Some things are cultural differences:

On first glance Korea is very cautious about spreading dirt and germs. Face masks keep those with mild colds from polluting the air with their illness. We wear indoor shoes and outdoor shoes– not the same thing. Swine flu sent everyone into a hand washing frenzy.

Nevertheless, Korea is a friend of the germs.

During swine flu mania every child had their temperature taken before entering the school with the same thermometer. In one ear then out and then in the next kid’s ear. Sweet ear wax.

Smell the chlorine in the bathhouse? Nope. I love the bathhouses, but I’m not going to pretend that bathing with strangers in very weakly chlorinated pools is sanitary.

After getting off a machine at the gym exercisers do NOT clean them. The salty remnants of my sweat are not cleaned off until the end of the day.

If I don’t have my own indoor shoes I use the communal ones and in the summer no one uses socks.

and there is more…

But mostly it is the same things I would struggle with at home:

My apartment is small but at night I can’t heat it to a comfortable temperature. I have three blankets, a heater, and an electric mattress pad. Around 3 am every night I wake up pouring sweat, turn off all heating devices or turn them down and go back to sleep to wake up at 8 freezing. This is a combination of pour body circulation and pour apartment building insulation.

Secondly, who makes itunes Genius music genres? The new itunes makes mixes supposedly to fit my taste, but of course I’m going to like them because it’s my music. Every time I turn on itunes I am provided with 9 genius mixes. All with different names: americana, adult alternative rock mix, lo fi mix, alt. singer/songwriter, etc. First, who decides the names for these categories? Next, most of my music is similar so why is Feist in alt. singer/songwriter not in indie? Is Train in adult alternative because they are from the 90s? What is lo fi? Why is Bon Iver Americana?

These are the things I think about when I am packing up my apartment.

I walked through the waiting room (with about 20 peeps a waiting), shot jimmy a look who was deeply immersed in his Steven King novel, peed in my cup, then walked back through the full waiting room, then was told to wait for a minute in the room with my full cup of steaming pee.
The pee test took about 5 minutes.
“severe infection. You 3 somemedicalwordIdidn’tunderstand points bad,” said the doctor. “Ok see you wednesday!”(severe seems too severe of prognosis.)

I paid my 3,000 won (a little less than 3 bucks) co-pay after using my med card given to me through the gov and then went down stair s  to pick up my meds. The antibiotics for 3 days cost 4,000 won.
Before every meal I eat a gel package that tastes like tooth paste. Then I open and swallow an individually wrapped package of four pills.
On wednesday the doctor hit my kidneys again.
Gave me another prescription for gel and pills then said…
“see you saturday!”
Why is this the gauntlet of medical service? Why can’t I get my minty gel and pills all at once?

Love motels range anywhere from clean spacious modern rooms to small dingy cells with prostitute fliers outside the door. Our last room was the later and ironically the most expensive because it was in Seoul.

Most travelers when looking for a motel for the night look for a motel/hotel that looks clean, cute, new, friendly, all of the above. But when I decided to journey around the lower half of Korea I was looking for the skeeziest looking accommodations.
Buildings with peeling paint and burned out neon lighting won my business over any well groomed establishment. Why?
because I am cheap. And a cheapy love motel goes for 25,000 to 30,000 won a night. Split that between 2 to 4 people and I have a mega steal.
At love motels you can either buy a night or just a few hours in which to hanky panky. When entering love motels you are often met with shady couples dodging in and out of the shadows on their way to turn in the room key after a mid afternoon rendezvous. A few are young couples that still live with their parents ( most Koreans do until married). Much more likely I will see some fancy suit dude and his mistress.
Most love motels will only allow heterosexual couples to stay. So the game plan was that Jimmy and I would get a room then text to Tessah the room number. She would wait a minute and then mission-impossible-style sneak up to the room.
Korea loves technology. There are flat screens on buses, in taxis, at bus stations as well as state of the art security cameras that see every corner of even the dirtiest love motel.
So I don’t think we were fooling anyone with our three person rooms. In Yeseo Jimmy and I took extra blankets to only find out from the miffed motel owner that the blanket closet was also hooked up to a camera and sensor.

After giving up on the slow 12 hour boat ride that would drop us off at Jeju, we quickly found a place to eat and then nabbed seats on the 1127 on the way back from Busan ( we had to stand on our way out of Ulsan.) “No more bad things will happen,” I said. But all bad things happen in threes: traffic and ferry closure only makes 2.
We got off the bus in Ulsan and Jimmy turns to me and says “where’s your backpack?”
My backpack with my PASSPORT.
A friend of a friend who speaks korean called the police who tracked it down after first saying that my chances were slim of ever getting backpack back. Jimmy and I take a bus downtown, one taxi that takes us to a closed police station, then another one that finally takes us there.
At first the police didn’t know what I was saying, but after some excellent miming we were asked to wait a minute and drink some tea while the oldest police officer in the room smiled at us.
Today I wanted to show Jimmy a temple. We waited a 1/2 hour for the 1723 to come and it never did so we took the 1703 to Eonyang where we waited for the 1723 for another 30 minutes, which in turn did not take us to the temple.

Although this is not at the Phoebus Mobis basketball game it similar to the great violation that happened on the mega screen. At the basketball game we were put on the Kiss cam. I leaned in for a peck and Jimmy licked my face in front of 400 people. I subsequently hit him the face. Long story short they didnt know how to react to this weird meegook display and they gave us free ferry tickets to Jeju island.

