeff joined the two of us at the bar and we whiled away a happy few hours laughing and joking. In between glances at the TV (which helped fill up the occasional awkward pause), we discussed everything from the number of fouls Côte d'Ivoire had committed against Brazil, to the demographics of Germany, to the general hostility felt toward the German people by most European nations. (I believed Karla when she said there was a lot of it still around.)

I enjoyed the conversation and the whisky immensely. I found the former to be rewarding, refreshing, just the ticket after a couple of days spent solely in the company of my erstwhile travel buddy; and the latter I thought very light, the lightest I had thus far sampled among single-malt Scotches. It had a sort of dry sweetness that was rife with vanilla, easy and mellow. The effects, however, crept up on me. If I'd had more money and the booze had cost less than four pounds a sip, then I probably would've had to be carried back to the hostel.

Our three-person party broke up around 11 or so, when Karla said she was getting tired. The poor woman had likely had enough of the rowdy foreigners badgering her. We parted on good terms, settled up at the till, and made our way home through the mild Scottish twilight.

Back at the hostel, I was on my way to the john when I spotted an attractive American brunette peering gingerly through the open door of the ladies' room.
"Oh, God," she groaned.
"What's up? I asked.
"There's no toilet paper."
I winced. "Oof. They forgot that, huh?"
"Yeah."
Being the chivalrous man I am, I went to the front desk. 
"Is he not here?" I asked the night watch, referring to the janitor.
"He's out smoking a cigarette."
"Well," I said, after explaining the problem, "let's go get 'im."
I poked my head outside.
"Need something?" he asked, between puffs. He was a short, dark-complected fellow with spiky black hair and a goatee.
"Looks like there's no toilet paper."
"Oh."
He came cheerfully inside, twirling his keys around his finger. The paper was refilled in minutes.
"Thanks," the brunette said to me. "I've been holding it for two hours."

Bedtime came, but not sleep. I lay in my bunk and stared for hours at the high vaulted ceiling, limned by the lights in the roofless hallways. The sky outside was not black, but purplish; I found it oddly comforting that the sun was not on the other side of the world, but merely hovering below the horizon and not far off. I gazed over the wooden buttresses and arched windows as a dying man might look upon his final sunset. I couldn't get enough. All was magic and wonder and Heaven itself. I was living high, in the midst of a dream, but I knew it wouldn't last. I used that last night in Edinburgh to soak up as much as I possibly could before the daily grind came back into my life. I strove to confine some shred of the marvels of my environment to memory, and carry it away with me into years and travels unknown. Drunkenness be damned. I was seeing with remembering eyes.

When sleep finally did come, it didn't last. Between the sagging mattress, the alcohol in my veins, the titanic snores of my fellow tenants, and my own tendency to rasp, I didn't get much rest.

But there was adventure even in that. On the morrow Jeff and I would go our separate ways: I back to Newcastle, and thence to California; and Jeff across the Channel into France, bound for all the major European capitals, and North Africa beyond.

For the moment, however, I threw myself onto my side, shut my eyes, rubbed my congested nose, and slept.

