HELLO! BAMBOO!

The Li River slices across the northeastern corner of Guangxi Province like a knife, quite literally. The regional geological makeup is predominantly limestone, meaning that the mighty Li and its tributaries dig and cut through the ground, leaving what is known as Karst formations, basically tall, sharp fingers of limestone jutting up out of the flat, fertile farmland. Needless to say, it is quite beautiful here, and many people travel to see the river and surrounding topography. And so it was that we found ourselves in the "laid back" atmosphere of touristy Yangsuo.

Yanguso is the quintessential tourist town; the main district consists of several pedestrian streets lined wall to wall western bars, restaurants, souvenir stands, the whole kit and kaboodle. In many ways, this was a nice break for us, where we could read menus, eat some familiar food, generally communicate with people, and make some foreign friends. In other ways, the town was severely irritating, and has given me a new and mortal fear of the word "hello".

Now, anywhere you have a high concentration of travelers gathered in one place to see or experience something, it is of course natural that you are going to have a high concentration of people hoping to sell, swindle or otherwise capitalize in some way on said travellers. That is just something you have to accept and deal with as a tourist. In Yangsuo, there is certainly no shortage of these people. Every time you turn around, there is somebody trying to interest you in everything from vintage Mao pins to postcards to memory cards to cut-outs of your own facial profile. The universal tactic to to draw your attention to the availability of these goods and services is a loudly yelled "HELLO!". This single word is using to fulfill literally dozens of meanings, none of which have anything to do with what the actual English word denotes. A yelled "HELLO!" could mean anything from "please look at and purchase my amazing postcards/flutes/memorycards/buddha statues" to "you are going the wrong way, follow me and I will show you the way to the river and try to get you let me take for a cruise in my bamboo boat", depending on the context.

Those with a particularly high proficiency in hello-speak will modify and clarify their exclamations by adding a noun at the end of the "HELLO!". For example, if someone selling bananas is particularly clever, they will not only shout "HELLO!", but the much more expressive "HELLO! BANANA!"

Now, as everyone comes to town to see the river and the rock formations along it, there is understandably quite a developed industry of river cruises to take in the full beauty along the most scenic sections. There are large, official flat bottomed boats with seating areas and observation decks, but these tend to run a little on the expensive side. The local entrepreneurs have found a brilliant product to fill the demand for low budget river cruises. Thus the booming bamboo raft ride industry in Yangsuo. Basically, to be a bamboo raft guide, what you need to do is strap roughly 8-10 large pieces of bamboo together, bolt on a couple of chairs, hook up what usually appears to be some sort of lawn mower engine, and shout "HELLO! BAMBOO!" at every foreigner who passes by. You can't come within 50 meters of the river without being bombarded by potential bamboo captains. Even if you make it very clear that you just want to stroll along the river, they are always convinced that they can make you understand that what you actually want to do is slide down the river on their questionable craft.

Even though the bamboos are about half the price of the big boats, they are still fairly expensive, so Taylor and I decided to explore the territory on land routes, powered by our own locomotion. On Saturday we opted for a bike ride along one of the main Li tributaries. After about 20 minutes, we noticed that this one woman was keeping basically the same pace as us, even when we stopped to take pictures. Soon she was "HELLO!"ing us if we made a wrong turn, and after that she was basically leading us down tiny tracks through villages and even offering to take our picture. Inevitably, we arrived at the main river crossing, and she started in with the "HELLO! BAMBOO!"ing. She and about 6 others were sure they needed to take us, bikes and all, back down the river on one of their streamlined, two-seater, no-motor bamboos. We politely declined. It took a while, but we finally convinced the crew that we were capable of making it back to town on our own.

On Sunday, Taylor and I walked the most scenic section of the Li river proper, and though we didn't see too many people, they all greeted us with a hearty "HELLO! BAMBOO!". A woman harvesting fruit in her orchard, a man walking his gigantic water buffaloes down the path, these people all seemed to think it was pertinent for them to drop whatever unimportant task they were currently doing and whisk us downstream on their bamboo. Apparently everyone in this region has an extra bamboo laying around.

