<

I am going to recap Taiwan in three long posts. I just need words, herbal tea, and time. Memory, be persistent. This is post number three.

We were still awake around one in the morning on Monday when I saw a sign in the bathroom that said there would be no water in the pipes starting at 8am for several days. NO WATER. This was the last day in this hostel, but I couldn’t imagine not being able to shower or wash my hands during normal hours for several days on end. Dani and I took showers at that moment. When we woke up, sure thing, no water in the pipes. Awesome. We checked out. The lesbians were much happier with us at this point and even smiled at us. Maybe they just needed time to warm up to us? Too bad, because we liked them when they were smiling at us.

We went to the post office so I could mail postcards back home. Two people cut in front of me in line, but with limited Chinese language knowledge, I just submissively accepted it. I didn’t know if I could muster a sarcastic “hello” or “thank you.” Can Chinese sound sarcastic? I don’t know.

Dani and I found a hardware store to buy a few things before we headed to the airport. We found $3 dildos in the hammer, nails and screws section. They were called “lady massages” and were advertised for “healthy well being.” Haven’t seen that in Korea yet. We had a good laugh.

We took the subway to a station where we believed we could find a bus to take us to the airport. Please understand that most of our trip went this way. We would “believe” things about how to get places by what we could piece together on the internet and from what other people had overheard from others. Surprisingly, everything panned out, and we got all over Taipei cheaply, safely, and quickly.

I bought bus tickets from a lady on the street. After several minutes of the mysterious bus not showing up, I began to worry that we had gotten scammed and no bus was coming. And the lady disappeared! I think it was the heat and exhaustion making me loopy, because when the bus arrived a few minutes later, I had lost my ticket. I lost my ticket in maybe 10-15 minutes. Fortunately, Dani found it a few feet behind me. I guess I threw my ticket down on the ground at some point…?

I ate some nasty bulgogi on the airplane. Once we landed in Seoul, we trekked to the Yellow Submarine hostel, which is a great place. Dani did a double take at the half naked Aussies in our room. Our nights in Seoul got off to a bad start since I got carded at Zen Bar and had no ID. I do not look young enough to be a Korean minor. I think they were just being jerks. No big deal, because we had delicious burritos, girly drinks and two for one hookah.

On Tuesday Dani developed a crush on an Italian girl before I even woke up. We went shopping at H&M and Forever 21. I bought a potentially awesome (or possibly awful) red dress and cute brown shoes. Had the best Indian food in Seoul for half the price of the mediocre Indian food in Busan.

We had dinner and drinks with the Aussies in Itaewon. We explored the wrong street, saw a lot of transgendered prostitutes, and angry military guys. Eventually ended up at Rocky Mountain Tavern and then drank in the park with some creepy dude that was taking pictures of us with his camera phone. If you see pictures or video of me floating around the internet in a floral dress, drinking in a dark park with Dani and two extremely tall gentlemen, you know where they’re from now.

On Wednesday, we packed up, had strong coffee, said good bye to Henry and bought train tickets. Of course this is the day I lose something. Henry said he found it on my bed and will mail it to me Busan. So kind! At the end of the train ride, we lost the Australians. Dani and I dropped our bags off at our apartments, changed our clothes, and then enjoyed delicious Italian food in KSU. That’s also when we wrote out the list of things we did, which is what I based these posts on.

Our vacation was mind blowing. I am so happy I left Busan. It was exactly what I needed to recharge, reorganize my thoughts, and get my head back on. I cannot wait to see the three people I love the most next month! I also cannot wait for all the good times to be had before then as well. Wooooooo!

“She wanted to be a Jew but at the same time couldn’t stop admiring Louis Ferdinand Celine. This attraction for his writing, for his “little music” was making her sick. How could she forget his most anti-semitic pamphlets? How could she forget this man’s most disgusting tendencies just because he was a genius? Just because her teachers, backed up by the french self -righteous intelligentsia were arguying  that he never developped any racist theories in his novels. Was it possible for her to love the writer and deeply despise the man?  

As she was spending her time criticizing all those men and women who, for a few euros and scraps of power, make pacts with more than questionable regimes and people; she, a little French girl with a lack of role models, was finding herself in the evening, turning the pages of a novel written by a man who, in some second hand newspaper articles, praised Hitler. She, the sanctimonious one who often thought of herself as a humanist, was falling asleep, rocked and moved by the sentences of a collaborator and was justifying it by saying that genius excuses it all, and that art transcends everything.

She was the worst of all. The most dangerous kind of collaborator.
The kind that hides behind works of art forgetting, oh too often, that they are the vector of the worst atrocities and that beauty –this powder thrown at gullible ignorant’s’ eyes- is nothing but the projection of the fantasies of those who have never done anything else but watch trains passing by without even bothering to wonder what their destination was.”

Of the spam form, that is.

I recently did a Google search for “Busan Department Store” - I probably left out the capitalization.

The second link was for Asia rooms , which gave me this paragraph:

In Busan, shopping in one of the best activities to indulge in as the city affords its visitors a range of choices and provisions. In Busan in Korea, you can expect the same kind of experience as you would from any progressive global culture. One of the many tempting shopping destinations in the city is the Busan Department Store in Busan. The specialty of the Busan Department Store in Busan is that it houses big global brands and is mainly an up market place to shop in. moreover, here, at the Busan Department Store in Busan, the activity of shopping is not just a pastime; the authorities have improvised the Busan Department Store in Busan to transform shopping into an experience.

The words are mostly right and mostly in the proper order: the “in” in the first sentence should be ‘is’, but I’ve seen and occasionally typed worse.  Still, there is no content there.  you might wonder where the “Busan Department Store in Busan” is.

The Busan Department Store in Busan is centrally located in the city and is a shopper’s haven.

Well, that’s a big help.

The one thing that convinced me there is no such store was this:

Also, the daily hours of operation of the Busan Department Store in Busan are between 09:00 am and 08:00 pm.

Those hours are too good.

—-

I am an HTML neophyte – I tried to link to Asia Rooms using “rel=nofollow” to avoid increasing it’s page ranking.  I hope the link works.