The rest of the Funeral day

So I went to the funeral the other day. It was nice in a funereal way. In the bottom of the hospital, it was in a room, seperated into two chambers. In the back chamber, Mr. Oh stood by an alter with sacrifices and a picture of his mother. We entered and bowed twice (full bow to the floor bow) to the alter and once to him. One of the Korean teachers lit a stick of incense and we went to the first room. We sat at one of the tables and ate ddeok (traditional rice cake) and some sort of pork and other side dishes. Mr Oh walked around and made some small talk. He seemed happy, maybe that we came, maybe that the ordeal was over and he knew his mother was not suffering. Envelopes came around with some characters I didn't recognize on them. Everybody stuffed some money into them and passed them on. Then they came back to us, people telling us to put out names on them. I was tempted to stuff another ten thousand in mine to show up everybody else, but something held me back. Parsimony?

Then the motorcyle called. Greg, Will and I took off through country roads at breakneck speeds, breaking the thin pavement while taking turns like animals, frightening the locals and running over animals. Well not so breakneck, but my motorcycle wouldn't go any faster so it felt like I was really tearing the roads down. We ran across a real nice set of roads northeast of here, some of the most pristine countryside I've seen outside national parks in Korea. We even went swimming in the Wicheon (위천) river. After a particularly nice stretch, after "blazing" across a bridge, Greg pulled over and looked at us, "The locals were swimming." We intended to swim someplace, though we didn't know if we would run across a river or lake clean enough. With the locals in the water, we figured it was a sure thing: some were wading, kids were swimming and some had nets possibly pulling food from the water.

There was a little film on top. And the eddies trapped some dark dirty looking foam. But by that time I'd been in up to my neck--self dunked, it wasn't deeper then my belly-button--and discovered a small cut on my foot. So I was the first to jump off the small cliff and slam my ass into the sandy bottom. Will and Greg followed suit. Afterwards, Will put on his change of clothes, a Batman suit complete fake muscles, but unfortunately we headed home before riding at slow speeds through sleepy towns. He did, though, pass a few cars at 110 km/h fist thrust forward as if about to save the day.

We ended the holiday with a barbeque in our apartment complex's back quad. We left the cheap little grills out there, too hot to bring inside, and they ran off by morning.