how I became a football nut

How is it possible that the world throws an amazing party every four years and I, so far, have been missing out?
And not just a party, either. It's a sports party. A soccer party. (Okay, fine, I'll even be multicultural and call it "football" if you want.)
It's the World Cup!
Football's my game. I played soccer for five years before high school, and was a referee two more years after that. (Which means that, yes, at one point in my life, I understood the offside rule. Bow in the presence of greatness, peasant.)
But I never dug watching it so much as playing it. Playing it was a blast, once I got myself into shape. I even scored a goal once. I was playing right forward on a glorious California afternoon, charging down the field, defenders left in the dust, goalie looking pale and scared and totally not up to our level of awesomeness—and the center passed, and BAM, I booted it right in. I reacted modestly, as I recall; now I'd like to erect a temple to myself.
Football was hard work, to be sure. Playing in Tennessee was humid, and often rainy. Playing in the desert was hot and dry. I worked with some prima donnas that would've put Beckham to shame, both coaches and players. And thanks to the precise orientation of some of the blood vessels in my right nostril, I got nosebleeds all the freakin' time. Every game I played, somebody would give that ball a kick three feet in front of me and it'd come soaring up in slow motion and conk me right on the snout, followed by a copious flood of vermillion.
Watching football was just...bleh. A bunch of tiny little men running around a big green field with white stripes, booting a ball back and forth. Whoop-de-doo.
Then I went to England. I was already aware that the World Cup was up and going. Heck, that was my purported reason for going to England in the first place, to watch the World Cup in the pub with my English friends. That was how I pitched it to my editor, anyway. I said, "Hey, I'm going to be rambling around Scotland, Ireland and northern England for two weeks in June, watching the World Cup in the pubs surrounded by a pack of ravening England fans [or, in Ireland's case, a pack of ravening Brazil supporters]. I'll be your war correspondent behind enemy lines, sir. I shall infiltrate the enemy's ranks and observe their football-related operations in intimate detail, if you please. How'd you like some dispatches from the front?"
At the time, I was speaking facetiously. Little did I realize how prophetic my levity would prove to be.
I rode the bus with Andrea up to Stansted Airport. It was a beautiful ride through picturesque English countryside, all fields, hedgerows, and woods that Robin Hood wouldn't have felt like a complete idiot hiding out in. Andrea, who (bless her heart) had treated me to a beer before we got on, got all caught with me during the ride, and I her. She'd been teaching university students in West London, but it was driving her mad: Western children aren't quite as industrious as our old Korean gang had been. I advised her to get out of the teaching business and go live by the seaside somewhere and write, all the while grinning inside. Somehow I always thought English kids were too smart to ask their professors to bump grades...
We made Stansted, checked in, and went through security. That was the only place where I was searched: dinky little Stansted Airport, about to board a domestic flight to Newcastle. I'd traveled thousands of miles over oceans and mountains and foreign lands, through international airports like McCarran and George W. Bush and Heathrow, and Stansted is where the curly-haired safety official pulled my bag off the scanner and rifled through it, chatting at me all the while with her nigh-incoherent English accent. Weird.
Anyway, we had a lovely 45-minute flight to Newcastle. I say "lovely," not because the flight itself was lovely, but because the views were lovely. I was sitting next to a lovely, slim, doe-eyed brunette, for one thing. Her name was Nicola and she was coming up from London to visit her Geordie boyfriend in Newcastle. So of course I said "Hey, Nicola baby, why settle for that bucolic bumpkin? Tag along with me and I'll show you what an old-fashioned home-grown grade-A American man is. I'll pierce the secret depths of your sorceress soul with my Longbow of Love, darling angel-pie."
Well, I didn't say that, exactly, but some version of it was running through my head as I chatted her up. She was quite friendly and open, and pointed out some of the sights as we came down for a landing—making a dramatic sweep out over the North Sea and then lancing back over the jagged coast. The orange sun was just kissing the horizon, lighting the rolling green lands beneath with a slanting, golden divinity. The waves crashed against the sands and rocks as we thundered over.
It was an auspicious start. This was "the Toon," and man, it looked beautiful. Andrea and I disembarked and met Adam and Elaine, our friends and local guides, in the terminal. We stepped out into the still-setting sun (I was about to learn how long-lasting and late the sunsets are in Newcastle in summer) and hailed a taxi. It was sure something seeing A & E again. It had been almost exactly a year since we parted in South Korea. Being near them, hearing that lovable Geordie accent tumbling around in my ears, observing the two of them again in their natural environment...it was almost unreal. I was overjoyed to be reunited with them and thrilled that I'd now get to play around on their home turf. Within the span of two minutes it was just like old times: we were laughing, talking, joking, jibing, doing all the myriad things we used to do together on those narrow streets and tiny restaurants in K-Land.
But this wasn't K-Land. I could tell that immediately. England flags were everywhere. St. George's Cross flew proudly from every upper-story window, every shopfront, even from the antennas of cars. This was football territory, and it was World Cup time. It came home to me then. I would be spending the next two weeks in a land utterly obsessed with football, during the most well-known international football competition in the world, in which both my country and England were competing. And, abruptly, I was transformed.
Think of the most fanatical, die-hard, sycophantic sports fan you know. He doesn't necessarily have to slather himself in his team's colors and leap up and down in the stands like a trained ape; he may not even own any memorabilia. But his soul, his essence, his life-force seems inextricably linked to the performance of his team. He'll scream and yell and holler when points are scored; rant and roar when an unfair call is (rightfully or wrongfully) perceived; become insufferably exuberant for hours after winning a game (or days, in the case of playoffs or championships); and likewise sulk for a full-length mourning period on the heels of a loss. Take that man, soak him in three pints of beer and dust him with a packet of pork rinds, and you have an English football fan. These guys are nucking futs. I was infected with this excitement, this ardor, this enthusiasm, this pandemic zeal within minutes of getting off the airplane in Newcastle. Suddenly I was pumped. I was raring to go. I was ready for some football. I wanted my team to win, more desperately than I wanted my own seaplane or a bootlegged copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special. Some hitherto inactive and unsuspected gland had been activated, galvanized by the competitive pheromones in the English air, and was feverishly flooding my body with footballmoxytocin and ballsinourcortisol, twenty-four years' worth of backlogged fan-pheromones. The chrysalis of apathy had come off, as had the gloves. I had been transfigured from a lackadaisical observer to a dyed-in-the-wool football nut in less time than it took László Kiss to score a hat-trick against El Salvador in 1982.
This was going to be sweet.
The first night was thankfully uneventful. I was exhausted by my travels, and by my long night of debauchery in Las Vegas some twenty-four hours before. Except for a few cat-naps here and there, I'd been awake for close to forty-eight hours. I was ferried to Adam's mum's house in a taxi, where I was fed, watered, and cleansed. Elaine's friend M came over and the four of us stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, sitting in Adam's mum's tiny conservatory, listening to AC/DC and Curtis Mayfield and just getting caught up.
I was floored. I was in England. I was sitting in the conservatory of an English house, looking out on the prim and proper English garden, surrounded by an English red-brick neighborhood, under a sky that refused to go completely dark in these northern latitudes. My soul boiled with excitement. My head swam with anticipation, happiness, and travel-induced delirium. I was out on the road again, back amongst friends, in for a hell of a time, and loving every second of it.
We'd originally resolved to stay up all night waiting for Jeff, but we figured since we'd be shouting and screaming and hollering and jumping up and down and drinking copious amounts of beer and watching the World Cup match the next day, we should probably get some rest. I was put to bed on a marvelously soft queen-size in an upstairs room. The view from the window looked like this (in the morning):

