Below The 38th Parallel Archives
Twenty eight
11:03 am | 0 | Blog | Below The 38th Parallel
My house is empty. The dog is with doggie friends, husband is millions of miles away. It’s hard sometimes to sleep when it’s like this, even harder when I am excited about something.
I will be spending my birthday tonight on the banks of the Guadalupe River, figuring out how to attach my digi-cam to the handlebars of my scooter so I can capture the Texas Hill Country scenery as it passes by during tomorrow’s ride.
Yesterday during a bizarre spring-y rainstorm I looked at the umbrella I bought in Seoul, the one that reminds me of a Magritte painting, and had a very strange feeling.
I looked at this umbrella in my hand, and for a split second I felt a fondness and nostalgia for the monsoon season in Korea, for waking up in the mornings and watching the fog rise over the bay and walking everywhere with a umbrella in my hand, the smell of humidity in the air before the stifling heat of summer.
It’s the first time I’ve felt any kind of longing for Korea since we got home. And as soon as I realized what it was, it was gone.
So long, Korea
2:27 pm | 6 | Video | Below The 38th Parallel
So long, Korea from Brittanie on Vimeo.
More info on san nag-jik.
Gipfelschnaps and grass snakes
9:29 pm | 0 | Uncategorized | Below The 38th Parallel, El Perro
This is the start of the third fall in a row I have lived in this apartment in Korea. It’s still warm during the days but it’s now cool enough to leave the windows open at night. The past few weeks have been gray and rainy, which gives the air a misty sea-breeze feeling I’ll miss when I move back to Houston. And the smell — the smell that emanates and originates from somewhere in this building, drifting with the breeze outside and through my open window in the evenings now. I have never figured out who it is, but someone in this apartment smokes cigars, and he is heralding the fall for me as he has done the two years previously.
It’s made me a little lovesick, actually, because there’s almost nothing better than Christopher’s winter beard, cold from standing on the roof where he goes to smoke his nightly pipe, and which I bury my face into and absorb the smell. One week down, two weeks to go.
Jirisan was a beautiful as usual and for the second year in a row we had banner weather. Last year I hiked the highest peak, starting at 600 meters and ending at 1900. It took about 9 hours round-trip and, having done it once, I didn’t feel the need to do it again. This year I hiked to a lower peak, Banyabong , about 1700 meters, but starting at 1100 meters. It took right at 5 hours, including a break during which I ate lunch and had my gipfelschnaps, which was actually rum, not schnapps.
Sunday I visited a nearby temple, Hwaomsa. This was by far the largest and most spectacular temple I’ve seen in my time here. It was also one of the most bustling. The complex was made up of several smaller buildings, and inside of each were monks and meditators chanting and banging their hypnotic, regular beat. You could stand in the middle of the grounds and hear several different beats at a time, intersecting and reverberating off the hills that flank the temple. Or you could walk up to each building and listen more closely, the sound of one chant drowning out all the rest. At one point, I approached a small room in the corner of the complex and stood, transfixed for several minutes, while listening to the monk inside chant and beat, chant and beat. I left feeling quite moved.
On our walk through the park this afternoon Gus and I found a tiny, slender snake, the same color of dead grass. Gus snuffled it and scared it into a defensive coil, and it sat there, tiny and pathetic compared to the two of us, and shook its rattle-less tail at us. I managed to drag Gus away and hopefully left the little bugger in peace.
I think Gus was nipped or bitten by it though, because as we walked back to the building he began to sneeze in the way you do when you bonk your nose, and there was drool swinging from his jowls. The snake was so small I assumed it was harmless, and Gus has been acting normal (well, normal for him) since then, although he now has a small red spot on his snout. Boy scout he is not. Silly dog.
If I was…
9:11 pm | 2 | Uncategorized | Below The 38th Parallel
in Houston, I’d be camping in a friend’s backyard and swimming in Clear Lake even though it’s the almost winter.
But I’m in Korea instead, and so tomorrow I’m going to hike Jiri Mountain. Again.
Widowed to the Sea
12:47 am | 0 | Uncategorized | Below The 38th Parallel, The Man
The best and worst thing about our cracker-box apartment is the living room window — literally a bay window — which looks out onto the East Sea. On a good day, if I get up early enough, I can watch the sun rise over the crescent of land just southeast of our little town. On a good night, I find the lights of the ships in the yard and the flash of welders working the third shift oddly beautiful, like the Christmas Trees of my youth.
On a bad day I’m bitter at how human intervention has ruined the natural beauty of one of Korea’s most beautiful places. On a day like today, I can watch from my couch as ships, rigs and submarines, sometimes belonging to multinational companies, sometimes belonging to the military, perform their slow dance in and out of the docks and folds of the quay.
