Mac D Moments

The music dies down, the short barmaid in flats and a tight t-shirt approaches the table where you are sitting squeezed in between two drunken guys trying desperately to balance their asses on stools.  Women with flat ironed hair and smeared make-up sloppily move their bodies to the disappearing music while uninhibited men in v-neck t-shirts plan their last strategic attack. These sex thirsty men, in desperation, try to procure a bed mate and the urgency behind their liquor laced eyes tell you they too realize time is running out.  

The barmaid clears the empty glasses on the table and your heavy, half closed eyes follow the sound of her voice to meet her face. You see her lips form the words “last call” and you toss your head side to side as you reach for a full glass of whisky coke in front of you.   

The drunken French guy to your left keeps sliding off the stool, his ass teetering on the round leather cushion. He is holding the wall with one arm and clutching his cell phone in the other hand, incoherent ramblings about a girlfriend escape his mouth.  He stops periodically, eyes suddenly alight as he reaches his hand into some absurd hidden pocket and pulls out a skinny white cigarette. He does this trick repeatedly and the drunk in you makes you cackle with glee every time he pulls out that limp cigarette with a delighted stupid grin on his face. 

The drunken friend to your right is hunched over. He is quiet, head bobbing precariously round his lap, in between the two realms of consciousness. 

The lights flick on.  You slowly and clumsily join the march outside. There are zombies on the street with glazed eyes and an inebriated hunger. There is one common destination: Itaewon’s 24 hours McDonald’s.  As you get close you see the sun tickling the horizon and notice the glint of the bright golden arches. You are overcome with joy. 

Inside, there is an assortment of people with sweaty faces and sloped shoulders.  A cluster of people are lined up against the wall in various forms of the evolution of man.  An environment like this is cause for potential danger, a setting for a massacre.  You find what looks like a line and mosey on over to queue up. At the counter, the cashier is wearing a fancy dress shirt resembling a page girl on Parliament Hill and not a fast food joint employee.  You want to laugh about the silliness of Korean things, but instead you point to the menu and enunciate as best you can, “quarter pounder with cheese, cam sam nee da.”  

Her eyes are flat and she doesn’t punch in any orders. You say it again trying hard not to slur words but you do anyways.  She mumbles something foreign, or it could’ve been English, who knows at this point. She lifts a lazy finger upwards, indicating the menu behind her and you look up.  You look back at her. You look up again. You hear distant mumblings all around and your heavily lidded eyes suddenly notice the breakfast menu is up. Gross round egg concoctions on weird muffin things and you realize it’s morning. Somewhere you missed the night, you were awake in dark corners when the earth made a full spin and beckoned the new day on as evident as McDonald’s breakfast menu. 

You order seventeen hash browns and thirty-two ketchup packets and move out of the line for the next sullen soldier. 

Rental Spaces

Rental spaces are the collection of apartments you live in after you move out of your parent’s home.  They started back when you left for college and tried to decorate your tiny dorm room with abstract posters and candles that smelled of exotic scents. You attended yard sales to find funky lampshades.

Before walking across that stage in a cap and gown with an undergraduate diploma in your hands, you would have U-hauled boxes of your stuff to possibly three more rental places.  There was the fourth floor apartment you moved into with your college boyfriend after freshman year wrapped up; you bought a twelve week old puppy with a month’s paycheque and fostered faded couches from the street corner.  You wondered briefly if street furniture could have belonged to frat houses or sororities and lurked with a gazillion diseases and bodily stains. Little did you know however, street couches are the perfect habitation for bed bugs.  Before the new fall semester would start, your whole apartment would be infected with the flat-bodied vampire bugs and you’d end up not just returning the secondhand couches to the curb, but also your new IKEA mattresses and bed boards as well.

Following sophomore year, just as you were getting the hang of post-secondary living and independence, you were getting worse at romance and being a good girlfriend. The college boyfriend and you shared a poisonous relationship but you thought it was easily salvageable: just get a bigger space! So during the early hot summer days after your sophomore year, you moved into a two bedroom flat on the second floor of a high rise with giddy optimism. There were more walls than you had posters to hang and more wall-to-wall white carpet than you had furniture to put on.  You spent weekend mornings during that first month going to farmers’ markets and buying cherry tomato plants.  You lined them up on your balcony imagining bursting red ornaments of fruit in no time. You bought a spice rack imagining all those luxurious dinners you would make.  You ended up most nights eating Kraft Dinner concoctions. The potted stems never gave birth to any sized tomatoes.

There’s the apartment you moved into after you built the courage to leave your boyfriend. You realized the problem wasn’t space and vowed never to move in with another man until you’re married.  You find a new roommate, a classmate in your last year of college. The sixth floor apartment you two shared had tiled floors and a bareness you never expected.  Without the discarded clothing and unwashed dishes your ex left around, the apartment was lonely. You vowed never to have any kind of roommate again.