Adam warned me that I would likely be awakened in the middle of the night by Jeff, our Canadian friend, who was was also coming to the Korean reunion (from Korea, actually) and who was taking the night bus up from London. He and I would be splitting a bunk. If he did wake me up, I don't remember it. I was out like a light.
Well enough for me that I got my rest, for the next day was a momentous one: England's first game of the World Cup...versus none other than the USA. Time to explore the Toon first. We commenced with the Quayside, where the bridges which Newcastle is famous for spanned the mighty River Tyne.

We took a nice little stroll down by the waterfront, crossing the Millennium Bridge over to Gateshead, taking the elevator up and admiring the view.

We also stopped in at Greggs for a snack. Greggs is something like the Geordie McDonald's: only instead of burgers and stuff, it's pasties and pies. The steak bake was delicious. Check this mother out:

Then we stopped in at our first pub (yippee!). Bob Trollops, just off the Quay.

Lovely little place. I'd been dying to try some English cider. I'd had some Old Rosie at Adam's the night before, and liked it a lot. Had something of a sulfuric overtone to it, but was very equable otherwise. I saw no reason to quit there, however, so I procured some Strongbow. Named after the Norman who made the first official British expedition to Ireland back in medieval times, Strongbow is your basic English cider: apple-tasting, fizzy, and roughly as alcoholic as beer. It makes a nice change from beer, though, and gets the same job done.
And there I was, sitting in a tiny, dark, woody, brass-laden English pub with a couple of mates and some cider.
You know that feeling you get when you realize one of your lifelong dreams? Yeah, I was getting that feeling about then.
We exited Trollops and headed up the rather steep Dean Street....


...which became Grey Street, if I remember correctly...

...which led us to Grey's Monument, smack dab in the middle of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne city center. It was built to honor Charles Grey, one of the architects who designed most of modern Newcastle.

That's Charles, Earl Grey to you. Yes, the guy the tea is named after. Cool, huh? You didn't think Newcastle was all meat pies and bridges and Brian Johnson, did you?

The place was hopping at mid-Saturday. There are about three different shopping centers clustered around Monument Square; Newcastle University ain't far away, either, and there are enough pizza joints, pubs, and book stores to choke a horse.