Today, my husband was on one of those ships. He left before the sun was up this morning and it could be a month before I get to see him again.
A part of me is glad he’s finally sailed out. The project is finished and as soon as he gets back from Singapore we can begin to make plans to move home and start the next phase of our life. But a part of me feels lonely and sad and restless. By tomorrow he’ll be hundreds of miles away at sea, and I’ll wake up in our bed alone, with no way to get in touch with him and no idea of when he’ll be home.
And this trip to sea is just the beginning — this marks the first goodbye in a series of goodbyes that I’m not quite prepared for yet, the first of many month-long trips away from me after the two of us have spent nearly every moment we’ve lived in Korea with only each other to depend on. I look forward to the time off he’ll have every other month, but I’m not looking forward to the cold hard fact that next year we’ll really only be together for a total of six months.
At first I didn’t think there would be tears. I though, “I better get used to this,” but as we kissed goodbye this morning he held me for a little bit longer than I expected. I’ve done this before. It was just a long time ago, and since then the two of us have really come to reply on each other in more ways than I can explain without sounding clingy and lonely. It would be so different if we were in Houston, where I have friends and plans and distractions to keep me busy each day. It would be different if I wasn’t such an outsider here, if I wasn’t so sick of small town life and desperate for home and a return to normalcy anyway. It would be different if there was some concrete schedule, some calendar on the wall where I could X out the days. But for now I have to find ways to keep myself distracted and find solace in the fact that soon, soon, we’ll be packing our boxes and I might very well miss this place when that time comes.
It’s funny, I had this silly little idea in my head that I might stand on the dock and wave him goodbye with a my handkerchief in my hand. Instead, I sat in the living room and looked out the window every few minutes until finally, nine hours after we first said goodbye, the tugboats lined up to pull him past the breakwater and around the peninsula where the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
Bad bad bad bad day
10:44 am | 4 | Uncategorized | Below The 38th Parallel
I did not pass my test.
About that big test I took this weekend
10:11 pm | 1 | Uncategorized | Below The 38th Parallel
The leg is the longest and strongest weapon a martial artist has.
I won’t know for about two weeks or so whether or not I passed, and I still have to break my five boards, but I think I did pretty well. The gory details are inside.
(more…)
Seoul survivor
3:03 pm | Comments Off | Blog | Below The 38th Parallel, Conversations
A couple of days ago Lance sent me this e-mail:
Subject: license to il..
n. korea has the bomb now, yikes! dont forget to pack your sunglasses and geiger counter. i got you a going away gift as well…”How to Survive In a Postapocalyptic Wasteland for Dummies
When I didn’t respond, he sent me a second e-mail:
Subject: Re: Death of a Playwright
want to meet up for lunch tomorrow or sunday? did you hear about n korea? THEM NIGGAS GOT THA BOMB BITCH! THAH-MUTHAFUKKIN-BOMB! scary
This same friend, my dear Lance, also called me at work the other day to find out when C and I were going to be leaving for South Korea. All panicky, as if we weren’t going to tell him.
“This sucks,” he said. “When you and C move to Korea, that means half of all my friends will live in Korea.”
We likely won’t officially move until summer, and then we’ll be gone for three years. But suddenly all of our usually flaky friends want to spend as much time with us as possible.
I was talking to my Mom the other day and she started crying uncontrollably. “I don’t want you to go,” she sobbed.
“But why, Mom? I’m happy. Don’t you want me to be happy?”
“Yeehehehesss,” she replied. “But you’ll – be – so – far – away – from – mehehe.”
Two years ago, after years of false starts, I finally moved out of Oklahoma. Moving to Houston was the best decision I have ever made — not because Houston is that great of a place or because Oklahoma is that horrible, but because I am in a better place. People always say you can’t run from your problems, but I did it and it worked pretty good for me.
I marvel at how much happier I am here. I had gone through a series of devastating relationships, all my friends had moved away, and I felt like college had been the peak of my life, the top of my performance, and there was no place to go but down. You can only be an overachiever for so long before it gets old.
When I moved to Houston, my mom was not very happy. I did so desperately, with very little planning and only $500 in my pocket, a car full of clothes, and a Boston terrier.
The best decision ever. Almost immediately I made some wonderful friends whom I love dearly. I only wish I would have known before how easy it was going to be to transplant myself, because I would have done it much, much earlier.
Now I am planning to leave all this too.
My Mom and Grandma call randomly. They don’t really have anything to say to me, they just want to know if I know when we’re leaving yet.
And our poor friends. They act as though C is just going to steal me away under cover of night, whisking me off to Korea, where I’ll live as his kept woman, writing my memoirs and eating kimchi.
Which I will. But don’t worry. We won’t leave without letting you throw us a going-away party first.