In town, the "HELLO!" is used not just for drawing your attention, but also for general conversation and bargaining. The haggling works like this, if you show any interest in an item, the vendor will immediately "HELLO!" you and write down a price that is roughly twice what you should pay on a piece of paper. You then make your counter offer on the same sheet until an acceptable price is reached for both parties. If you walk away from the bargaining table, the vendor will chase after you with desperate "HELLO!"s pointing at a lower circled price.

All of this hello ranting aside, I actually quite enjoyed Yangsuo and the Karst countryside. I am just warning any friends and family that if you ever address me using the word "hello" again, I may instinctively bolt in the opposite direction.

zhangjiajie

Well, we battled a seven hour missed connection on Yeleu Mountain in Changsha (good song writing material), extremely awkward mid-night train schedules, exceedingly confusing place names (Zhangjiajie city, Zhangjiajie village, and Zhangjiajie park), and loud speaker packing tour groups, but we successfully saw, encountered, and conquered the world's most beautiful place. Needless to say, it was worth the hassle. A few notes, and then I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, because words cannot do Zhangjiajie nearly enough justice (not that pictures can either.) In the village, the restaurants prominently displayed caged or tubbed (aquatic) creatures that you could consume for your meal. This is not unusual in Asia, but the inclusion of what appeared to be some sort of mole was. The park is impossibly beautiful, with sharp, vertical, craggy columns of peaks straight out of an ancient Chinese scroll painting. The vegetation literally cascades down the shear sandstone faces. We climbed roughly 4,000 stairs to get to the top of one of the peaks on the first day, and Taylor charged up those stairs like a pro. The crowds verged on driving me to madness, but on the second day I ran to the park at shortly after the 7:00 opening and raced past the tour groups for a personal re-climb up 4,000 different stairs in a more secluded location. Overall, fanastic is about the only way to describe the experience. Oh, I forgot to mention that it was amazing to be able to breathe a full lungs-worth of air and not taste burning.

Now for the pictures.

This is what a mole-eating town looks like:


There were many stairs:


Did I mention there were monkeys?


It was pretty nice on top:


Maybe the morning light was best:


I have perhaps one million more thoughts and pictures to share, but Taylor and our new friends are getting hungry and anxious for dinner, and this computer is about the speed of a desert tortoise. I'll see you down the Li River a ways.

pollution, communism, censorship, justice

POLLUTION:
China is beginning to wear on me. At first I was underwhelmed by the pollution. In downtown San Jose, Costa Rica buildings and sidewalks have a thick smudgey blackness to them, presumably caused by the exhaust fumes of busses and cars. I was expecting the same thing in China, but the pollution here is different. It isn't black- it's gray, brown and hazy. Everything is covered in haze. In Shanghai and Suzhou, like Portland in the winter, the sky is pure gray so you can't tell if it's 9:00 am, half past noon, or 3:00pm. The only thing that makes sunset different from any other hour is that the sun turns fire red, the clouds however remain gray. I was expecting more people in China to wear face masks to prevent themselves from breathing in the smog but they don't, so we don't either. In Shanghai our boogers were black, and in Suzhou our eyes burned from riding bikes in traffic all day. Both of us have congestion at the top of our chests that's not particularly bad but certainly annoying. I get winded really easily and prefer not to take in deep breaths. We're heading to a national ark tomorrow and I look forward to seeing blue sky again.

COMMUNISM:
Looking around in China I see absolutely no evidence that this a communist state. There are no ration lines, no big billboards promoting the government (or if there are and I can't read them), there is no great social equality here- the gap between rich and poor is huge and widening, there's little police pressence and it's not intimidating, people speak freely about troubles in there country (even more so than Koreans!) and although there is some Internet censorship freedom of expression does not seem particularly restricted. Communism here is confusing- it's totally unlike Cuba which has ALL of the above qualities, and I can't figure out what is communist about the coutry besides there not being normal elections- something that isn't even necessarily a charcteristic of communist philosophy.

