A Sea of Change

I said farewell to Penny today, over breakfast at the bistro table in my crackerbox apartment. She dove into a bowl of cereal and milk sprinkled with raisins while I nursed an iced coffee, both of us musing at the pace with which life bring change.

It's a strange thing, the transiency that permeates life living abroad. I've always considered myself an adventurer at heart, a free spirit with a soul that longs to experience life firsthand from a wide range of geographical perches. My family and friends who know me well, I hope, appreciate this as one of the qualities that defines me, while others who are perhaps less in tune with my curious yet genuinely humanitarian nature might write me off as some kind of a gypsy.

It's true that my life has been a constant stream of movement. Since my early years as a youngster, following my parents along on cross-town and cross-country moves, I became well practiced in the art of packing my things, settling in to a new home, and finding my place among new friends. And the pace only quickened as I reached my college years. I don't think I can truthfully count the number of places I have lived, or the number of times I have moved. But that's okay with me. It's part of the learning curve that is my life, and I wouldn't change it.

Still, it's a reality I have had to adjust to, that here in Korea, I am rubbing shoulders with so many others for whom life is also a sea of change. Most of the foreigners in Korea have come to work as an English teacher for twelve months. That's the standard contract length. Of course, there are a host of expats, mostly settled in and around the suburbs of Seoul, who have chosen to make themselves more of a permanent fixture in Korea. I'm somewhere balanced between the two, for once -- not particularly eager to sprint out of Korea at the first chance I get, though certainly not ready to put down the kind of roots that would keep me for years on end.

With Penny gone, I'm reminded that life is fleeting, that friendships are to be appreciated and savored, and that I am blessed to have been touched by people who have come into my life, bringing rays of sunshine with them. Penny is off to begin another chapter of her life, in the same way that each foreigner I meet will in turn. And then one day, it will be me again who spreads wide my wings and soars to some new perch from which to take in the world around me.

I am grateful to have learned through my life experiences that hellos and goodbyes, while often tinged with emotion, are never final or absolute -- that the world, despite how tremendously large it is, can still in its own miraculous way bring people full-circle back together again. I am grateful that I have learned how to take that feeling of "home" with me wherever it is that I have chosen to be, and that I can be thousands of miles away from family yet still somehow feel "surrounded" with the love, support, and care of those who matter most to me.

Life is a sea of change. Sometimes we drift, sometimes we swim against the current. But always, in the end, it is the sea that carries us beyond our humble beginnings and into the vast and open space where more than we have ever imagined can become possible.

Penny, Pals, and Pepperoni Pizza

By 2:00 today, my left foot and ankle had ballooned into a painful and nearly unrecognizable mass. I hadn't realized how bad it had gotten until I noticed that I had been hobbling around my classroom in quite a bit more pain than normal. Finally, as if it were an afterthought, I glanced down at my foot. I think the look on my face must have been somewhat horrified. One glance south-ward and I could feel despair looming large on the horizon. It had been almost a week since my leg became dogfood, yet somehow I felt the past 6 days had really aged me.

I try to take things with an open mind and accepting spirit, but by this afternoon, I was DONE with the dog bite from hell. I was done with the limping and done with the doctor's visits and done with the iodine stains peeking out from underneath my bandages. My leg hadn't been shaved since.... I couldn't even remember when, and I had just plain run out of smile to paint across my face.

I wanted to be free to hike the hilltops and ride my bike to the grocery store and just... be normal again. It was, then, absolute medicine for my soul to meet up with with Penny, Francois, and Chetty tonight after the workday -- and workweek (hooray!!) -- had ended. This was it, one final round of pizza and beer at our favorite Friday night hangout before Penny left Korea for good. I arrived in it-might-kill-me-to-be-happy spirits but not ten minutes passed by, I think, before I had all but forgotten the worst of my troubles. Good friends will do that, and a few bites of thin-crusted, mozzarella-laden pepperoni pizza don't hurt either!

As Penny handed me a sweetly framed photo of the two of us, yet another parting gift from this little lady with a big heart, I felt my own heart sink a bit with sadness at our pending farewell. In literally three weeks time, I have grown quite attached to this sweetheart of a girl from Down Under. It seems like surely we've been friends for months, so easy and enjoyable has our time together been. I've stopped by her and Francois' place often on my evening walks home from work, and have ended up staying for hours, chatting over slices of perfectly chilled melon and nectarines. We roamed the boardwalk and side streets of Daecheon Beach together in our mud-splattered bathing suits, hiccuping all the way, and climbed the hills of Seosan, which was a perfectly beautiful hike right up until Penny's four-legged friend deciding to give me a laceration or two. And she's been my angel these past days as I've begun, as she says, my "week of healing."

