I wandered lonely as a cloud

Before you begin reading the blog post proper, here's a question for you: How many squares are there on a chessboard? (Hint: a lot more than 64.) The answer is many paragraphs down.

I have only two hard-and-fast appointments during this week off from school: a bar trivia quiz with friends last (Wednesday) night and a follow-up hearing test/doctor visit tomorrow.

Yesterday afternoon around 2:30, I was sick of being in the apartment and convinced myself to leave for Itaewon, even though I'd agreed with my friend Jane to meet her at Phillies Pub by 8:00 to save a table for the 9:00 game. I wanted to walk, I wanted to see things on this first full (very nice) day of spring, and mostly I just wanted to do something. (I'm thinking of a song my mom used to sing to me long ago: "The bear went over the mountain to see what he could see.") In my pack, I had my hash happi coat, patches for the patch lady in Itaewon to sew on it, and books to trade in at What the Book. And I had lots and lots of time.

So I set out on the seven-mile-or-so walk to Itaewon, along the Yangjae Cheon and along the back streets amidn all the kimbap restaurants and convenience stores. After an hour, I'd walked three miles, I was in Gangnam, my knee was starting to twinge, I could already feel the wind off the river I'd need to walk across, and there was the 421 bus to Itaewon, just sitting there with lots of empty seats...

So I got to Itaewon a lot earlier than my ETA, which was already really early. I dropped off my happi and patches and went over to WTB to swap out a Janet Evanovich, a Robert B. Parker, and a Korean for Dummies book, which proved true to its title by teaching no Korean letters whatsoever, for one Dalai Lama.

No, not this one.

 Then I had a coffee and went back to pick up my happi. (Incidentally, I just Google Image-searched for "happi coat + hash" and found five pictures from this blog. Huh.)  By then, I only had 2 3/4 hours till I was supposed to meet Jane. It was time to wander.

I've written about Itaewon several times before, but I don't know if someone who hasn't been there can really picture it. It's just around the corner from the United States' huge Yongsan Army Base. Itaewon features dozens of people selling socks and hats and toys out of motorized kiosks on the streets, about a million bars and restaurants of every cuisine on Earth, innumerable shops selling oversized hip-hop clothing for American soldiers, a bevy of Korean gentlemen who stand in front of their shops (windows adorned with people like Walter Cronkite and US generals shaking their hands) and ask a thousand men a day, "Custom-made suit, sir?", and, on the sidewalk and in the streets, Nigerians and Russians and Turks and Americans and Pakistanis and Poles and Egyptians and even a whole bunch of Koreans.

I'd never really explored "Food Street" behind the monolithic Hamilton Hotel before, but I went in search of Honest Loving Hut, the vegan place I'd heard so much about. I didn't find it. In the lanes on the other side of the main street, I did find Hyundae Sauna ("Korea's Biggest Queer Shelter"), whose door had the repeated close-up motif of what I can only assume from the drawing style is Homer Simpson's Private Area, as well as the most honestly named bar in Asia, "Are You Ready to Drink?"

I wonder as I wander. I was thinking Deep Thoughts and enjoying the sights of Itaewon's back streets and my solitude in the crowd. The sun was lowering in the west but it was still warm enough to have my windbreaker tied around my waist. There is so short a spring here, and an even shorter fall, and they're both beautiful.

Then I started on the half-mile walk to the other great Waegook (foreigner) neighborhood, Haebongchan, home of Phillies Pub, our trivia site. On the way down the main road from Itaewon, you pass the huge, ornate Noksapyeoung subway station...

This is its skylight. Those little dashes are pigeons. It's a big place.

...walk along the interminable, razor-wire-topped wall of the Yongsan Garrison, turn left at the end of the wall by the big kimchi pots...

...and head straight toward Seoul Tower, whose shifting nighttime colors make it quite the sight, up on Mount Namsan.

But you mustn't get transfixed by the tower, because Haebongchan-daero, the street, is narrow and has neither sidewalks nor shoulders. What it does have, though, is haphazardly parked cars on both sides and a steady stream of traffic, much of which is being driven by drunks or, worse, cabbies. Too fast. At dusk, in this case.

