Seoul, the First Time

David has been to Seoul before and I am tired and so as we enter the subway system, merging, floating along, and then breaking off from one churning tributary of commuters to the next, I keep my eyes on his backpack and follow in his wake all the way to our final destination. I feed the bills into the automatic ticket dispenser designated for visitors as instructed by both Dave and the (I am surprised to read) grammatically correct signage and I trust his reassurances or self-assurances that we are going the right way on the blue line. Just look at the map, he says. I look at the map and allow my vision to blur. I have complete faith in him and either way, we are in for a long ride.

We will be staying in Suji, David tells me, in Blake's apartment. Blake, a friend of Dave's and a friendly acquaintance of mine, had been given a real New Years break befitting a real school—a full week off which he had decided to spend sitting on beaches, eating cheaply, and watching cockfights all over the Philippines. Dave had been given a full week as well, but not everyone is so lucky. Thus prevented from journeying anywhere of real interest by my own more confining schedule and his own unwillingness to travel alone, Dave had abandoned his previous plans to spend the (Western) New Year in Hong Kong. As we disembarked at our first transfer point, Dave shook his head and smirked. “But really, who needs Manila, when you have Suji?”

It took us two and a half hours to get to our final stop. In the meantime, we transferred three times, left the Seoul Metropolitan self-governed area and crossed in the surrounding province (“enveloping Seoul like an amoeba,” Dave said), Gyeongi-do. Dave had other things to say about Gyeongi. “It's nothing but sprawl and highway. It's a cultural deadzone.” Dave had spent his Christmas in Pyeongtek, a town in southern Gyeongi that hosts a U.S. Military base and very little else. “Drunk assholes and row after row of samgyeopsal [Korean barbecue] restaurants.”

There was snow on the ground outside the subway station. Winding along the back of the terminal and bisecting one strip of brick-shaped apartment buildings, electrical appliance stores, and TGIFridays from another ran a shallow stream. We walked along it, crossing under a bridge and doing our best not to slip on the path. Patches of ice floated slowly down the river in brittle sheets.

Blake's apartment was everything that mine was not. Spacious and well-lit, it boasted such luxuries as a couch, a kitchen counter, a sink in the bathroom, and a glass shower door. There was a separate doorless room at the front with a separate bed. I would be sleeping there. That is, I would be sleeping on a bed, which is more than Dave could say of his accomodations in Tongyeong. I set my bags down and crossed the apartment to the glass windows overlooking the stream and the Lotte Mart across the street. The sun was beginning to set. I took a picture.

“God, my apartment sucks,” I marveled. It was a conclusion I had been slowly coming to since the beginning of the month. I had been told to expect the Spartan lifestyle as an ESL teacher living in Korea and so though my own apartment left much to be desired, I was for at least those first few weeks content to imagine that every other one of my colleagues and peers were living in similar discomfort and dilapidation. But having since attended a few parties in Tongyeong and hosted Dave for three days who slept on my floor and complained incessantly and having now come to Suji to see first hand what living conditions might be for an ESL teacher of similarly limited experience and qualification, I finally understood that the shittiness of my apartment was not just absolute but relative.

"Yup." Dave laughed, as he poured water into the back of the coffee machine--yet another accessory that could not possibly fit in my kitchen. “Your apartment sucks.”

We drank not-bad coffee while Dave formulated a plan. New Years Eve, we had both discussed earlier on the train, is a reliably disappointing holiday. There is the constant anxiety, heightened by meaningless symbolism and bad movies, in trying so desperately to make this the unforgettable denouncement worthy of the past year that, on second thought, wasn't all that great anyway. As far as both of us were concerned, New Years lacked both the ritual and the flare that other holidays used to distract you from the fact that, after all, what you are doing on this special night is almost exactly what you were doing last Friday night. There is the count down to midnight, in which a few hundred thousand strangers crush into a open square in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter, and a few hundred million more follow along from their living rooms, to watch a clock run out on yet another year spent alive. But as far as festive convention goes, on its face, this lacks the base appeal of, say, dressing up as a dead celebrity or eating until you want to vomit.