CENSORSHIP:
It's strange what is censored and what isn't. BBC.com= censored, NYTimes.com= not censored. (Interestingly, at our first hostel BBC news was broadcast nonstop on the TV in the lobby. I don't know if the broadcast was legal or not, but it shows that if it isn't legal people aren't too afraid of the authority, or if it is legal that media censorship isn't terribly strict) Wikipedia is censored and so are all blogs. Anything related to sex is censored. Naver- a Korean online community is partially censored so that you can read their main page and use their search engine but not access the cafes. Neither myspace or facebook are restricted except for blogs.

JUSTICE:
I like the cops here. In Suzhou someone tried to steal my wallet out of a pocket in my purse. This man must have followed me for quite some time because I remeber seeing him at least 5 blocks away from where I caught him. I felt a tug at my back so I swung around quickly and his arm was outstreched, fingers poised for picking. In my best mean-teacher voice (a voice I have honed for the last year) I spoke very sternly to the man and his two friends. When they guiltily tried to walk away from me, I followed them. They didn't walk too fast and finally the theif stopped in front of a sign and pretended to read it. I pretended to read it too & pointed at the symbols and fake smiled at him a lot. Then I saw a police man (riding a scooter in the bike lane against the flow of traffic) and I flagged him over and pantomimed what happened.
I was and am very impressed with the policeman's behaviour. He patted the men down, spoke to them authoritatively but not meanly (so far as I could tell), paid attention to my gestures. Spoke to them more, and after a small crowd formed he let them go and lectured me on keeping my bag held tightly nd securely. What I liked about the cop was that he didn't abuse his authority or disrespect the crooks- even though they were a different ethnicity than him. I can't imagine a Korean or a Costa Rican police officer treating a minority so respectfully, nor most US cops.
This is another way that Chinese communism doen't fit into my idea of what a communist state is. I feel like law enforcement officials (The guy I described and the traffic-directors) are very respectful and careful not to abuse power. This morning when Travis and I saw Chinese university freshmen practicing marching and doing army-type parade formations, we could see that the students were being treated kindly by the drillmasters. They would laugh together in between drills and there was nothing scary about the militaristicness of the drills.
China is so hard to figure out. I think it's because we're extremely tied out of the community because of the language barrier. Even though we're here I feel like we're looking in on the culture through a keyhole.

bike traffic and black lungs

Suzhou (pronounced "sue's-oh") is the real deal when it comes to gardens. The garden in Shanghai was okay, but for the legitamite experience, everybody says you have to go to Suzhou. The town was once home to over 200 gardens, is laced with canals, and Marco Polo described it as "heaven on Earth". Today, it's not exactly heaven on Earth, but it is pretty along the canals, and getting into the bike traffic is an intense experience.

When I say bike traffic, I of course mean mostly scooter traffic. Every main street in Suzhou has "bike" lanes that are physically divided from the main flow of traffic, and overflowing with two and three wheeled vehicles. This is intense, serious, move it or lose it traffic, no gentle calm bike rides in this town. At first I was intimidated by all this, but after a preliminary cruise, I was out there muscling and honking (bell-ringing) my way through traffic jams, sketchy left turns, rush hour traffic, the whole deal. Taylor hated the cruising, and on our first afternoon trip, she headed back as we prepared to cross the river. I made a big loop until I ran into a an impossibly busy street that I needed to be on the opposite side of. After I became severely frustrated with the backup trying to get to the next night, I decided to go Chinese style and just force my way through the four lanes of barreling rush hour taxis and buses. That strategy worked surprisingly well, and incidentally, as soon as I landed on the far side, I found myself pedalling perfectly parallel to Taylor. Good thing, because she had no idea where she was or how to get home.