However, it is true that North Korea and South Korea could break their cease fire at anytime. The country that is starving (there’s more, but I don’t know much more) and the country that loves dominatrics-like boots, plastic surgery, freedom of religion and kim chee could be thrust back into full out war at anytime.  The last skirmish, about 5 soldiers died, occurred a few decades ago and it could happen, then escalate. An underground tunnel from North Korea to about 30 miles outside of Seoul was discovered in 2003.  So Kim hasn’t given it a rest yet.

North Korea owns the world’s biggest flag: weighing in at 600lbs. Surrounding this high flyer just on the other side of the DMZ sits several two dimensional mansions, perhaps to lure South Koreans in, but I don’t think anyone believes it’s the life over in the North. The average citizen makes about $30 USD a month ( after taxation and redistribution). It is hard to say how far that would go in North Korea, but regardless it does not provide much.  Hennessy reported that Kim Jong-Il was their biggest purchaser in 1993 and 1994. It is estimated that he buys $750,000 annually. So… Kim’s liquor budget equals the yearly income of 83 North Koreans.

One thing North and South Korea can come together on is cheap labor. A giant factory complex was built by South Koreans and run by South Korean bosses who are bussed in each day. 95% of the labor is provided by North Korea. The factory makes everything from shoes to pans. Most of the goods are bussed back into South Korea, where they are probably sold for the monthly salary of the person who made the garment or cooking utensil.

Don’t let them near your leg hair (The fish not the fairies. As I said I’m not sure about the fairies).

Wearing temple garb ( grey genie pants and shirt with fancy knot buttons) staring at wall paintings our translator described enlightenment as a clear pond. A person can immediately see a drop of red dye in crystal water. However, a drop of red dye in dirty water disappears. Likewise, an unhappy mind cannot quickly identify the root of unhappiness, anger, and greed. However, a happy enlightened mind can swiftly see the cause of negative thoughts and stop them. Buddhists believe that unhappy thoughts are not real, but shadows that our mind produce, that only we can stop.

Buddhists seek happiness. The head Monk of the Beomeosa Temple said that many people chase rainbows their whole life. They look for money, love, and fame to make them happy. But when they come to the end of their rainbow, the end of their lives, they are not truly happy nor enlightened.He said “I have no hair, no money, no girl friend, but I am happy. Happiness does not come from eating a lot, sleeping a lot, speaking loudly and often, or finding true love. Happiness must be found within our self.” ( All monks that spoke to us had great senses of humor. They giggled and made comments about their shiny bald heads. Perhaps this comes with enlightenment?). He said taking little and contentment with this lifestyle equals true happiness.

But he did not condemn marriage, just said do not depend on another, on love, for it; Happiness a person must create on their own. If we rely on the person we love for our happiness they will always fall short. This will create resentment.

So make yourself happy then if you want, find a person to share this with. So wise, wise one.

The temple paintings I was staring at were 10 paintings depicting a boy and an ox. The boy finds the ox, befriends it, and over time the ox turns from brown to white, the boy rides the ox, and eventually the ox walks away. Metaphorically this represents enlightenment. It takes time and in the end one must ignore it, because to be bragging or always aware of a higher state does not represent true enlightenment at all.

The ox not only appears in Buddhist art but also myth. In the middle of Beomeosa Temple court-yard, inside a pagoda sits a massive drum made of cow hide. Interesting since Buddhist are vegetarians. However, legend has it that one monk many years ago predicted he would come back on a certain day at a certain hour. He told the monks to eat him and enjoy the meat. Once eaten he would help the monk reach enlightenment.

The Monks beat the drum like a stomp performance on Broadway stage, even at 3am when this bleary eyed foreigner had trouble focusing her drifting contacts and still ached from the 108 full bows (on my knees, nose to the ground) the night before.

Three hours later at 6am we ate breakfast. Eating in the temple is a ritual. Each person has four bowl that must be arranged a certain way, unwrapped from its swaddling cloth a certain way, then cleaned a certain way. We ate in silence. The monk who ate with us finished much quicker than us, and sat quietly meditating. When done each person must scrub their dish with their yellow radish, drink the dirty water when done, and finally eat the radish. Waste not.

From Ulsan University take the 1127 city bus to Nopodong. Get off the bus and go one stop on the subway to Beomeosa station. Take bus 90 to the temple. Reserve a spot prior to temple stay.

ALL Pictures taken by Dragana Bijedic

Badminton week in high school also  constituted the week I could forget deodorant and not smell like feet. Minimal strain and minimal sweat.Keeping this in mind I rolled into the korean gym looking like a thug in one size fits all, even santa, sweat outfit. Lois wore spandex with shorts over them. My skills can be compared to most of these players’ new-born children’s badminton skills. Has anyone ever shown up to a pickup game of some sort and realized that pickup doesn’t mean casual to anyone surrounding them? The overwhelming feeling of being out of my league was instantaneous.

After some mediocre at best rallying “Korean Tom Cruise” ( the name he picked for himself) motioned us over: friendly like, grinning, happy, then the rapid-fire Korean language flood gate opened.

Through Lois’s translating (as well as pointing and unhappy facial contortions) I found out that showing my collar-bone when my sweatshirt slipped a little during an ungraceful overhand swat didn’t fly in this sanctum of badminton. Spandex over shorts also didn’t bring a smile to Mr. Cruise’s face. Tommy also gave us a mini-lecture on how Americans were too open with their sexuality. I felt like a slut, and that’s a hard feeling to have when every part of my body was covered by fleece except for my face (and a few seconds of collarbone viewing).

The correct badminton attire? Matching polyester workout outfits. I swiveled my head, horrified to find every team looking suave in Nike ad ready coordinated duds. I felt like a high schooler sneaking in after curfew.