hell is a 2-day bus ride to nowhere

so we're back at crimson house again, a day early.

yesterday morning saw us leaving crimson at 7.30am weighed down by backpacks for our three-day field trip with our writer friends living in gwangju. we got to the aeogye subway station at 8.30am sharp, as requested by the various organizers kind enough to put this event together. after a long-ish wait outside a convenience store, we saw some young korean writers carrying many many many cartons of beer and soju and loading them onto the waiting bus. after a bit, our friends kris and kit arrived, with three other asian writers (a guy from mongolia and 2 poets from palestine) and their handlers. the weather was mild. and so we set off to kangwon-do, where we were scheduled to stay at a buddhist temple and later at manhae traditional village, named after a buddhist love poet.

and then it started raining really hard. and now, a day later, it's still raining. the sheer agony of what we went through is truly blog-worthy but because i don't want to risk feeling worse than i do now, lemme just give some bullet points:

• my phone kept receiving broadcasts about the weather, all in korean. but i could see numbers like 250mm and some scarily unidentifiable korean verbs attached to han gang, which is the name of the river that cuts through southern seoul.
  
• we got word that there were landslides all over and many roads were impassable. we got off the bus several times on the highway for smokes and roadside toilet breaks (sans toilets) because traffic was at a standstill anyway. after a few hours, the koreans just started firing up their little death sticks inside the airconditioned bus and poor kris had to tie a bandanna a la holdaper around his face because of all the smoke.
  
• it's a 3-day weekend so lots of people were also stuck in traffic en route to holiday high jinks all over the peninsula. i bet every bus on the road had a huge cargo of alcohol and no food. just like us.
• during said toilet breaks, i saw lots of koreanas shivering in the rain with their dinky little handbags, pekpek miniskirts and stilettos. said koreanas also had to, ahem, go by squatting beside the highway in the said weather-inappropriate outfits. wehehe.
• on the bus, i alternately slept, read pico iyer's tropical classical and listened to mp3s on my palm (especially my playlists entitled "uppers", "salon downloads", "about a paul" and "shirley bassey remixed"). got bored after 8 hours of this so i took out my camera and watched the video clip i took the night before of the lovely kanako* at the nurebang singing in a voice fit only for a cartoon character.
• we spent a total of 18+ hours inside a bus stuck in traffic, in the rain, and still ended up back in seoul the next day. however, we did have a pretty good time last night with the korean writers who organized the trip for us. at around 11pm, we got off the bus and into some fleabag motel, the kind where the bedrooms had no beds and the bathrooms had no sinks. only faucets 6 inches above the floor***. we made short work of our busload of alcohol, amidst some forced singing (kris did a bit of "walang hanggang paalam" and i squawked through the beatles' "i will"), fried chicken, dried squid and various makunat na chichirya.
  

lots of other miseries happened but not really appropriate for this blog. some things are best forgotten, washed away by this damned rain. on the bright side, as soon as we arrived in seoul, siege and i took the subway for a good lunch/dinner at our favorite pakistani restaurant in itaewon (aka, the foreigners' ghetto) and looked at books in What the Book? couldn't find the ozick book for my favorite person so chose not to buy anything. so i'm now back at crimson, in my usual comfy state, surrounded by unread books and laundry in various states of filth.

* we all have a crush on her, this sweet japanese girl who lives in room 401. after weeks of plotting and pining, we finally convinced her to join us for some yogurt-flavored soju (like yakult that delivers a kick in the head) and lots of bad singing at a nurebang on chamsari-gil**. so last friday night, jon, siege, tenzin and i brought kanako to our favorite soju place. this favorite night-time ritual now includes puffing on chocolate-flavored cigars so we gave one to kanako, too. she knows very little english, lots of korean and of course, japanese. jon knows no korean, a little japanese, and english. tenzin knows tibetan, hindi, english and urdu. siege & i know english, tagalog and lots of curses in various languages. you can just imagine how much got lost in translation (eg, kanako almost took a bite out of her cigar, thinking it was actually made of chocolate).

** our photographer friend from klti, mr. song in-ook, told me yesterday that chamsari-gil means "real life road". very appropriate, as it is lined with bars and nurebangs and more bars, all for the pickling of generations of korea university student livers.

*** once more, i give in to my inner bigot and make tawa at the idea of korea being a developed country. i maintain that it's a matter of software (ang mga utaw) not being able to catch up with the hardware (ang kanilang hi-tech insfrastructure). tercer mundo pa rin mag-isip ang karamihan dito, basta nakalabas na ng seoul. having just survived a hellish roadtrip that inevitably includes stops at roadside toilets with electric hand dryers but no toilet bowls (only those horrific crusty squat-type abominations), i must ask you to forgive my grousing.