Our New Years doesn't mean much to Koreans anyway.

And so Dave started to formulate a plan to ensure that our time would be well spent and our expectations would be reasonable. No matter the details, our plan necessitated our staying in Seoul all night. This had much less to do with our festive exuberance and more to do with the fact that Seoul's entire transit system closes down at midnight. Even in this city of fifteen million people. Even on New Years.

According to the plan, our night would start off with a meal, and so, as the sun began to set in earnest, we took the elevator eight floors back down to the street. Our walk from the subway stop had been upon snow golden and reflective. Everything was now cast in a blue shadow and the air was suddenly frigid.

A few blocks away from the apartment, along what must have been the main-strip of Suji, a broad concrete corridor shadowed on both sides by office buildings taller than anything in Tongyeong, we found Dave's favorite gimbap restaurant in the area. I do not remember the name. Throughout Korea, in every town and city on any given block, one can invariably find this national equivalent of a greasy spoon. Most exist within the two most popular national franchises, Gimbap Nara and Gimbap Cheon Guk. But because the two corporations seem to have little interest in harmonizing the menus or prices or decors of their respective chains and because Korean fast food is relatively uniform anyway, it really doesn't matter what name you find displayed across the front on an orange colored sign in block font. The food is always good enough and it is always very cheap. We ordered dolsot bibimbap (bibimbap in a hot clay bowl) and a soup we had hoped was spicy beef but turned out to be tofu.My Korean is limited now--more so then.

Next was the jimjillbang. I had never been to one. Dave had, though only once and only a week before. Nevertheless, he was excited.

"I think this is kind of a big deal," he kept saying as we walked the three blocks to the entrance of the bath house, an arch covered set of stairs descending from the middle of the sidewalk to a neutral toned anteroom below. He had been saying it since arriving in Tongyeong at the beginning of the week. "I mean, it isn't a huge deal. You get used to it really quickly. But at the same time..." Dave was weighing his words, not out of any lack of confidence on his part, but I suspect in anticipation of any awkwardness on mine. "But at the same time, we've never seen each others penises!"

How right he was and I conceded as much. But where as he, having been baptized into the jimjillbanging way of life a week earlier by Blake, saw this is as a glaring fault in what I had mistakenly assumed to be a perfectly functional friendship, I regarded as perfectly healthy. Or to put things more accurately, I'd never really thought about it.

Dave and I had lived together for three years, but his room had been upstairs while mine had been in the basement. We were both relatively private people, in any event, and the fact that neither of us ever paraded around the house naked didn't strike me as symptomatic of anything else than a perfectly well-adjusted sense of modesty on both our parts.

But Blake had made a convert of him and now, with the zeal of a missionary, Dave was calling upon me to take part in this right of passage with him, to scrub away with a rough sodden towel my vestigial prudishness, and to witness his penis. "I mean, isn't that weird?" he kept saying. "We lived together for so long!"

"I don't know," I said, feigning nonchalance as best I could. We slipped our shoes off at the bottom of the stairs. A long corridor extended to our left on an elevated wood paneled floor. "I figured it had just never come up."

Blake had changed Dave's worldview about all things corporeal, I was sure of it now. I had noticed it on Dave's first night in Tongyeong. It had taken very little makgeolli before Dave began espousing in great detail on all manner of things sexual. Or at least, so it seemed coming from Dave, a cautious personality in any event, though particularly about sex. If any clarification is needed, Dave and I are not "guy's guys" and to the extent that either of us harbor such bawdy tendencies, they were never drawn out by the particular chemistry of our friendship. He and I would likely feel more at ease talking about feminism, or better yet, video games and politics and movies.

