Pressing Boundaries (Daniel)

     The next morning we woke up with the sunrise. This is no small feat in Korea, which, like Japan, does not use daylight-saving time. Already, the sun had been rising soon after 5:00 in the morning and I had been told that by summer it can rise as early as 3:30 in Japan. (Sarah and I were blessed with an apartment already furnished with long, thick curtains).

     Outside the streets were barren. We didn't see another person for several minutes. The weather was cold, and the red streaks of morning light were still fading. We stopped at a McDonald's for breakfast (Stomach -3 points). We walked quiet and tired, eating our Egg Mcmuffins. At about 6:30 I could finally feel some warmth from the sun. I was not the only one.

     As we approached one of Seoul's more centralized we began to notice the waking homeless population. We passed a group of three homeless men starting off their early morning drinking, smoking, and playing dice. They were sitting only fifty feet from a small ground story building into which dozens of homeless and impoverished people were cramming into for day labor. We passed several day labor centers. It was the first sign of how vastly different Korea really is from Japan.

     There are certainly homeless in Japan. Admittedly, this surprised me at first because I'd heard so little about issues like poverty, unemployment, mental illness, and drug addiction in Japan. Well, rest assured, these things are very real in Japan. But you just don't see them that often. Whether homelessness and its root causes are as prevalent in Japan as they are in the USA, I cannot say. I do know that Osaka is twice as densely populated as San Francisco and yet I see a homeless Osakan less than once a week, if even that.  When I do, they are usually curled up, asleep in some hidden corner of a train station. The only time I have seen begging was when a man approached me quietly and somberly, whispering his words.

     We were headed for Camp Kim, an old USO camp that led bus tours to the demilitarized zone between the South and North Korea. It turned out to be a single-story facility sitting with dusty windows and dull beige paint that hasn't been reapplied since the Korean War. It sits beside some withering shrubbery in the middle of modestly-sized parking lot. Had it not been for the walling around the complex and a giant USO sign I think we might have mistook it for a YMCA and kept on walking.

"Come for our restroom, stay because the gates are only opened on the half hour."

     We waited for our tour bus inside Camp Kim's lobby. It felt like the crowded front office of a Motel 6. Only there were no stale sweet rolls and gut-rot coffee. But there was a large crowd of arriving tourists and they were overwhelmingly American.

     This felt strange but familiar too me. Like Mowgli at the end of The Jungle Book, gazing upon other humans for the first time. I had grown accustomed to quiet reservation of the Japanese. I have come to enjoy hearing nothing but the constant stream of a language I don't understand. I find that I can choose to let it be soothing, like a continuous stream of white noise. Or when I want, I can watch the speakers for body language and listen to their tones and construct my accounts of their conversation. I enjoy projecting paranoia onto the wait staff at restaurants, as they look out upon their guests and quietly discuss which one might be the food critic that blasted their restaurant in the paper and which of that critic's dishes would be best to turn into "a spitter". Other times I see a young train attendant stop to politely remind a pretty girl of the train's cellphone restrictions, but I can hear that what he is really asking for is a single moment of her attention with a long shot hope that maybe, somehow, this could lead to something real.

     In Camp Kim's lobby, all I heard was loudly spoken English. I heard couples arguing about plans later that day. I heard a child, rather eloquently, trying to persuade his parents that their was still time to correct their folly and leave for the Gangnam amusement park. But mostly I heard listless complaints simply meant to fill up conversation like "Jeez, where could that bus be?" and "you'd think they'd have enough seats in this room for a full bus-load of people" and "I'll bet the bus doesn't even have a toilet, if I piss my pants it's gonna be everyone's problem." The last one was me. Luckily I was able to hold my bladder during our two hour bus ride to the DMZ.

      Our tour guide on the bus was a bubbly Korean girl, not much older than twenty, who barely had enough English skills to help someone find a supermarket. Despite this, her enthusiasm kept people engaged enough to listen as she tried to explain that the free way has military outposts every one hundred yards because spies from North Korea SCUBA all the way down the parallel, climb out of the river, and dart across the free way to escape into South Korean cities.

"I swear guys, I'm just holding onto this snorkel mask for a friend."

         It was already hard enough to understand. But some rude mid-Westerner, sitting one seat behind me, felt it was his patriotic duty to lecture the nearest stranger on the all the ways he could think of in which Barack Obama was using the U.S. Constitution to wipe his ass. This man, who for the rest of this story will be referred to by the alias of "Sergeant Dick-Cheese", did not seem to mind that this nearest stranger was a Korean man who also spoke very little English. Nor did he care that this poor Korean man, who was trapped in the window seat by Sgt. Dick-Cheese, was frantically glancing around the bus, as if he were either counting the number of stink-eyes they were getting or simply looking for any other available seat. All Sgt. Dick-Cheese seemed to notice was that periodically this man would shrug and nod in passive agreement, while wiping sweat from his forehead and gulping audibly.

(This post ended rather abruptly. But I we're going to Nara in the morning to see the temple and pet the docile, wild deer, and Sarah says I should sleep. The next post should conclude the rest of DMZ experience and hopefully the rest of the Korea trip. I'm finding I have more things to write about than I have time to write.)