Worse than the traffic is the air. China is of course known for its poor air quality, but you really have to see/breathe it to believe it. The sunsets and sunrises always come severely orange through a thick mist of haze. You can't see any distance from the tops of mountains, and the sky seems to never be truly blue. My lungs basically always ache, and pedalling next to a fleet of diesel spewing buses does not help matters. Even my eyes started to burn at one point on a particularly long ride. Oh well.

To avoid traffic and smoke, I liked to dip off into the narrow side paths and alleys. Though you would inevitably run into torn-up roadway construction, often get lost in apartment complexes, and become embroiled in dozens of near collisions with every imaginable type of wheeled craft, this was the best way to roll. It was back in these little hollows that I felt I could really see, hear, feel, and of course smell China. Well worth the hazards.

The destination in all this cruising was usually a garden. I visited three gardens in Suzho, two were totally bunk, the final one made up for all the shortcomings of the first two. It was called Shizi Li (Tiger Forest Garden), and it was incredibly badass. This puppy has been around since 1352, and its showcase feature is a small pond surrounded by rollicking man-made rock structures that resemble mountains. Curving, tunneling, rolling through these is a series of paths that wind impossibly intricately through, above, around, over, and under. I became lost in this labrynth for about 20 minutes in an area that could not have been more than 30 meters squared. The whole garden was amazingly designed; beautiful, peaceful, inexplicably free from huge tour groups with bullhorn wielding guides. It was fantastic.

Last night we took a sleeper train into central Hunan Province, where we had to kill time all day before catching another sleeper train tonight. I promptly lost Taylor on a mountain, and we did not miraculously meet up until 7 hours later. But that's a whole other story.

Shanghai and the ride there

Our 20-hour train ride from Qingdao to Shanghai was rather uninspiring. We saw seemingly endless gray, square, uniformily drab apartment buildings, corn field after cornfield and mysterious industrial sites. Unable to communicate much with our fellow passengers we could not deterimine exactly what type of industry we were passing- it required heavy machinery, big black piles of finely ground coal, lots of construction cranes, and massive warehouses full of firey blazes. Metal work, perhaps? The corn fields were fairly interesting. Unlike Korea where all farming appears to be done on a small scale, the corn fields we passed were quite large (though not by US standards) and it was easy to see crop rotation at work. Some parts of the fields would be burning, other parts ripening for harvest, and we even saw sheep being used to munch away at the post-harvest remains.
Now we're in Shanghai, a somewhat tragic city. In Shanghai the gap between rich and poor is glaring. The Shanghai landscape is a mix of modern sky scrapers, colonial buildings (some restored and used as banks or hotels, other not restored and used as very lowclass housing), construction, and rubble. You can stroll down fancy commercial streets passing 5 star hotels, and expensive stores and restaurants then turn and walk in a different direction 3 blocks and find yourself surrounded by ancient, almost-crumbling, over-crowded apartments where whole families live in single rooms and the alleys are full of bicycles hauling assorted recyclable materials.

In Shanghai everyone speaks English and wants to be your friend. By "friend" I mean they want to flatter you and then convince you to buy whatever they are peddling- most commonly watches (fake Rolex) and bags (fake Gucci and Louis Vuitton).
The Shanghainese are more fashionable than folks in Qingdao, but still less stylish, and quite honestly, less attractive, than Koreans. It took me a while to realize why there seem to be so few good looking young people in this country, but I think part of the reason is the one-child policy. There are just proportionally fewer young people here than in Korea or Japan (where it's hard NOT to see a beautiful girl every half block). This one child policy has not helped China create a vibrant culture for youth. Unlike Korea, where the PC-bangs (internet rooms) are full of kids, and karaoke rooms cater to teens, shopping streets are full of giglly girls taking pictures of themselves with their camera phones and there are a million different pop-y boy bands on the radio; China doesn't have that youthful frivolousness. I think this is pretty interesting because in every other way Korea is much more serious and somber than China.
There is one thing we've seen in Shanghai that I truly loved: M50, a conglomeration of 4 huge warehouses divided into artist studios and galleries. All the galleries showed exclusively modern, Chinese art. We spent 2 hours exploring and could have spent 2 more if we'd tried to see it all. The warehouse complex was rambling and confusing- some studios were dingy and small. Some were huge, two-stories tall and expertly lit. Most were somewhere in between. By far most of the art work was painting- big, bright, bold acryllic paintings, at least half of which had communist themes. Only one of the galleries we saw showcased photography, while about a dozen contained prints or sculpture. There was absolutely no video or weird installation type art, so in that sense the space was very commercially oriented. I liked most of the art we saw, compared to First of last Thursday the collections were really incredible. The gallery workers and artists were friendly and very willingly to negociate prices, but no one we met was particularly hip, young or eccentric.