The cuddly little blue teddy bear she brought by Thursday night sits on my nightstand now, a sweet reminder that however far I roam, the genuine caring of good friends can make any foreign place feel just like home. A few laughter-filled hours later, my spirits are high, my tummy is full, and my head is ready to hit the pillow. Good night, world!

The Devil's Jaws, Part II

(continued)
. . . We neared a tree on the left shoulder of the road, and I could see a rather large dog lying near its trunk, its white fur matted down with rain and mud. It looked rather beastly, and I kept a bit of a distance as Penny approached him and held out her hand for him to sniff. He recognized her, that was certain, and slowly he proceeded to raise up on all fours and respond to her with some long, wet licks. Then Fido looked in my direction, and walked towards me. I held out my hand, slowly, wanting to give him an opportunity to familiarize himself with my smell.

I've been around dogs as much as the next person, I guess. I even owned a dog for a short time. I know animals can smell fear or nervousness. So as we approached one another, I monitored my emotional base to make sure he could sense trust from me. He sniffed at my hand, my fingertips, the cuff of my pants, my ankle. And then he reciprocated with a few slobbery but gentle licks, which seemed to say he accepted me. All seemed to be going according to plan.

But in a split second, everything changed. A deep, low, fear-invoking growl suddenly surfaced from somewhere closeby, but before either Penny or I had a chance to realize what was happening, I saw a flash of white and felt a burning sensation as something deep and sharp cut into the flesh just above my ankle. I looked down in shock to see this dog, who had just a moment ago given me a token of friendship, tear into my leg with determined aggression. I pulled back, completely stunned, my mind straining to interpret the nerve signals firing up from what had instantly become a bleeding mass. I limped further away from the dog, my only solace being the rope tethering him to the tree just beyond my reach.

I looked down to see blood gushing from a long, deep gash, and instantly the sight of it, coupled with the effect of hiking for over an hour on an empty stomach, left me feeling light-headed and weak. We were only about 3/4 mile from home, but as Penny and I attempted to continue on the road leading back to town, I realized that I was not going to be able to make it back on foot.

Within minutes, Penny had flagged down an approaching car, carring a local farming family headed out of town. Through gestures, we were able to quickly garner their help -- one look at my leg, and they herded us into the backseat of their car, minutes later dropping us off just outside my apartment door. The next few hours were more or less a nightmarish blur. I grabbed my wallet and health insurance papers from my desk, and hopped into a taxi with Penny heading towards the local hospital. Once admitted to the emergency room, I was ushered to a cot while an on-call doctor began removing my shoe and sock and inspecting the wound. His assistant approached and as soon as she took a look at my leg, began making terrible noises that, regardless of language, indicated that whatever was going on down there was NOT pretty.

Two hours later, I had been allergy tested for contraindications to some kind of medicine the nurse was planning to shoot me up with, shot in both the arse and my left forearm with menacingly large needles, and had nearly fainted and vomited from the immediate effect of these unfamiliar drugs as they started coursing through my bloodstream.

With little ability to communicate with the doctor, I had to be content with the shoddy patch-up job that the doctor had done on my wound. He somehow was able to explain to me that I needed stitching, but that because the wound was from an animal bite, they have to wait a few days first. I was still bleeding through the gauze as I hobbled out of the hospital. I thought I had understood something about recieving a pain/antibiotic prescription, but there was no one there to help us find the pharmacy and, as the evening was dragging on and on, Penny and I finally decided it was time to head home.

An hour later, I was at Penny and Francois' kitchen table, my leg propped on an adjacent chair, trying with all of my energy to focus on the plate of clams and pasta and fresh parsley loving laid out before me, and not on the perilous incident that had undoubtedly changed the course of the next few weeks. Penny apologized profusely, but I wouldn't hear it. She was not to blame. No one was to blame. It was just one of those things, and it happened, and that was that. There was no undoing it and it was best that I just start focusing on my healing.

But all kinds of fears creep up under the guise of realistic concern when you're brought head to head with an unexpected crisis. What about rabies, I thought in a half-panic. With the dozen plus jabs that I received before embarking on my round-the-world travels in 2006, rabies had NOT been on the agenda. How would I know if I were at risk? And why couldn't they stitch me? What would happen when I returned to the hospital tomorrow? How was I going to get through the night with the throbbing pain from my ankle?