We wandered up Northumberland Street, checking out Fenwick's Food Halls. They sell boatloads of candy, booze and deli-style pies, pasties, sandwiches, and Indian food. I was full up on Greggs and drooling anyway. Angelic Elaine let me try some of her chicken tikka masala sandwich.

We kept on, and hung a right at St. Mary's Place (at Newcastle University, where Princess Eugenie Victoria Helena Mountbatten-Windsor of York—insert loving sigh here—is doing the equivalent of her master's degree).

A few hundred yards brought us to Luckies Corner Bar. Like every other pub I was to visit in the U.K. and Ireland, they had a big projector set up inside, already spreading some World Cup pregame love over the spacious interior.

We met up with some more of A & E's friends at Luckies: Nathan, Aaron, and Michael, all solid lads. Bets were going around, being hotly debated and finally placed with the aid of Michael's iPhone. I hadn't realized what a roaring betting culture England has going, especially where football matches are concerned. There were betting houses on every street corner. The Brits'll put 50 pence down on anything: who'll win, how much they'll win by, the final score, the fastest goal, the highest-scoring player...even how many corner kicks there'll be.

Me being the only Yank surrounded by a cadre of English people, the badinage began to fly. They were "taking the piss" out of me, as they say up there. Several rather disparaging remarks were made about the United States' chances against England, which got my red-blooded American dander up. So I hauled out a "chunk" (one British pound coin; thick little buggers, they are) and put it down on the US to beat England 2-1.

There remained but to sit, drink, and wait.
The game came on. The action began. I sat there, watching my friends both old and new unanimously yell at the projector screen, feeling a curious sort of nervousness. It wasn't concern for my chunk, oh no. It was the football-mania again. I folded my arms so no one would see my hands shaking. I kept up a bold front, giving as much lip as I got. Inside, I was pulled tighter than a guitar string. My homeland's manly pride—not to mention $1.40—was on the line.
England scored in three minutes. My forehead hit the table as the pub erupted. A cacophony of hoarse screams and yells resounded through the enclosed space, bedlam on the ears, needles in the pincushion of prestige. Suddenly all the world was gray and lightless, void of cheer, or even the promise of it. This, I thought, was what it must be like to be a football fan.
I recovered with difficulty. I sat up, withstood the laughing jibes of my so-called friends, took a commiserating sip of beer, and took my life in my hands by chalking the English goal up to luck. The next thirty-six minutes inched by, spurred on by my gritted teeth and clenched fists. My eyes were locked onto the projector screen in a death-grip. I didn't even know that my eyes could grip anything before then. If an earthquake had struck the pub at that moment, the projector screen would've held rock steady, so intently were my eyeballs gripping it. The fingers of my very soul were crossed.
And it happened. Just as I was up at the bar ordering another pitcher of Fosters, the ball slid between Robert Green's fingers and rolled into the net.



My brain immediately clamped down on the rest of my body to prevent it from leaping into the air. My eyebrows seesawed. My arms jumped and wavered about, threatening to shoot skyward, like rockets on tethers. Half-strangled cheers and yells of approbation clawed their way up my neck and died, suffocating behind mumbling lips. I settled for giving the barman a friendly wink as I handed him £7.50.
We'd equalized. The US was tied, 1-1. My prediction might still come true. We might win.
The rest of the game was no less tense. All of us leaned forward in our chairs (or back, depending on which way we were sitting). Hearts pounded. Eyes dared to blink. Tongues danced over dry lips. Fingers drummed on tables and knees. Disgusted shouts rang out now and then. The noise in the pub fell to a whisper, rising to crescendo when England got a run on the American goal. But no further goals were scored. And suddenly it was over. A 1-1 draw. My pound was lost, but my national dignity and my life were intact. We celebrated that night with beer, dancing, and a trip to the Pink Triangle, the gay area of Newcastle, whence the gay bars and Goths traditionally were located. Adam danced with an enormous, smiling fat guy as we all got drunk and laughed. We went out for Greek food after and ate in the shadow of the solemn stone keep wall that surrounded the city in medieval times. We somehow made our way back home in the wee hours of the morning, beer-soaked, exhausted, sweaty, stuffed to the gills, and happy as we'd been in a long, long time.

And that was just the first day.