shangwho?

(Author's note: although this posting technically covers only exploits in Shanghai, I have found it necessary to include a few extraneous details from my previous location. Please bear with me, and I promise we will get to Shanghai soon enough.)

In Qingdao, people drink beer. Lots of it. You would expect this, it being a brewery town and all, but even at lunch time all the tables at a restaurant are littered with pitchers of beer. It's also (in retrospect) an extremely pleasant place where people are incredibly kind, friendly and generally good natured. I just have to make sure we understand where the score stands on Qingdao before we start talking about Shanghai, namely, good.

We boarded our sleeper to Shanghai a little bummed out that the dudes in the upper bunks had made themselves at home sitting on our lower bunks with us. This was not the optimal situation, but luckily they later moved up top. Around supper time, the older and rounder of our bunkmates scampered down from his perch and produced a bag full of food and two bottles of Tsingtao. He promptly laid this all out on the table and offered me one of the bottles of beer (all done with hand gestures). He also invited us to sample some morsels of his dinner (a whole roasted chicken, and some delicious buns served with condensed milk). We moved up to one word (pretty much all in English) sentences catalyzed with copious smiling. When there was one piece of chicken left, he offered it to me. That piece being the head, I politely declined, and he promptly stuck the whole thing in his mouth, retrieving only the beak. After dinner, we had more halting conversation mostly revolving around looking at different pictures in our China guide book. Our second bunkmate made no attempts at contact with us.

It's good that the company on the train was somewhat interesting, because the scenery certainly was not. If you could imagine combining the two fantastic American landscapes of midwest cornfields and Utah desolate weird chemical industrial plants, you would have exactly what we saw for twenty hours. Oh shit, that's not quite right, I forgot the sprawling uniform government housing/dorm buildings that were interspersed.

For better or worse, we arrived in Shanghai around lunch time, and promptly took the subway in the wrong direction (are we detecting a theme here?) and so wandered around back and forth for about 4o minutes trying to find our hostel. We finally taxied to the "Captain's Hostel" right in the ritzy part of town. This is one of those classic large scale city-center hostel affairs. About five floors of dorm rooms are seemingly packed to the gills with a mix of 78% German, 8% Scandanavian, 13.5% Asian, and .5% (us) American backpackers. All in all, its a pretty nice place.

Shanghai is a city of stark contrast. The main tourist drags are lined immediately on either side by dark streets and alleys full of smelly water and hanging laundry. Half of the city is seemingly spurting right up out of the ground in great glittering geysers of development, while the other half seems to be being torn down in dusty dingy destruction. There are more foreigners here than any city I've been to in Asia, many of them businessmen, and a lot of them tourists (can't seem to find too many teachers). There are about three main tourist traps, and we've hit all three of them hard. They are mostly worth it. One is the area along the river, which highlights views of the impressive exploding skyline on one side, and classic European architecture on the other.

The other worthy candidate is a classical Chinese garden dating from the 1600's. It's pretty spectacular, but they've engineered the stupid thing so that you have to fight your way through a labrynth of shops, fast food, watch, bag, shoe and sunglass peddlers, and art students for what seems like hours before you can even find the entrance. (The exit is cleverly placed at a different location in the same mess, so you can't retrace your steps out.) But the garden is quite special, you can really feel the oldness of the place, and it's as if the stone, rocks, wood, carving and plants have all kind of grown and melded into each other to become one single unit. It's also interesting to catch the odd glimpse of a sky scraper or hanging laundry or have the silence (brief periods of which exist in between the barking of megaphone mass tour guides) pierced by the honk of a scooter careening around outside.