At the end of the corridor, two women stood behind a broad dark wooden desk. Two smaller passage ways branched off on either side of the room, both coming quickly to blind turns. I covered Dave's 6,000 won entrance fee and we were both presented with numbered keys. "For the lockers," Dave explained. We took the corridor to our left.

We emerged in a locker room, but that isn't really the right term. "Locker room" implies cold steel and impersonal towel snapping; this was something completely different. The floors were padded and a widescreen T.V. donned one of the walls. Before it, splayed out in all stages of distress upon a cushioned and elevated cube in the center of the room were a half dozen Korean men. Most of them were old and most of them let us sidle by the screen and into the second aisle of lockers without so much as taking their eyes off the flickering screen.

Dave and I found our respective cabinets, side by side, and unlocked them. We loaded our backpacks and then our jackets. Next, we threw in our socks and then our sweaters and shirts. We stood there for a second, standing in our pants and nothing else, looking into our lockers and not at each other. "Well," Dave cleared his throat. "Here we go."

And then we were both naked. Dave walked ahead of me, back into the central room with the TV and the luxuriating pensioners and, I only noticed then, a fully stocked snack and beverage bar. Dave is very tall. His back seemed to stretch on forever.

At the other end of the room, two steps and a tile platform led to a glass wall with two glass doors, either one of which could have been the designated entrance to the sauna, but it was impossible to tell. At one side of the doors sat a steel cart stacked with paper thin strips of polyester towels. Dave grabbed two before pushing on one of the glass doors into the steam.

There is such a thing as jimjillbang etiquette. As Dave led me to the row of stall-less showers in one corner of the room, explaining to me the importance of showering before using any of the other facilities, it seemed only a matter of time before I would unknowingly but unforgivably breach one of the established and unwritten rules. It seemed only a matter of time before I would be expelled from the building in a flurry of hisses and unintelligible insults. Looking around the room at the raisin-fingered clientele of no one but pudgy Korean men, I wasn't sure that our mere presence hadn't already put us in some for of violation.

But surprisingly enough and in sharp, almost disappointing contradiction to what I had heard from Greg and Britney and Zibby, Dave and I garnered little attention. The men all seemed perfectly content to ignore us--along with everyone else in the room for that matter--choosing instead to waddle back and forth between the different pools of differing temperatures, to perspire with sullen expressions in the steam-rooms and saunas, or to lay motionless, like beached sea mammals, on one of the two beds in the left corner of the room, where, for a fee of twenty-thousand won, a wirey man in short-shorts and a hairnet would subject himself to Korea's most thankless job: the task of scrubbing the dead skin off of every inch of a persons naked body with a towel the texture of steel wool.

Except for the intermittent spray from the showers or the occasional grunt or guttural sigh of a bather getting into the cold tub, the room was quiet. In this respect, the behavioral protocol didn't seem so different from what you might find in men's public restrooms everywhere: go about your business quickly and don't look anyone in the eye.

The three main hot-tubs were situated corner to corner at the center of the room; a tiled platform filled the place of the expected forth. Two men lay on the platform, prostrate and somber, as Dave and I got into the tub beside it.

I do not remember what Dave and I talked about. I doubt it was anything important. We didn't have any clothes on but it was surprising how quickly that stopped making a difference. With our backs against one of the ledges of the hot-tub, a particularly ungraceful man slowly mounted one of the beds directly in front of us and collapsed upon his back. With the heels of his feet pointing directly towards us and his legs falling open loosely, Dave and I suddenly found ourselves at a unique vantage point. The wirey man with the hairnet immediately went to work, emotionlessly scrubbing with controlled and dignified vigor. Atop and around the truck of his client, he then proceeded downward, working his way down the sides of the legs and then back upward between them. The man was thorough and professional. Dave and I were horrified and impressed. The demeanor he employed as he used the back of his left hand to part the scrotum to one side can only be described as casual.

“Let's try out the steamroom,” Dave suggested.

