Visiting

The best part about working at KFS is the amount of time I'm not required to be there. I got a good three weeks off for Christmas; the typical hagwon teacher gets one solitary day. So, to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, my girlfriend Toni and I took a shlep through the only nearby countries virtually guaranteed to be Christian-free: Malaysia and Thailand. Let me tell you: it was a good call.

Malaysia is a strange place. It's a cultural melting pot but also fiercely Islamic; it's got a fantastic influx of oil wealth and foreign investment, and yet it's still in relatively early stages of economic development; and while nearly everyone speaks English, the taxi drivers still pretend not to understand when you ask them to just use the meter.

Kuala Lumpur is cool. It's famous for these,
The Petronas Towers. Toni and I went up to the Skybridge, but before they let us on the elevator we had to sit through a 12-minute video telling us about how great the Petronas Corporation is for us. Pictures of smiling children, new houses, etc. Look what having an offshore oilfield can do for you! Though to be fair, the Towers were really cool.








Here's a shot from the Skybridge. It's a little fuzzy because we were in a cloud.














Nearby KL are the Batu Caves, a series of big 'ol limestone caverns that have been converted into a Hindu holy site/capitalist tourism bonanza. This statue is Lord Murugan, to whom the temple is dedicated. He is tall.












The caves are the perfect place for a spiritual experience: dimly-lit, stalactite-filled, and ethereal. So naturally I went straight to hanging out with the monkeys, who populate the caves in great abundance, due almost certainly to the huge amount of people-food that gets thrown to them daily.

I guess I should include a photo of the caves, too.
From KL we headed to a little island called Pulau Pangkor off the west coast, where we stayed at a nice little place run by some nice little people. Lowlights were confined to the both of us sick and confined to the bed/bathroom on Christmas. On the other hand, highlights ranged from renting a scooter and circumnavigating the island to drinking fresh fruit juice all the time, floating in the ocean, and making friends with the Jungle Puppies, a litter of pups we found living in a pile of trash in the jungle.





Awwwww.




Next: Thailand. This part was going to be easy: bus to Butterworth, Malaysia; overnight bus to the Similan Islands, Thailand. Ha!

We arrived at the Butterworth bus station on the 26th to discover that there wasn't a bus station. Butterworth, just so you know, is a city of over 100,000 people. Yet the bus station is a parking lot - an unpaved one, for that matter. After being herded off the bus and wandering around the parking lot for a while, we discovered the ticket booth, which is in fact an unlabeled shack by the road. The lady in said shack said that the overnight buses weren't running since it was the day after Christmas. The next bus left at 5:30 am. Toni and I, undeterred, found the least sketchy hotel we could find (all the places in the area charge by the hour) and hit the hay. The next day, which happened to be my birthday, went as follows:

5:30 am - arrive at bus terminal to discover that our bus is actually a minibus with no room for us or our luggage. We squeeze in anyway.

7:30 am - we arrive at the Thai border where we are instucted to hand our passports to the driver, who promptly disappears.

8:00 am to 11:30 am - wait in line to get through the border.

11:31 am - a family of 30 unnecessarily sweaty folk attempt to cut me. Elbows get involved, but no eye contact. I am larger and I win.

11:35 am - back on the bus. Passport has reappeared.

1:30 pm - Bus driver drops Toni and I off on the side of the road somewhere in Hat Yai. Another minibus picks us up. Onward.

3:00 pm - bus arrives at a parking lot with a small building on it. Toni and I are sent into the building to wait for a different bus. I am still not sure where exactly this place was.

4:00 pm - our other minibus arrives, the impatient driver sends us aboard.

4:01 pm to 4:35 pm - the impatient bus driver idles the bus' engine and stands outside smoking cigarettes. I contemplate hijacking the bus and driving to the Similans my own damn self, but I refrain, in large part because I don't know where I am.

6:00 pm - Impatient bus driver turns left where I know he's supposed to turn right. My free tourist map says so. I say something to him, but he ignores me/doesn't speak English.

6:10 pm - we definitely should have turned right back there. I show him the map, he swears in Thai, and points to his head while making that wide-eyed "Aw shucks, I forgot!" face. He does not, however, turn around.