Possibly the best piece of Shanghai we've seen was an interesting complex of art galleries near the train station. It was cool to see, and there was some good work there, but I'll let Taylor fill you in on the details of that.

Though people generally wear clothing over their torsos, and children don't generally run around in assless pants (unlike Qingdao), I would say the level of manners is generally lower here. This is, of course, kind of a big city phenomenon, but it is very strong here, and most apparent on the subway. Even in the biggest, rudest cities I've been to, the people understand the rule that you have to let those on the train get off the train before you can shove your way on. That's not even manners, it's just the way that things need to happen in order for the system to work. Well, in Shanghai, that's not how it works. You fight your way on, and the people getting off be damned. This is not the only example of rudeness, of course, but it is the most visibly obvious. The rest is mainly just that indifferent face and lack of smiling or acknowledgement of your existence that is common in other locations as well.

Overall, Shanghai is about what I was told it would be: not that exciting a place to visit. I'm certainly glad I came, and I think that living here could be pretty cool, but I don't live here, and I don't have time to search out everything that is cool. That being said, the coolness certainly doesn't jump right out at you. Tomorrow we'll be heading out for Suzhou, about an hour west of here, for some even more outstanding gardens than the one here. We may or may not return to check out Friday nightlife in Shanghai before moving on to the western mountains.

i love china!

One disconcerting situation about being in China is that I am allowed to write my blog on blogger, but viewing my (or any other for that matter) blog on blogspot is not allowed. So that means this better be good the first time, because there will be no checking and editing.

Censorship aside, China is fitting quite well with my personality and demeanor. All ramped up for extreme grease, spitting and rudeness, I have been nothing but happy with what I have found so far in this new land. Granted, it is a giant country, and I have spent less than 24 hours in what is considered a kind of exception to the rest of China, but it is awesome!

A little context: we managed to catch the boat the second time, and we are now in Qingdao (pronounced ching-dow), which is essentially a German style town in architecture, and also home of the Tsingtao brewery. The architecture is quite interesting, the people are friendly, if a little bit uncouth, and the streets have a real feel to them. I can't put my finger on it, but there is something on the streets and in the air that makes this place feel comfortable and real. It's not the ubiqutous old men sitting on their stools (apparently everyone carries one everywhere with them) on every street corner smoking copious amounts of cigarettes and playing assorted card or board games; it's not the small children with the assless pants for easy public waste disposal; it's not the stares that are (amazingly) more blatant and widespread than in Korea; but I'm not sure exactly what it is. Taylor keeps pointing out quite correctly that there is a very Latin American feel to the place. That is true, from the fashion sense ranging from 1992 to none at all, to the multitudes of people louting about on the streets with seemingly nothing to do, to the habit of men tucking their tee shirts up over their bellies for cooling, it has that kind of feel.

Of course, we have had our problems here, most notably that I drank heavily on the boat last night with our new British friends, and was not in tip-top shape for disembarkation (Taylor and I wondered if that is actually an English word), but more importantly the fact that we cannot get our ATM cards to work. When the machine swallowed Taylor's card after she gave the "wrong" password too many times, I thought things were really going to go downhill, permanently. As it turned out, all we had to do was talk to the incredibly kind English speaking lady at the bank and wait for about 20 minutes in the VIP room for the maintenance guy to come back from his lunch break and open the machine. They didn't even ask for any kind of proof that she was the lady named on the card. I think we'll do just fine in China.

china: here we aren't

Having said all our goodbyes, cleaned out our cozy little home for the past year, wiped the sentimental tears from our eyes, and hoisted our luggage on our backs, we made our way for Seoul first thing Monday morning. We secured our Chinese Visas with no problem, were given our hepatitis shots, and had a pleasant final Korean dinner. Tuesday morning I climbed Namsan ((남산) mountain) for spectacular panoramic views of the city, and Taylor and I left with over two hours to make it to the Inchoen ferry terminal by 3:30 for our 5:00 departure. The sun was shining, our spirits were high, we were leaving Korea on a high note.

