Part 2

On exiting customs and entering the arrivals hall, I noticed some familiar faces scattered about and others I did not recognize but who looked around shiftily, assessing the group of students huddled together and all wearing the same white t-shirt that we had been instructed to identify and follow.  Our group became more well-defined as we shuffled forward, but to an outsider the only thing it seemed that we all had in common was that we were not Korean.  Thankfully, the conference organizers had arranged for a few coaches to leave Incheon and take us the three hours to our hotel’s doorstep, and there was no worry about subway tickets, catching trains, and transferring buses, and we were led to the curb where one student placed our luggage in the undercarriage, another checked off the name written on the sheet immediately above a pointed finger, and we stepped on to find a seat.  The exterior had been unassuming, it was just a bus, but the inside was identical in nearly every way to the one in which PSY jumped, wriggled, and thrusted while singing “Gangam Style,” with technicolor overhead lighting, quilted antimacassars thrown over the leather seats, and embroidered window draperies embellished with tassels.  Only the disco ball and the Korean grannies, dancing uninhibitedly in the background, were missing.

The rest stop’s oasis was a long, squat building, filled to bursting with food stalls, shops, and cafés set beneath a restaurant on the upper floor, with illuminated neon signage for those that were open.  The day, as marked by the sunlight scattered red through the horizon’s smog, was quickly becoming short, so few people were out and the half-full lot dripped cars back to the highway, set off on the final legs of their journeys.  Korea is serious about driver attention and now our coach, just over an hour on, was required to pause for about 20 minutes, allowing us passengers our first deboarded glimpses of the country.  I had simply stared agape through my window for the length of the drive thus far, watching the incessant march of the skinny, nearly-identical 40-odd story apartments that was only rarely broken by construction cranes and even taller unfinished structures, and here walked by the storefronts but only took a few pictures while attempting to divine a deeper meaning in the English names, like “Angel-in-us Coffee” and its ubiquitous winged theme.  The lot was bordered by a cyclone fence and behind that any view was mostly obstructed by a berm, but the hill fell away near the oasis and a small tear had formed in the green windbreak privacy screen.  A rural scene peeked through, hazy mountains in the distance, scooters crisscrossing the narrow gravel roads, and then directly below was a rice field, some shoots just emerging from the pierced black plastic, but not yet flooded for summer.

The profile of a cross atop the Baptist Church glowed a stark blood-red against the night’s blackness from out my hotel room window and over the street, the highest floor of a multi-use building, set above a bank, a home store, and a few restaurants on the ground floor.  Though my hotel was no high-rise and I slept on the third floor, the beige box set in the corner was troubling should an evacuation be required during my week’s stay.  Rather than lock the elevators and run down the stairs, and thinking back I can’t even remember that there were stairs, you were supposed to open the window, latch a cable onto the convenient hook, harness into a life line, then rappel to the sidewalk from the outside of the hotel.  The instructions on the box were written in both Korean and stilted English, but the illustrated instructions, vaguely reminiscent of assembling Scandinavian furniture and complete with a person setting the belay symbolized by an oval floating above a rectangle with ramrod arms but amputated of legs, was the most disturbing outcome of an impending disaster.  Moving on to set my toiletries on the shelf above the sink, I noticed that the shampoo was the same brand as my cell phone and the washing machine in my apartment back home, all produced by one of the four largest chaebol that control almost every aspect of Korean life.

North a block, past a clutch of serial-addressed high-rise apartments, rose a long, stretched ridge, densely blanketed with second-growth pines.  Though an hour before buffet breakfast was offered, the sun had long since crested the horizon and warmed the air into a weighty haze stuck to the contours of the Earth and limiting vision to a few hundred yards.  I was far from alone on the trail that cut straight uphill, joining a well-spaced line of walkers, each geared up in bright pastel synthetics, heavy-soled boots, and bearing at least one hiking pole, but all my seniors by about four or five decades.  Though only a cleared dirt path through the thick underbrush that filtered out any of the sounds of the city waking up, street lamps were placed so regularly that in straight legs, you could see up to four that bounded the trail as it slalomed through.  Up here was a small cemetery, a handful of headstones and monuments terraced into the slope at a small clearing, and I continued, passing Hangul signage marked by distances and arrows that I could not understand, but noted as a waypoint for my trek back.  When the trail descended again, the scenery changed too, now a ferris wheel dominated the sky through the open canopy and once the trees on my left were replaced by the loop-the-loop of a roller coaster and the damp hem of my shirt no longer swayed with my stride, I turned around.

Set at the side wall in the grand meeting room, two story high ceilings and mostly vacant circular tables filling the floor, an almost exclusively Western and further American breakfast was offered in the warming plates.  Actually, the juxtaposition of familiar, wet, limp scrambled eggs, soggy, undersalted tater tots, yet crisp and brittle bacon rashers, with traditional Korean, mounds of kimchi drenched in fermented chilis and chopsticks as the only cutlery, was perhaps the most authentic way to enjoy the meal.  Though I could hardly claim being adept with any chopsticks, the standard Korean issue was another challenge, solid metal and tapered flat like a screwdriver, it took practice over a few mornings to find balance and cradle, and not slice, each bite.  Though nothing special, the kimchi saved the meal, like dousing a plate from a truck stop with Tabasco to render it edible, and I took up a piece of Napa cabbage with each tot or egg curd between the bits of conversation that had landed on me as it danced around the circle.  Later in the week, one of the local organizers noticed my original approach and said that most Koreans don’t even each kimchi every morning.