It was the summer after you walked that stage with diploma in hand that you moved back to your parent’s suburban house. You had known even before you dropped your suitcase to the ground that this old familiar home was again just more rental space.  It stopped being home when you left four years ago with foolish ideas that building a new home was as easy as co-signing a lease.

After five months of feeling like a stranger in your childhood house, you packed up a suitcase and boarded a plane flying you half way around the world.  You would find yourself setting up camp in a new rental place each year, but this time around you knew exactly what it was: just a space.  There was no false hope.  You hung postcards on the fridge collected from places you’ve been, left framed photos of your faraway family on the bookshelves, and scattered daisies in empty glass bottles whenever someone gave them to you.  Still, when the twelve months came to an end and you packed up your stuff, you always noticed how everything fit into one suitcase. Unlike your friends, you wouldn't have things to ferry across oceans to your parent’s house for storage. Everything you have is on you. Everything fits into one tiny space.

Baked

The buttery sweet smell of pies baking in an oven is not a common aroma to encounter when walking into an apartment in South Korea.  Convection ovens are not a staple appliance in the country’s kitchens so it may sound absurd that a dozen or so women in the small town of Icheon City, an hour southeast of Seoul, decided to host a bake sale in order to raise money to send a young woman through her final year of university.

The fundraiser was for Rose, a young woman living in Uganda with big ambitions and an aptitude to learn, but the misfortune of coming from a place ravaged by war and human rights violations. Rose was born in Nebbi, a tiny village in the north of Uganda. Her school was nothing more than a foundation without walls.

How Rose formed relations with a handful of English teachers in a small town in Korea occurred three years ago when she met Holly Dagnan, a then twenty-two year old graduate from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  Before Holly became an English teacher in Korea, she spent the summer working at a restaurant saving money to fulfil a long awaited trip to Uganda.  She spent much of her undergraduate studies following the conflicts in Uganda and always knew it was a country she needed to see firsthand.

When she had saved enough to go, she and three other classmates made the trip to the African country where she spent two months interning in parliament. On a trip to the town of Nebbi, she met a skinny young woman in a blue dress whom she would later become very acquainted with.  Holly remembers Rose being extremely timid, not well spoken, and barely able to maintain eye contact.

 “I think she was nervous to meet us, maybe she felt intimidated,” says Holly.

When Holly discovered Rose had gotten accepted into Mokono University but did not have the funds to attend, Holly made a call to her parents back in Tennessee and started working out a financial plan to pay for Rose’s education. 

“I felt very strongly about education and its role within a society, especially one that had been disrupted a great deal,” says Holly. “There are many people in the north of the country living in small villages… And whole generations grew up with no knowledge of how to harvest their own crops, how to run a business, computer skills, all those things. And for someone from the north to be qualified for a college program but not be able to go really weighed deeply on me.”

With the help of practically a stranger, Rose started her first day at Mokono University in the fall of 2009.  Her choice of major was developmental studies.

“Her decision for study was really important because she could give back to her community and help develop the north so it can be on equal standing as the south,” says Holly.  “I think change has to come from within a country, as well as development, in order to do that you have to educate the locals.”

However, with the state of the economy and shifting plans for the Dagnans, they had less money available to send Rose through her last year of university.  When some of the English teachers heard about this cause, they jumped on the chance to help.    

***

On a cool fall evening, in the small city of Icheon, a small group of women who find citizenship from all around the globe came together in a second floor apartment carrying every toaster oven they could put their hands on, intent on spending the night baking as many sugar cookies, chocolate chip biscuits, lemon cupcakes, and blueberry pies they could.  The goal included selling the baked sweets that many foreigners miss so much from back home, along with a silent auction of goods donated by the expat community in the city, and a 50/50 raffle at RX Bar, the local foreigner hang out spot.  An event page was created in Facebook and twenty one people in the town pledged their attendance.

These hard working ladies and their baked goods helped raise over one million won, just three hundred thousand won short of one year’s tuition. The turn-out was small in numbers if compared to an event in Seoul where many expats live, but Holly is more than satisfied with the generosity of her local community who helped surpass her goals for the fundraiser.

As for her hopes for Rose, Holly is again, more than satisfied.

“A lot of my dreams for her had already been fulfilled because she turned into a really assertive and strong woman,” says Holly. “She used to be terribly timid and couldn’t address issues at her school with her schedule.  But now she is on top of things. She’s just bolder, it’s really amazing.”

Idea-less Days

Five months ago, as the snow on the skiing slopes began to melt, a college friend flew from the mountains in France and Switzerland to the cramped and cold country of South Korea.  He spent almost two months here quickly becoming a necessity to my days.  We played a lot of Scrabble, got acquainted with French-immune zombies, and shot a lot of BB guns.