Due to some sort of engineering malfunction, however, the Number 1 Subway in the direction of Inchoen (인천) splits into two separate routes at Guro (구로). Had we known this, we would have tried to check which line the subway we got on was going to take. As it turned out, our train took a turn for Choenan (천안) at Guro (구로), not Inchoen (인천). We only realized this about 40 minutes past Guro (구로), when Taylor could finally slip out from behind our mound of luggage to see how many stops we had left before Inchoen. It was about 3:00 when we hurriedly leaped from our train to change directions. It soon became clear that continuing our current route would not get us to the ferry terminal anywhere near our 5:00 departure time. We called the ferry office, and the woman suggested that we immediately hop in a cab and we should be able to make it in time.

The nearest subway stop basically ended at the side of a major highway, where available cabs were few and far between, and those that did exist were zipping by at high speeds. We finally hailed a taxi with a blue-eyed driver (extrmeley unusual), and through a mix of Korean, English and hand gestures, we indicated where we needed to go. The poor guy was not really familiar with Inchoen (인천), as we were about five suburbs over, so he had to call someone else for directions. Soon, however, we were moving at 100km/h towards our port destination. The only problem now was that we had not foreseen the possibility of a cross-country cab ride, and had thus disposed of most of our Korean currency. It started to look like we would make it to the terminal around 4:30, which, we reasoned, should give us just enough time to run to an ATM to pay our driver, quickly swipe our credit cards to pay for the ferry tickets, and sprint across the waiting gangplank onto our China-bound fairy. Spirits were again lifting.

City traffic slowed us down, and then Taylor thought she saw a sign pointing towards the terminal in a different direction from that in which we were heading. We soon started seeing signs in our direction, and things again looked good. Upon arrival at the terminal, however, we were informed by a random passerby (terminal employee?) that we were at Terminal 1, when in fact we needed to be at Terminal 2, which was across town. Back through the traffic we headed, towards the sign Taylor had previously seen. As it was now past 4:30, my pessimistic side fully took over. Our driver felt the pressure too, and I hope he wasn't too stressed out, driving through rush hour traffic in a strange city, with two very anxious foreignors in the back seat.

When we arrived, Taylor arranged for a split won (원), dollar payment at a high exchange rate. We sprinted into the ferry terminal at quarter to five to be received by nothing but befuddled faces that we thought there was any possibility of us getting on the 5:00 boat (for which we had reservations).

Exhausted, irritable, and totally bummed out, we had to sit down and regroup, consider our options. The next boat didn't leave until Thursday, so we basically had two days on our hands. No option seemed bearable; Inchoen (인천) is not a real treat of a destination, getting back on the subway for another ninety minutes back to Seoul was kind of pointless and extremely unpleasant, and going back to Daejeon (대전) for two days with our tails between our legs wasn't particularly enticing either. In the end, after we had calmed down a bit, we reasoned that the only rational thing to do was to get a love motel room in Inchoen (인천) and wait it out for two days. The woman at the information desk gave me very detailed directions of how to get from where we were to a central district where we could stay.

That route took us to a busstop right in front of an E-Mart (giant grocery store), and we both agreed that before climbing onto another mode of transportation, we needed to sit out in front of the E-Mart and drink a beer. When I came out with the beers and a snack, Taylor had busted out the guitar, and we made a little party out of our unfortunate circumstances. I even wrote the better part of a song about our troubles that day. The sitting, beer, music, and attention from E-Mart shoppers brightened our moods quite a bit, and by the time we checked into the Royal Motel (로얄모텔), we were both ready to fully joke about the fact that we had missed the boat.