A few glasses of wine and an hour of candlelight later, and my mood was tranquil, my spirits calmed. I was ready for sleep and anxious to meet with Harrison, who had offered to take me back to the hospital for more treatment Sunday morning. As I laid my head back on my pillow and thought of the trauma of the past few hours, and of the past few days, I took solace in the sweet reminder that I was not alone, that I was so very fortunate to have many caring people around me, and many caring people far from me, whose thoughts and prayers would surely be reaching me over the days to come. It was almost enough to allow me to black out the angry bite that a four-legged stranger had inflicted on me just hours before. The devilish jaws of this insidious animal may have wounded my flesh, but I was determined to see that my spirits stayed high, intact, and unharmed.

The Devil's Jaws

There is a portion of the world-famous Iguassu Falls, which straddle the border of Argentina and Brazil, known as the Devil's Throat. Iguassu Falls (Foz de Iguacu in Portuguese) is one of the most impressive waterfalls I've never seen (but someday, God willing, I will).

Imagine taking the grandeur of Niagara, stretching it out to a width of 15 miles, and then splicing it up into pieces, so that instead of two of three major falls, you have literally hundreds of them (there are as many as 260 on record). It is one of the widest and tallest waterfall systems in the world.

The Devil's Throat is the oldest and largest fall in the complex, one of the most dangerous to approach, and one of the most spectacular to behold. Movie buffs familiar with the classic film "The Mission" will remember the protagonist, a peaceful humanitarian and monk intent on helping the indigenous peoples of the Guarana tribes. He climbed the falls at the Devil's Throat in order to pass into the tribal territory and make a connection with the Guarana people. Flash forward to present day, Seosan... and bear with me as I take a literary leap to connect the dots between Brazil and Korea...

This morning came and went with no change in the steady, heavy rainfall outside my window. Monsoon season had indeed descended upon Seosan, and it seemed there would be no reprieve from the precipitation that was most certainly staying put for the next several days. It was unfortunate, as I had missed quite a few of my daily walks and hike due to the drama with work and with Seosan's Most Wanted (a.k.a. Mr. Lowlife) that seemed to make a complete mockery of an otherwise peaceful entry to Korean life.

I was eager to get out and stretch my legs a bit, but with the rain coming down in heavy sheets, it was nothing doing. So, I stayed holed up in my tiny little one-room apartment, losing myself in one project after another -- a recipe hunt for a Korean-style cabbage dish, reading up on yoga poses, tweaking my Facebook page, finding good excuses to procrastinate entering report card grades for my 115 students. The day literally evaporated, which seemed quite ironic, given that just outside my window, the weather was doing anything but. Finally, about 5:30 PM, the rains died down and I seriously contemplated picking up my tennis shoes and going for a walk. After I finish this one last project, I told myself.

A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door, followed by a familiar voice. It was my friend Penny, stopping by to see if I'd like to join her on a hike. Realizing that my good intentions would all too possibly fail to materialize if left to my own timetable, I thought there seemed no better plan than to go along. A little company after a lonely Saturday sounded like the great way to round out a relaxingly quiet day, and I knew I'd enjoy Penny's company. Plus, with Penny leaving the country soon, I knew I had precious few opportunities remaining to learn from her where some of Seosan's best hiking trails were located. A few minutes later, I was sporting my workout gear and we were out the door.

We climbed and chatted for nearly an hour, clomping our way uphill through seldom traveled mountain trails and then downhill again, ducking under spiderwebs that had become illuminated by the strings of pearly dewdrops from the afternoon rain. We turned off of the trail connecting one mountain to the next, and continued on along a rural but paved road leading straight through some of Seosan's most picturesque farmlands. The backdrop of rolling hills and late afternoon sun, coupled with the lifting clouds and deep saturated greens made for some awe-inspiring sights. About an hour into our hike, we started down a narrow one-lane country road that snaked past yet more farmland as well as some dilapidated lean-tos and shacks.
"I have a little secret," Penny began, "and now that I'm leaving, I think you're the right person to share it with." My mind quickly started turning circles, my curiosity trying to pin down what this secret might be. She hadn't hinted at anything all afternoon, yet I could tell from her tone that it was something important to her. But first, she began with a question: "How do you feel about dogs?"