Just as the cold long days were dwindling away leaving a space for the dreary skies and wet weather of the rainy season, my college friend left for home. He took some soju with him, a packet of instant noodle, warm socks with cute animal faces on them and left me with a jar of Ideas.

  An E-mart jam sized jar that once had pumpkin yogurt in it was filled with a bunch of tiny scrunched up little papers.  Five months later, today, I unraveled the last one...

 

Englishmen 101

Things I have learned from dating Englishmen:

They take pride coming from the birthplace of the English language yet they can't speak it.  They mispronounce words and make a mockery of lisping.  They're too lazy to pronounce 'th' so they just settle for "t" ('He is tree years old').  They're the Ozzy Osbourne of mumbling and unintelligible speech.

They sweat. They sweat a lot.

Whenever you say eggplant they say aubergine. 

They drink like fish. When the rest of the world has fallen into a sweet slumber, crawling into bed with their loved ones, Englishmen are still going strong.  Where they stop and start gets blurred as nights collide into mornings and weekends merge into work days.

They don't pussyfoot anything. When they're mad at you, you know right away. They square their shoulders and try to head butt you.

Their hands are normally clutching pints of beer or leaning on a bar top for support.

They like to call their moms.

When they aren't drinking beer, they really do like to drink tea.

They shout a lot at football games.  Be it the World Cup, Sunday football league, or little kids playing in a park, the crazy lad with a beet red face screaming insanities at the side of the pitch is probably an Englishman.

If you mention Sunday roast, their eye gloss over and fill with nostalgic longing for things like Yorkshire pudding and mint sauce.

Oh yeah, and it's pronounced "York-shure" not "York-shire"

The part of leg hidden beneath shorts and unseen by sunlight is a blinding, sickening sight of pale coloured skin.

They love X-Factor.

For some reason you start calling your friends "mates" and your enemies "wankers" and "twats" over time.

They say things like "I need to blanch the tomatoes" and "Bebe, let's just go for a cheeky one" and "don't be a spot of bother."

Their English friends turn up in the morning, out of the blue, with a missing shoe and no pants and bruises all up their arm.  You ask them where they've been but they don't know. You find out from the barkeeper at the pub nearby how they were found passed out, spread eagle, on the middle of the street. And that was a Monday.

Oh, Englishmen.

"A Bali Ending", Indonesia Day 12

I was in Jakarta International Airport waiting nine hours before my flight to Manila when the words of a spunky vibrant young Dutchman took hold.
I met Kevin on my way to Bali. We were on the windy upper deck of a ferry pedalling its way across calm water to an island more famous than the country it is a part of.  A paradise escape known for its raging nightlife, sunburnt Australians, and lovesick honeymooners. Kevin, an experienced traveller with a world tour already under his belt decided he needed some more time touring Asia since he enjoyed his first encounter with this mystic land so much.

 

When the ferry docks in Bali it is still a good three more hours in a chartered bus before we reach Denpasar and about another twenty-five minute cab ride to the beach cove of Kuta. My travelling mate and I, along with our new friend, arrive in Kuta's bustling nightlife close to eleven.  We search hotel after hotel for vacant rooms at backpacker prices but although the narrow streets are lined with inns, we are unlucky in our pursuit.  With heavy bags strung to our backs, and a full day journey it took to get from Mount Bromo to Bali, we are exhausted and our energy and optimism is quickly fading.  Our first impression of this legendary retreat is not looking too favourable.
After at least ten failed attempts at hotel hunting, we take our famished and disappointed selves to a cheap Indonesian restaurant just about to close down. A refuelled threesome will make the search for accommodation more successful, we reckon.
So over curry rice with meat resembling in taste and texture either fish or chicken, Kevin decides that perhaps another year long travelling trip just isn't in the stars.  "I've decided I much prefer the western world," he laments.  This realization was from numerous things, not just the rotten hotel luck or the fact he was feeling weak after getting a nasty bug that affected his digestion, respiratory, and energy levels.  It includes but not limited to a disgust in the squatting design of eastern toilets, of cold showers with buckets and ladles, and bugs the size of fruit walking carefree in your bedbug ridden hotel room.