After stopping on the main road for some gourmet basil/tomato pizza and exploring another little neighborhood on the slopes of Namsan, I picked my was along Haebongchan-daero to Phillies, where I arrived at 7:15. Phillies is tiny and if I'd met Jane at 8:00 as planned, we never would have gotten a table.

But despite my incessant prattling here about everything I saw, at its heart this post is about solitude. For many hours, I had nothing in particular to do and nobody to talk to. I wandered and felt alone. I don't know if other people feel as I do, or if it's just me being a loner, but for all my life I've many times where I've sought out solitude in the outdoors. The feeling isn't sadness, but it's not happiness either. It's a kind of satisfied loneliness, if that makes any sense, a sort of solace in separateness.

Hmm... separateness, serenity, satisfaction, solitude. The Sound of Silence. Stephen. And my favorite word in our language, solace.

See Robert Frost's "Acquainted With the Night"

Okay. My fifty minutes are up.

Moving on.

I held down the table at Phillies for quite awhile, quietly growling at anyone who looked as if they might want to steal chairs, till my peeps arrived.

 No, not these.

Finally, we were all there: my hashing friends Jane, Martin from Ireland, Emily, and Kat, Jane's friend Ally from Scotland, and me. There are only two big tables at Phillies and a half-dozen little round ones. The big ones housed us and the Team That Comes Every Week and Never, Ever Loses. (That was my folks, Brian, Nancy, Todd, and me, aka Hogwarts, in St. Augustine.) We wished very much to beat them.

We finished second, by one point. That was good for two free pitchers of beer (plus one from when we played a few weeks ago). But the good part...

After each trivia game proper, Phillies asks a bonus question. The pot starts at 100,000 Won and goes up 5,000 in each week in which nobody gets the answer. They had gone 17 weeks without a winner and the pot was now up to $185,000 ($163). The question was the one I asked at the top of this post: how many squares are there on a chessboard? Ally frantically scribbled "64" and ran toward the MC as I screamed, "Ally, come back! Come back!" (I knew very well they weren't giving out 185,000 Won for "64".)

He came back and the two of us figured it out: one 8x8 square, four 7x7 squares (two horizontally times two vertically), nine 6x6s (three horizontally times three vertically), 16 5x5s, 25 4x4s, 36 3x3s, 49 2x2s, 64 1x1s...

The answer is 204. If you got it right, I'll share my winnings with you when you come to Korea to visit me.

Ally tipped the bartender and bought shots for the quizmasters with the winnings, then split the money with me. I got 70,000 Won, or double what I'd spent on the whole day. I grabbed the subway home and got back at 12:30 a.m., coated in cigarette smoke, beer fumes, and glory.

But really this post is about solitude. That's what I'll remember about Wednesday, March 21, 2012. That, and 204.

Naengmyong, maekju, and 10,974 days down the drain

You know that invisible sign I have over my head that reads, "Hasn't been drunk in _____ days"? Yeah, well, reset it... from 10,974 to 4. I had said for thirty years that I hadn't been drunk since my friend George's and my bachelor party... oh, chill, we weren't marrying each other... on May 12, 1979. I guess once every thirty years is okay... isn't it?

On Friday after work, my new friends and colleagues Tony, Chris, Zach, and Lauren (as ordered in the photo below) and I took the bus over to Bundang, the area where the school used to be, and drank and ate. And drank. And drank. And drank. And I could keep going, but I don't want my laptop to run out of pixels. There were gallons of maekju (beer) and shots of soju (aviation fuel mixed with sugar) and baeksaeju (like soju, but gold-colored and with some actual flavor). And there was a lot of food, some of it identifiable, and more laughs (I think I told every off-color joke I've heard since I first understood what the terms in the jokes were talking about-- that would be 1985 or so), and just so much fun. I completely blew away my self-imposed temperance rules and we all had a wonderful time.