Penny explained to me that she had befriended a poor dog that was chained to a tree right along the road, and that she often stopped to play with him and give him some attention. It's true that Korean dogs, in general, are treated quite miserably. They are tied to trees with short leashes, given no opportunity to run or play freely, and quite often look despondent, neglected, and downright depressed.

Being a country girl herself, Penny had a natural affinity for animals that seemed to know no bounds. Where she had gotten the idea to get chummy with a strange dog, who probably had fleas and a whole host of other maladies, not to mention a sharp set of teeth was beyond me. But her secret was this: she was worried for the dog's wellbeing and hoped that she could pass the torch on to me to befriend her "pet."

(to be continued)

A Foreign Affair

I had to give myself a little talking-to the other night. I have been here in Korea for over two weeks now, and I've barely explored beyond my own little quiet corner of Seosan. Oh yes, I've hiked on the nearby, forested trails into the hills of Seosan (thanks to Terry for showing me where to catch the trail). And I've driven around town a few times with Harrison and Terry -- for groceries, bedding, even my beautiful peace lily, which I adore (again, thank you Harrison and Terry!). But as for solo exploration... I've been severely lacking in this department, and I'm ashamed of myself... where is the nomadic explorer within me whose heart beats for the adventure of discovering the unknown? It's been a while, I guess, since I had to deal face-to-face with the intimidation of a complete language barrier. Beyond "annyeong haseyo" (hello), I'm at a loss.
Fortunately, I've managed to meet a few more foreigners here in my town -- one through Maggie (the teacher I replaced), and another quite by accident on the trails just the other day. Dave, it turns out, is from Missouri (my old stomping grounds!) and a friendly guy. I met him at Maggie's farewell party, along with a handful of other foreigners. He's the only one who I've managed to meet up with again. He lives just down the hill and kindly called the other evening to see if I'd be up for a night walk around town. It was a perfect idea -- the temperature was cool, the air not too heavy, and the outskirts of Seosan are lined with astroturf trails, for the hundreds of locals who round out their evenings with a stretch of the legs as well.
Chett (or Chetty, as he likes to be called) is a South African native, teaching in a public school in town. He's been here for only a few short weeks longer than me. We were a few meters apart on the trail last Wednesday evening when a flash of recognition hit us both... recognition not of a familiar face, but of our "foreigner" status. Yes, this was the bond. We chatted for a minute, swapped email addresses, and both headed back out on the trail in opposite directions. It was a well-timed affair, and panned out well -- I had a chance to meet up with Chett and a lovely couple on Friday night while we bonded further over pizza at a cushy little joint near the movie theater.
I have to back up a bit, because this story has a bit of a funny beginning. I was on my way home from work Tuesday night when I turned the corner to hear some casual conversation floating out through an open window on the ground floor. At first, it didn't strike me as anything. I heard the clatter of dishes and thought, oh, a nice dinner conversation. And then it dawned on me that the conversation was not some caucophony of foreign sounds, but down-home English. I half considered rapping on the window and saying hello, but thought that might come off a bit too random. So I sauntered down the sidewalk and smiled at the thought that there were yet a few more friends yet to meet.
Friday night at the pizza joint I met up with Chett, and was introduced to Penny and Francis, a very chill and pleasant couple who had somehow managed to survive living on separate continents (Penny is from Australia, and Francis from South Africa) to teach in yet a third. I could tell right away I was in for a good evening. I hadn't been sitting for more than a minute when Penny said to me, "Hey, I know you! Your face is on a huge banner just around the corner from our apartment." And it was only then that I put it together -- they were the couple I had heard through the screen a few nights ago.
Over a large pan of pizza and a few pitchers to wash it down, we chatted together about everything from inequalities for women in Korean society, to teaching rambunctious kids (while at the same time pitying them for working longer days than most adults back home). And their adventures! The more I listened to my new friends' travels, the more I started to feel my own been-there-done-that list blend into the wallpaper... Chett had recently finished a two-month cycling trip through southern India, in which he had gone completely off the beaten track and managed to bunk down with locals along the way. Penny and Francis had just last year backpacked through Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos, and were in the final stages of planning their round-the-world trip to commence next month when they leave Korea. Still, I was happily in my element among these free spirits who, like me, have some inexplicable inner pull to cross oceans and traverse great expanses of land with little aside from the barest of essentials and a very open mind. It's this sameness that has brought us here to Seosan, I want to believe -- much moreso than the glimmering promise of cash to stash away. And it's somehow comforting that here, even in the counter-culture nomadic lifestyle I have chosen for myself, I am yet in the company of others whose passions are close to my heart.