the amazing race (The Wig)

Man, I’m tired. So it’s 11:14pm on Sunday night, and I really ought to just be hitting the sack right now, since I need to get up much earlier tomorrow than usual, but I haven’t blogged since Thursday or Friday and I’m in the mood. This weekend…

Friday morning I woke up at my usual time (around 7am) for family breakfast, then spent an hour or so online before going jogging. The jog was really sucky, and I ended up walking the last ten minutes or so (which out of thirty is quite a bit), because I just couldn’t hit my stride at all and was miserable. Saturday was one of my two off days for jogging, but I went on my slightly-longer (forty-five minutes) jog tonight and it was really great. I don’t know why I can’t get into running during the day, whether it’s entirely mental or not, but I may give up trying to run in the mornings and just stick to nights. Things have cooled off a bit recently, so it has nothing to do with the temperature. I’m not sure what it is. Anyway, today marks two weeks on the jogging schedule, and I’m really happy to be able to say I’ve stuck with it this long. I still can’t see much difference in the mirror, but my jeans fit better today than they have at any time in Korea, which was a good feeling.

So after showering, I jumped on the bus (with minimal confusion) to the Gwangju terminal. I arrived an hour or so before I was meeting Tim, but I wanted to browse the enormous bookstore in the terminal anyway, which I did. I bought another Korean textbook and spent forty-five minutes studying, which was a good feeling. Tim and I found out we needed to go to Jeonju first, then catch another bus to Nonsan, so we started the voyage with baked goods and then hopped on our bus. From that point on, it became a non-romantic comedy that wasn’t terribly funny to me, one of the main characters. Although in retrospect it’s much more humorous. We got to Jeonju, which has not one, but two bus terminals, and discovered that the next bus didn’t leave for something like two hours. So we consulted the tourist information lady (and by we, I mean Tim), who informed us of our many other options, one of which included taking a taxi to a nearby town where we could take an earlier train to Nonsan. She mentioned that we’d need to hurry, but once we got into the taxi, we discovered that she had clearly understated. The taxi driver, who was insane, kept shouting the time at us, and then the time that the train was leaving, and expressing, in Korean, the impossibility of our making the train. It didn’t stop him from driving like a maniac in a desperate attempt to get us there. This included not only honking constantly at anything in his way and banging his fist on the console whenever he was forced to slow below 60, but also turning on his emergency flashers and driving through a red light, a maneuver I had previously believed was reserved only for mothers in labor. My mistake.

Tim and I just held on for dear life, and commented that it felt a bit like the Amazing Race, or a bad b-movie. To allay (or at least distract us from) our fears of mortality, we cast each other in the aforementioned movie. I’m disgusted to say that I’ll be played by Kelly Clarkson, who is engaging in a foreign tryst with none other than Johnny Depp. Needless to say, we didn’t make the earlier train. So we waited an hour in the Iksan train station, which was relatively nice, and then finally got underway to Nonsan.

Upon arriving in Nonsan we were picked up by Amy’s co-teacher, who perplexingly intended to spend the evening with us. Now, she seems like a nice lady, but we only had one night and half day to catch up, and it was just awkward with this lady driving us around and sitting there. We went to a Pizza Date and had a delicious vegetable pie, then were kinda just driving around when we saw a DVD bang, which we expressed our passionate desire to visit. But Amy’s co-teacher either didn’t understand or pretended not to, and instead took us to a Buddhist temple. I’m not averse to sightseeing (yes I am), but it’s just not why I came to Nonsan, so I was vaguely annoyed. Finally the co-teacher expressed a desire to go home and then passionately opined that Tim and I ought not to stay in a hotel, but should instead stay at Amy’s homestay. Now, I’d intended to stay at her homestay when Tim wasn’t coming, but Amy’s family was a bit leery about putting up a weird male American (apparently), so we just decided to stay in a hotel, which Mrs. Korean Teacher was shocked and appalled by. After much bellyaching on her part, and lying on ours, we convinced her to drop us off near Amy’s apartment, and found a hotel. The reason she didn’t want us to stay there, to be clear, was because she was incredulous at the prospect of an unmarried opposite-sex pair of people sharing a hotel room. Gasp.

The hotel was a little… seedy. I’m not going to describe it in detail, because it would only worry you unnecessarily (since I’ve clearly survived to tell the tale). I never felt even remotely unsafe, probably because of Tim’s man-strength (ha!), but it was just weird. Korean people, apparently, don’t stay in hotels. They stay at the weird naked saunas where people sleep on the floor. Apparently the only people who use hotels are foreigners and couples who want to have sex. And, at least on Friday night, foreign pairs who don’t want to have sex.