The meat issue aside, as I've written before, this is a wonderful way to share a meal. Ninety percent of the food is just out there on the table, communally available, you cook your own food right in front of you (pork and sprouts and hot peppers and onions and cloves of garlic), nobody pours his or her own drinks and nobody's glass goes empty for long. We each had a wonderful little dish of onions soaked in a piquant wasabi juice, and Tony was kind enough to order for me, the veghead, some scrambled-egg soup and something that sounds atrocious but is delicious, naengmyong: ice noodles. Frankly, I thought I'd taken a picture of it for you but apparently my concentration wavered for some reason, as I don't have one. It's a huge bowl with kind of rubbery, thin, greenish-gray noodles, a hardboiled egg, some miscellaneous beanish things, and a lot of ice cubes. Disgusting, right? Actually, against all odds, it's wonderful.

Finally, we were ready to move on and against all odds I managed to stand up. I suggested we all go to a noraebang, a private karaoke parlor, and we had a great hour, fortified with another libation or four, sitting under the little disco ball and belting out Jump and It's My Life and Panama and Born to Run and Sir Duke and, well, the first few bars of I Believe I Can Fly, until I gently remonstrated with Zach for mellowing my harsh, upon which he saw the error of his ways.

Well, by the end of our hour there we were all pretty much quarter past drunk and I was ready to head home, but I had no idea how to get there, and a couple of the guys wanted to go to this other bar where there were pool boards and dart tables... I may have gotten that mixed up, I was pretty far gone... and after that somebody or other had the bright idea of having a pitcher of beer at some seafood restaurant where Tony ordered me a big bowl of watermelon balls and tomato slices floating in skim milk and ice. I'm not kidding. But by this time, for the first time in my life, I was actually full. of. beer. Couldn't take another sip.

We had started at 5:00 and it was 2:15 when finally Tony headed back home and the rest of us oozed into a cab for the long ride home, while Chris and Lauren conked out in the back seat. I'd never before actually watched any of my colleagues sleep together; is Penthouse Forum still in business?

At any rate, I'd had more booze than I usually ingest in five years, but my stopping drinking at the seafood restaurant, the long ride home, and my natural resistance to all kinds of moral turpitude allowed me to go to bed nearly sober and wake up without a hangover. The Age of Miracles is not over.

...by my count I need to not get drunk again until February, 2040 in order to beat my old record.

--
On Saturday afternoon, Zach, Tony, Chris and I went to a expat pub/restaurant, Gecko's, in Itaewon, the notorious foreign bed of iniquity. The place was flowing with buzz-cut young American soldiers and testosterone, but I was temporarily in gastronomic heaven to find that they had veggie burgers on the menu! I say "temporarily" because the burger turned out to be one of those beige monstrosities with grains freckling its surface, not a nice juicy fake hamburger as God intended. But it came with lettuce, tomato, onion, and ketchup, so it'll do.

I also had one beer. One. Then I headed back home via subway while the guys went out for more liquid refreshment.
--
For Sunday, I'd asked around about who wanted to go to the ballgame between the two teams that share Jamsil Stadium, the Doosan Bears (huzzah!) and the LG Twins (meh.) Tony, Nikki, and Chris said sure, they'd go, but didn't. Lauren said she'd love to but couldn't, but did.

It was her first time at a Korean game, and it's fun to go with a newbie. I've posted quite often about the spectacle of Korean games, so I won't, but a KBO virgin is always wide-eyed and grinning,.at the noise, the enthusiasm, the sheer energy of the crowd.

I will say, though, that the games at Jamsil, which is so much bigger and louder than the ballpark in Daegu, are exhausting. KBO games tend to run really long, with a lot of time between pitches and a lot of full counts, and it isn't the 25,000 people constantly chanting and singing and thwapping thundersticks that wears you down, it's the little kid right behind you. We left in the fifth inning, with our newly beloved Bears up 5-0; We taxied home, I stopped at E-Mart, went back to school for a half hour, walked home, and the game was still on; I got home just in time to see the Twins win the game in the bottom of the ninth. Four and a quarter hours for a nine-inning game.

I had a Coke.