We emerged from the subterranean sauna an hour later into a black sky no longer flirting with the notion of sunset. The air was frigid and still, but Dave and I seemed to have retained a bit of the warmth of the hot tubs. Our muscles were loosened. We were both relaxed, but alert; we were ready to get to Seoul. We dropped our clothes off at Blake's apartment and made our way to the subway. It was 9:30. “No rush,” Dave maintained, and I believed him. “As long as we're in Hongdae before midnight, we have an entire night to kill, so why not pace ourselves a bit?”

We were not in Hongdae by midnight. Instead, failing to take into account the probability of our getting lost within one of the many line intersections at which we had to transfer, and failing to predict that one of our trains would suddenly eject us and everyone else aboard it at a station five minutes from our destination, leaving us to wait for another train for another ten, we spent the last seconds of 2009 on the subway. “Congratulations,” I told Dave. “This year sucked and now it's over.” I took a picture.

We got off the subway around Hongik University and Dave made a phone call. We would be meeting a friend of his from Gangneung, he told me. “She's a nice person,” he said, which sounded preemptive. I waited. “I guess she can be kind of militant about some of her beliefs and I think some people find that kind of alienating.”

“What kind of beliefs?” We passed a number of clubs on our way into the heart of Hongdae. Lines of waiting, smoking, and screaming customers spilling out onto the sidewalk, forcing us to walk around them onto the street amongst the crush of cars.

“Well, she's very liberal,” Dave explained over his shoulder. “But she's also a Mormon and really has a thing against feminism.”

I shook my head. “I don't understand.”

Dave shrugged. “She's with a couple friends of hers at a jazz bar, so you can ask her then.” And then a second later: "On second thought, don't."

We cut over the top of a small park filled with skating college kids, idling scooters, and a few huddles of frugal drinkers priming themselves from plastic bottles before heading to the clubs and bars. On the other side was Hongdae proper—busy, but not as busy as you might expect if you actually thought Koreans cared much about the Western New Year. We hurried down the hill before turning onto a tree lined street lit with white Christmas lights and neon bar signs.

In retrospect, my incuriousity surprises me. As we wondered through the neighborhood, I thought very little about where we were in relation to anything else in Seoul, about the university itself and its relative importance in Korea or about the students that surrounded us. I suppose I might have felt overwhelmed; maybe I felt that to ask a question would only invite ten more and that to try to understand Seoul by any other method than that of living there for five years was a wasted effort. Or maybe I figured Dave wouldn't know the answers to any of my questions anyway. Either way, what I did comment upon, and repeatedly, was the sudden diversity.

“Look at all these white people!” I had seen a few on the subway, but in Hongdae they seemed to be everywhere. White, but black and brown too. We passed them all as we hurried along the sidewalk. I had no idea where to look. Tongyeong is a small enough town that, upon seeing another non-Korean face, it is usually acceptable to presume that the two of you will meet somewhere some other time anyway and so a nod of the head, if not a full introduction, is usually in order. But this was entirely different.

Dave laughed. “Wait until we go to Itaewon." I had no idea what he was talking about.

We found Dave's friend at a jazz bar. Rachel, the anti-feminist Mormon liberal, came out to meet us. The bar was down a flight of stairs, underground. The lighting was low, coming mostly from candles. The wood-paneled walls of the small, toasty room hung with framed records, posters, and photos. Billy Holiday was playing somewhere. I remember everything smelling very nice, but I may have added this detail since.

Rachel was sitting in the corner with her two friends: Theo, a fellow Oklahoman, and Hyunwoo, a Korean university student studying in Gangneung, but who grew up in Seoul. Rachel asked me where I'm from.

“San Francisco,” I told her. She put down her lemonade and smiled.

“Are you gay?” Dave shifted in his chair. If I had had the presence of mind to respond with the appropriate level of sarcasm and snark, I might have made a crack about Oklahoma or about how, as a matter of fact, it was because of my heterosexuality that I had been deported from the city, or simply responded with a straight-faced “yes,” if only to see how she might respond. But I did not have the presence of mind. I just shook my head. “Why don't we order a drink?” Dave suggested.

