Wide-Eyed Wanderer Adventures

05/24/2013 Tonsai Beach, Thailand Home, Sweet Home!  Photo credit:  www.lederhosening.com I come out onto my patio and see a root of a banyan tree wiggle. Wait. That's no root. That's an iguana camouflaging as one – humbly looking for breakfast. A big one. Craggy karst rocks pierce the horizon in Pandora-esque starkness. The sky is crochet with a white-to-lilac cumulus nimbus, the temperature gently hovering around the “just perfect” mark. A hammock rocks gently under a leafy tree in the winds of the Andaman, as the milky-turquoise steamy waves sing a hymn to this paradise. In that hammock no more than a few metres from the shore, lays a blond girl clad in diaphanous raw silk holding a furry black cat. She is me. Azure butterflies sprinkle themselves like oversized confetti throughout the jungle. The bull frogs vibrate the jungle with moans that would put most peacocks in heat to shame. The cicadas cast their hypnotic spell over the fecund forest on the s...

May 3, 2013 Jeonju, South Korea Yin-Yang Weather I have never realized how much the weather could matter to one's well-being. One of the rarely advertised features of the misnomer that is the “Land of the Morning Calm,” [a.k.a. Korea], is its wildly unpredictable but consistently unpleasant weather roller-coaster. And, of course, the seriously subzero winters that feel about 10 C colder than they actually are due to extreme humidity. The weather, like the country itself, is bipolar. Day-night gradient is 20-30C easily. The nights are moist, all-penetrating cold that one needs winter gear for in May. The days – one could walk in a t-shirt. Add to that the frequent, unpredictable rain, and you more or less have the picture. I have never been so irrationally pissed off by the weather. Until Korea. Wise Russians say: “there is no bad weather – just bad clothes.” Perhaps - in fact, until I came here, I believed them. Or maybe they just haven't been to Korea....

3-24-2013 Jeonju, South Korea The Kingdom of the Neon God – a K orean K onundrum Soul can be so geometric! A glass tsunami....a kinky building or ten. “ And the people bowed and prayed...to the Neon God they made.” ~ Simon & Garfunkel That is what Korea feels like to me. Sometimes I think, a writer's body is like that of a woman – if the old blood doesn't come out, she feels crummy. There's something in a writer's system that makes it mandatory to distill that dry residue of one's experience periodically and let it out into the world. Being a neophyte waygook, I've been observing the ways of Korea with the eyes of a curious, somewhat impartial outsider. And, I must say, I've NEVER been to a country with which I feel less resonance. Not ever. I now realize poignantly my naivete thinking that just because I've spent over a year trotting around many parts of Asia, Korea would be anything like them. Even remotely relatable. It ...

01.28.2013 Seoul, South Korea My Jjimjilbanging Seoul Korea is a busy place. The work hours are long and vacations are short for most locals. A 12 hour work day is customary. A five-day a year vacation – a norm. The kids are not exempt from this working frenzy – an average child attends 4 after-school academies, making “Johnny a dull boy.” Yet, no complaint is to be heard. Neither from an adult nor from a child. To a question “How do you do it?” a frequent response is “oh, it's just my job...” while the kids just shrug their shoulders as if it hasn't even occurred for them to question this state of affairs. Truly, a a curious way of acceptance. However, I believe, there is one “escape hatch” that helps Koreans brave the freezing winters and intense working conditions in this tiny, densely-populated country. The Jjimjilbangs, a Korean spin on the Roman Baths, and Oncheon – jjimjilbangs built on the natural hot springs, of which there are over 400 in Korea. If...