It was a very restful night, and I had a great shower. We met Amy the next morning at Paris Baguette, where I had a delicious cheese Panini. Saturday was, in fact, the first really amazingly nice day I’ve had in Korea, weather-wise. It was cool, but not uncomfortably so at all, and sunny and beautiful. After breakfast we took a cab across town to the DVD bang we’d spotted, only to discover that the movies (apparently) didn’t have English subtitles. (We’re dubious.) Not to be dismayed, we instead found a coffee shop and I enjoyed my first Korean Dr. Pepper. After that, we headed back to Amy’s homestay apartment and were awkwardly served pizza that was probably ordered for the family, but alas. In an experience that I feel really sums up the weekend, we asked Amy’s host brother if he knew of any DVD bangs nearby. He didn’t, but instead proceeded to hook his laptop up to the big screen television (lucky bitch!) and offer to play us movies he was (presumably) illegally acquiring from the internet. The Korean movies, however, lacked subtitles, so we were offered the amazing selection of Click, Mr. Bean’s Vacation, and Get Rich or Die Trying (Live Free or Die Hard 4). At that point, I advocated ritual suicide by falling on our scimitars, but instead we actually watched Die Hard 4, which was every bit as bad as you can imagine, and so much more. “That’ll wake the neighbors.”

We had to leave something like 10 minutes before the end, devastatingly, to catch our bus, which we did successfully. I’m assuming that the Bruce Willis Administration succeeds where the FBI and NSA failed, and saved America. It was really nice to see Amy again, and I’m glad now that I (theoretically) know how to get to Nonsan, so I can visit again. Hopefully she’ll be coming to our neck of the woods for Chuseok. Tim and I again had a layover, this time in Jeonju, so we did what anyone would do for an hour—bought five bottles of soju and got drunk outside of the nearby Super.

Just kidding. We bought cola and ice cream and drank it outside the convenience store, and it was just as refreshingly delicious. After just one more seemingly interminable bus ride, we were home. Tim and I had some pretty interesting conversations during our travels, the most interesting of which being a discussion about friendship and its inevitable replaceability. After a less-than-remarkable sandwich from the Gwangju bus terminal Dunkin Donuts, I got on my bus to Naju and rolled back into town. I’d planned to meet Meghan for DVD bang, so I went straight from the bus station there. We’d planned to watch a particular horror movie, but I couldn’t remember the title, and the guy didn’t remember it either, so instead we chose a different horror movie that looked like it was going to be life-alteringly bad.

It… wasn’t, I guess. The movie was called The Wig, and was unsurprisingly inscrutable, like most Korean horror movies I’ve seen. I’m willing to concede that I may just be too dumb for them, but I’m skeptical. The Wig is about two twentysomething sisters, one of whom is dying of leukemia (the younger one). The older one buys her dying (and now bald) sister a wig, which we later find out, in the big plot twist, was made by some shady person out of dead people’s hair. And one particular dead person was the gay-lover of the older sister’s ex-boyfriend, dead by suicide. The lover, that is, not the ex-boyfriend. So anyway, the big big twist is that the younger sister, because of the wig, is being possessed by said gay lover, and thus is awkwardly hitting on her older sister’s ex-boyfriend, in such a way that is bound to upset older sister. Oh yeah, did I mention the older sister is mute from a horrific on-screen car accident? No? That’s because it was totally unnecessary. Anyway, the end is shocking, I guess, but the fact that I didn’t really know what was going on had a negative impact on its overall scariness. There were some horrifying scenes that caused me to close my eyes, but the real freak-out factor was limited by my almost perpetual confusion. It gets 3.5 out of 5 Bs though, solely for the unexpected gay relationship in the last 20 minutes.

After that, I think I just went to bed. Today was a spectacularly productive day, if I do say so myself. I made a really long list of things to do this morning, and then proceeded to actually do most of them, because I was on task almost all day. I did a lot of lesson planning, such that I already feel mostly prepared for tomorrow, other than a few things I have to do at school. I took my younger siblings to DVD bang as well, as I’d promised earlier, and we watched Shrek 3. I was a bit perplexed, because as you don’t know, there are only 3 kids movies on display in the DVD bang, and they are very curiously located in the corner of the porno wall. But Alan spotted Shrek on the front counter and I was relieved. It was actually hysterical, as those movies tend to be, and I’m sure I enjoyed it way more than the kids, although they had a good time. And as I already mentioned, I had a fabulous jog and am now clean shaven and squeaky clean, and my eyes are shutting involuntarily. What a nice feeling. Now it’s 11:45, and I need to get up at 7, so good night!

Take care. :)