After the jazz bar, we made our way to, of all places, a fried chicken restaurant, where we ate an irresponsible amount of fried food and started to feel sleepy. At some point, David's other friend from Gangneung showed up. Luke was his name: an earnest Catholic and, as Dave puts it, an “absurdly good person.” Luke was with an entourage of Americans, friends of his girlfriend whom Luke had met on a social networking site for young absurdly good Catholics. From the restaurant, we then proceeded to a noraebang, which at the time didn't seem nearly as predictable and tired a suggestion as it does now or as it did once we'd finished at six in the morning.

Dave checked his watch as we emerged into the breaking daylight. “I think we can go home now. The subway should be running again.”

The struggle not only stay awake but to maintain the cognizance required of us to make our various connections from line to line over the course of the next two hours is difficult to describe. It was endured at first with manic incomprehensible humor and then with seemingly profound effusions about the nature of commuting and urban life and then finally, at around 7:30 in the morning, having finally reached the yellow line, in absolute silence. The train surfaced a few stations before ours somewhere in Gyeongi-do and suddenly the cabin was full of golden sunlight.

We slept until 1pm, which was not late enough. We were both exhausted and I felt nauseous. My stomach felt tight and I had a dull headache. I hadn't had so much to drink the night before, I maintained. It seemed unfair and it was raining. “We could go downtown,” Dave ventured, but neither of us really entertained the idea. We spent the remainder of the day eating bland starchy food and watching movies on Blake's T.V.. It was an auspicious beginning to the new year.

The next day was Saturday and I still felt ill. Dave handed me a can of clubsoda. “We really ought to get into town today.” This was my first time in Seoul and I wanted to see more than a single neighborhood and four lines of the subway system, so of course I agreed with him.

“We won't have to take the subway this time though,” Dave mentioned casually. “Now that I think about it, Blake wrote down the number of a bus we can catch into Seoul. Maybe it's a little quicker.” It was a little quicker. The trip took forty minutes. If I hadn't been so preoccupied with not throwing up in the overheated steamy cabin of the bus, I might have been angry with Dave for failing to remember this route the day before. Instead, I just focused on breathing slowly and keeping my eyes closed. "We'll be getting off at the border of Insadong," Dave told me. "Where Insa-dong meets Myeong-dong." Dave was looking at the map plastered to the curved ceiling of the bus. These names meant nothing to me and I didn't care.

Insadong, it turns out, is the center of Seoul's nostalgia industry. The neighborhood is spattered with palaces varying in degree of importance and touristic interest and running down the center of district is a thriving, presumably overpriced antique market. But Dave and I were not there to take a walking tour or buy knickknacks. Instead, we would be meeting another one of Dave's friends from Gangneung, Andrew, at the Insadong music market, a massive bazaar of musical instruments and digital noisemakers of every sort. The original plan was that Andrew would meet us in Seoul on New Years Eve. But he had come down with food poisoning the night before and so instead we found him perusing the selection of speakers having just arrived in the city by bus.

He seemed preoccupied with his search for a particular kind of mixing device that I did not and still do not really understand the purpose of, even though he explained it to me twice over the course of the afternoon. Either way, he was only going to find one within his price range with a bit of luck, so our introduction was brief. Leaving him to hunt on, Dave and I wondered aimlessly up and down the aisles of pianos, drums, guitars, violins, and more guitars. Despite the sheer concentration of musical equipment--the market took up two floors, each the size of a small city block--the prices did not seem to reflect the degree of competition and the salesmen were too pushy to allow us any decent noodling or experimentation, so the only fun to be had was in looking. The market proved to be a disappointment for Andrew too, who wasn't able to find what he was looking for. We decided to get lunch.