At the airport a week later, I pull out a last American twenty dollar bill I had stuck in between the pages of my passport to pay for the ridiculous airport tax in order to leave the country.  When the money changer refuses to take it, I take it to the bank teller who in turn refuses to take it as well.  "It's too old," he says.  I tell him it may look old and aged, but like people, it still functions and has use.  He shakes his head and I want to reach across the glass partition and punch him in the nose.  So I scan the terminal filled with people and search out the white folks.  Several are unable to help me out, but a cute French family stop to listen.  The two gorgeous teenage daughters are sweet and helpful but the mom, tired in her own mom way, shakes her head unwilling to even consider it.  In an exhausting last attempt, I try to explain again how I just want to trade a bill for a newer looking bill.  The dad, tired in his own dad way, opens up his wallet, fans through his bills, and extracts a mint crisp twenty.  We trade. I scan the bill like a greedy thief, thank him profusely, and head back to the bank.  At this point, the search for a clean twenty brought no emotions of desperation, embarrassment, or even fear as it would have two years ago. The only thing I felt was annoyance. Being able to buy things back home with cash I've accidentally washed in my jeans, dropped in the toilet, ripped up and taped back together, my reaction to this was simply "meh." And that's when I realized, as Kevin's words over a curry dinner flowed back in my mind, that I too, prefer the western world.  The comforts of the west have outweighed the mystique and charm of the east. At least for now.
Being able to travel through Asia has taught me a lot of things like simplicity, family, community, faith, and pristine sunshine. But it has also made me realize the things I miss about home like dreaming, thinking, freedom, and honesty.

So Indonesia, as my last Asian stop, has nicely summed up my two years in Asia.  Bittersweet as endings and new beginnings are, and although I've met a reason to keep me here, I am more than ready to take Keiko and go away again to new adventures in new places.

"Volcano Climbing," Indonesia Day 8

This photo is my favourite even though it was a blind shot.  I was standing on the narrow ledge at the top of the volcano. I looked down into a steaming crater, to my right was the staircase full of people and to my left was this group. The sun and sand were in my eyes but I took the shot anyways.

In the chilly early morning, a Javanese man is standing at the foot of an active volcano, wrapped in a thin shawl and clutching a tiny cluster of flowers.  He has a scarf wrapped around his head and is wearing a cloth surgical mask over his mouth to stay protected when the wind sweeps across the "Sea of Sand" like a desert breeze.  The small posy of dried and dusty looking yellow plants may have been flowers at one time, pretty and wild mountain flowers perhaps, but now they appear as though all the moisture has dried away and stiffened them under the beaming sun.  

"Gift to the mountain gods," he mutters under his mask yet clear enough for the dozens of tourists to hear as they begin their ascent to the top.

From where the jeep dropped me off, it was about a twenty minute walk to the base of the volcano.  When the wind danced across the ground the sand filled your ears and eyes.

The legend of Mountain Bromo in East Java starts along time ago, in the 15th century, when a princess and her prince were unable to have children.  The barren couple decided to seek help from the mountain gods.  In return for twenty-four children, the couple had to sacrifice the twenty-fifth infant by throwing it into the volcano.  On certain days, some people in East Java still bring offerings of flowers or foods to the top of Bromo and toss it in.

At the mountain town of Cemoro Lawang, an organized jeep trip brought me to a nearby cliff at five am.  Along with maybe seventy other foreigners, we watched the sun rise in the distance, lighting up a smoky sky and a picturesque volcanic backdrop.  Wearing thick sweaters and wrapped in blankets, tourists reached for their cameras and started shooting pretty landscape.  A middle aged Japanese man had a lens big enough to be a telescope, amateur backpackers were equipped with their Nikon DSLR's between their clumsy hands, and the rest of us were holding onto simple point and shoots.  The tourists all merged to the edge of the cliff, scoping out a spot where they could capture the beauty of nature devoid of any human interruptions.  

At sunrise, many tourists are brought to this mountain cliff to see the sun rise because it is apparently the best time to get a good view of the volcanoes.  It was cold being woken up at 4am. 

I lost my beloved Canon G11 way too early in its life and decided to only bring my iPhone4 and shoot with the attached camera.  I prefer it actually, as I could sneak up on people and take photos less intrusively.  There was no way I could capture the stunning scenic image before me anyways, even if I did have the appropriate camera and the perfect aperture settings. Beauty like that tingles you inside, plays with the atoms in your body, and nothing I took could really capture it. So I didn't try for that flawless National Geographic cover shot.  And after a little while, I became bored so I interested myself with the travelers surrounding me.   

I love people who take lots of photos. They interest me immensely.

After the sunrise on the cliff, the tourists would get in their jeeps and have locals drive them to the base of Bromo.  Some walked through the sand for the twenty minutes it took to get to the right volcano but others took horse rides.

There was one set of steps going up the mountain so only enough room for a single file line up and down.  The wind and blowing sand was wretched at this point and you were subject to the speeds of the people in front of you. Finally when I made it to the top, the surrounding ledge into the volcano was very narrow.  

Looking down into the caldera of the volcano as it hisses steam.

The single file going up and down filled with tourists of all shapes, speeds, and languages.

This lady was amazing. Some of the local Javanese went down into the mouth of the volcano to retrieve the gifts of offerings.  

More Javanese men on the ledge hoarding their stash.

I stayed on the top for not more than ten minutes as the sand in my eyes was unbearable and the push of tourists could have resulted in an easy tumble into a hot magma death.