6:40 pm - impatient driver drops Toni and me off at a convenience store by the side of the road outside Phuket. He explains the situation to the owner, who relays to Toni and I that a bus to the Similans will be coming by soon, and we need to buy a ticket. Impatient bus driver skedaddles off before I can get my money back.

6:45 pm - in a flash of insight, I ask the convenience store owner to call the Similan Islands' bungalow office and double-check on my reservations. After about 20 minutes I get on the phone with an English-speaking employee, and start getting a bad feeling.

7:15 pm - the bus to the Similans arrives. Our "bus tickets" apparently didn't guarantee us seats, or even walls, for that matter; fortunately, it is at this very moment that the Similan employee finally gives up the truth: our reservations have vanished. The bus goes on without us.

9:30 pm - we follow the convenience store owner's hot tip and make it to a bungalow place not too far away from the beach. I am tired, sick, and have not eaten in 36 hours. Still - all in all, not a bad birthday.

Yikes, this post is too long. To be continued.

Waeg'in'

Remember the county fair you went to as a kid? With the petting zoo and the fried dough and the horrible rides that were all just spinning things with different axes of rotation? Well, Gwangju is like that, except there are no llamas or Tilt-a-Whirls: the attraction is you.

By "you" I mean probably you; that is to say, someone who isn't from Korea and looks that way. The Korean word for "foreigner" is waegukin or waeguksaram, or literally translated, "person from not here." And it's a word that gets thrown around a lot, not like in America, where really almost everyone is a foreigner if you go back four or five generations. Children in particular are fond of pointing me out to their friends, parents, or people on the street and proclaiming "waegukin!" as if I need to be viewed immediately before I melt into the ground or vanish in a puff of pink butterflies or something. They might as well, I guess, since it's not considered particularly rude, and everyone knows that waegukin can't speak Korean, so really, what's the harm?
My favorites are probably the children that are still too young to fully articulate a sentence but old enough to know that I look different, perhaps fundamentally so, than they do. They've been the source of the best double-takes I've ever seen. I almost accidentally killed one kid in the food court when I stood up to put away my tray; he was so shocked to see me that he began choking on his kimchi. Another time involved a kid at the bakery who spun around for a second look so fast that the torque from his head pulled his whole body into a spin. He clearly hadn't been walking for too long and hadn't expected this contingency, so he fell on his face and started crying. His mom rushed over to gather him up, glaring at me while doing it, as if the whole thing had been my fault. I need to learn how to say "What, lady??" in Korean.
Of course, the attention is not limited to children. They're just the most obvious about it. Adults are also very interested in waegukin, but they know that they're not really supposed to be, so I find myself playing a bizarre game of Red Light Green Light whenever I'm in a public setting. They look at me, I look at them, they look away, I look away, we repeat. This happens most often at the grocery store, where my choice of food generates a surprising amount of interest. I haven't yet had anyone stick their head into my shopping cart yet, which happened to a co-worker, but I've seen many a neck craning over to catch a glimpse of my cereal or orange juice when I get to check out. Occasionally people forget what they're doing, too; I'm just waiting for the day when the person in front of me gets so out of sorts that they walk out of the store without their food. It'll happen.

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A month ago I was downtown with some friends. One of them looked over my shoulder and said in an excited whisper, "Look! A midget!" I'll be honest - I snuck a glance. Of course, I immediately felt guilty, and still do, but I'll still probably do it again. I am sorry.

There are over 200 conditions that cause dwarfism, which is defined as simply being less than 4 feet 10 inches tall when fully grown. Dwarfism affects around 1 person in 19,000. Here in Gwangju, waegukin-ism affects 1 person in about 2,000, so we're more common than little people (the word "midget" is most decidedly not PC), but we're still an oddity, to be sure. Add to that the hillariously ironic inability of Koreans to tell white people apart - people have told me that I look like everyone from David Beckham to "Spiderman" - and all the staring ceases to be much of a surprise. I mean, if Tobey McGuire was in line behind you at the Safeway, you'd notice, right?

And you know what else? Waegukin are kinda goofy. We're too tall, we have big feet and wide eyes, and let's face it, sometimes we do silly things in public. No, this doesn't really excuse all the staring and whispering and pointing, but come on. From time to time, we deserve it.