Andrew's personality was remarkable in its intensity. He seemed to hold strong opinions on subjects that did not necessarily invite the formulation of a strong opinion. On our subway trip back towards Hongdae, he mentioned that he had once been a bike messenger, which seemed fitting, and that he had recently shaved his head for the sole purpose of freaking Koreans out. His stance on the subject of fixed-gear bicycles was developed and unwavering. If it sounds as if I am calling Andrew an asshole, I am being unfair. He was and presumably continues to be, a nice enough person. And after all, it's difficult to judge a guy's disposition too precisely half a day after he's recovered from food poisoning.

His appetite seemed healthy enough at lunch though. Before leaving Tongyeong, my coworker Eli had suggested the most unlikely of restaurants: Dos Tacos, a Mexican restaurant in the middle of Seoul. And whereas I might have regarded the suggestion with skepticism had it come from anyone else, Eli is a Texan and a Texan, no less, who had served me better-than-decent burritos a few weeks earlier. Culinarily speaking, he seemed like a man who could be trusted.

The trust was not misplaced. The tacos were good; void of American cheese and anything Korean, much to my relief. This, coupled with the sheer excitement of eating Mexican food in a restaurant, in Seoul, in Korea, sent the three of us into convulsions of stomach pats, fist pumps, and high-fives. I order more than I needed and washed it down with horchata.

The rest of the afternoon, which warrants only a brief mention, was spent at Yongsan Electronics Market, a network of stores, underground bazaars, and towering emporiums offering every imaginable kind of monitor, mixer, processor, and amplifier, so many of the products of questionable utility, their sale of questionable legality, all of them priced beyond my interest. Andrew, at long last, found his mysterious piece of hardware. Dave flirted and then decided against buying a keyboard. I no longer felt nauseous, but my stomach was still tight and generally upset. I spent a lot of time walking in progressively wider circles, mindlessly pushing and toggling buttons and nobs and then quickly moving on. Not quite soon enough, we left the complex, using the grandiose front steps of a labyrinthine mall it had taken us nearly thirty minutes to extricate ourselves from. And then we headed to Itaewon.

Like Chinatown, Koreatown, or Japantown, Americatown seems just as appropriate. Itaewon is the epicenter of America's unmistakable presence in Seoul. The neighborhood is a preponderance of chain restaurants and dirty-sloganned English T-shirt vendors. Its corners are dominated by Irish pubs and German beer halls managed and frequented by Americans. English is the unofficial official language in this neighborhood in which every storefront, restaurant, and street stall bears witness to the most obnoxious elements of the ESL teacher community and the American military. One is more likely to hear the Carolinas (North and South) than the Gyeongsangs (Buk or Nam) in the half-drunken shouts of the sidewalk bustle.

After stopping in at a coffee shop to warm up and kill time--time I spent sipping water and wrestling with the vice upon my stomach from a sitting position--we climbed Hooker Hill. I am almost positive that this is not the direct translation. Stopping upon our accent at, of all things, Seoul's premier English bookstore, What the Book, we then proceeded down the other side. I announced my reservations, couched in a vague morality that may or may not have concealed the fact that the neighborhood just gave me the heebie-jeebies. A lone woman walking ahead of us along one of the narrow serpentine roads slowed as we approached. Suddenly she turned with her hands outstretched. The street lights were few and far between and I could barely see her face except for the sheen of heavily caked-on make-up. We waved our hands and moved on.

There was nothing lude about the brothels that we passed at a steep clip. With their blinds drawn, they might have been empty except that with every other step, out of the corner of our eyes, we would catch the parting of a curtain and the glance of calculating and dispassionate eyes.

We met Rachel and Theo at the subway. Dave had, once again with very little interest or participation on my part, coordinated the night's event: we would all be having dinner together at a Thai restaurant. The restaurant in question was Rachel's choice. She had never been there before; she consulted the scrap of paper a colleague had provided her."It's called...'Buddha's Belly?'" As coincidence would have it, I recalled only because of the distinctive name, Eli had spoken highly of the place as well. With my clothing still smelling of tacos, that was good enough for me.

Tucked along a narrow street that ran parallel to Itaewon's gaudy main drag, Buddha's Belly sat perched on a second floor like a secret, accessible only be a narrow iron staircase. Once inside, I immediately noticed the candle light and the wine glasses at each table. Innocuous orientalist techno thumped steadily from high quality speakers. Everywhere one looked there was muted earth tone and stainless steel.

"Wow," went the collective first impression.

"I think I'm under-dressed," I said.

"This doesn't feel like Korea," said Theo.

"This feels like a nice "real" restaurant," Dave agreed.

Rachel nodded. "A nice restaurant in a big North American city."

"This feels like the Seoul that Seoul aspires to be," said Andrew.

We all sat down and ordered. The prices were not as high as I had expected and the meal was delicious. I wish I could have enjoyed it more, but my stomach was being unreceptive. It felt as though I had swallowed a block of cement; I could not finish my meal.

The bus-ride home was uneventful in a way that it almost wasn't given the wave of nausea that once again swept over me. Back in the apartment, Dave and I watched a bad sci-fi movie. It was nearly three in the morning before we got into our respective beds.

"We'll all grab lunch tomorrow morning," Dave said from his end of the apartment. "Good night."

"All?"

"You and me and Blake. Blake is getting in tomorrow."

"What time?"

"He should get in at around six a.m.," Dave explained. "Good night." I took a long drink of water to calm my stomach, curled up against the wall, and fell asleep.

I woke up three hours later to a battering ram. I sat up immediately. My forehead was damp and pounding and the room was dark. Then came the pounding again. Someone was at the door. With my room at the front, it was left to me to leap out of bed and stumble to the door, tripping over bags and snowboots on the way. It was Blake of course. It was still dark out.

"Rise and shine, fuckers!" he shouted. Dave groaned from the other room. I stuck out my hand feebly. "Welcome home." Giving my hand a firm shake, Blake grinned, kicked off his shoes, and came in. He looked tan and relaxed. More than anything, he was loud. My temples were pounding.

"How's everything? How was your weekend? The Philippines were fucking gorgeous!"

Dave groaned again from the other room. I went into the bathroom and threw up.

I could hear Blake putting his bag down in the other room. "What that?" he asked Dave. "Is he joking?"

"Poor Ben," Dave said, finally waking.

"No, this is good," I called out from the bathroom. "Finally." I rinsed out my mouth in the sink and strode back into the kitchen. I filled a glass of water and downed it quickly.

"Yeah, that's it," Blake said. "Wash all that down with some poison water."

It took a moment for that to settle. About as long, incidentally, as it took for the water to settle heavily in my stomach. "Say again?"

"The water here," Blake said. "Seoul water. It's bad water. You should boil it first." I looked at Dave and Dave looked at me. How were us small town folk to know such things? I went back to sleep.

The three of us ended up grabbing lunch. After a few hours of no tap water and a few antacid tablets, I was already feeling better. We ordered beef soup at Blake's favorite neighborhood restaurant and we talked about the Phillippines and then jimjillbangs and then Korea in general. Blake was at the tail end of his contract. He had already purchased his plane tickets for his post-Korea trip throughout Indonesia. He was sick of Suji and he was sick of little kids.

Before we left for the bus terminal, Blake took us up to the roof of his apartment. He told us about his suburb, about how so much of it had not been there only fifteen years early, how the entire country was like that and how that unmistakably explained so much of the modern Korean psyche. Don't get me wrong: we also made a lot of penis jokes. All hours counted, Blake and I spent only a negligible amount of time together. But as so frequently occurs between ex-pats in Korea or the marooned or imprisoned, I left with an immense fondness for Blake. But that might be giving our circumstances too much credit.

The bus-ride home was long and mostly dark. Almost immediately, the windows fogged and the heat blasted. I listened to music, drifting in and out of sleep. Before long, I was back in Tongyeong, spent, sick, regretting my return, but somehow revitalized despite all that.